All this will get him off to a good start, keep faith with the believers and debrief the brainwashed skeptics, but will leave three vast problems. Standards of information and education have withered. The American people, and most other advanced nationalities, are less well-educated and less well-informed than they were 50 years ago. The teaching and academic professions and the journalists have failed. They have not failed completely, of course, and there are many individual exceptions, but they do not get a passing grade. Government can do something about the schools but can’t really touch academia or the free press without threatening the foundation of free society. There is no obvious solution.
The legal profession is increasingly a cartel in which lawyers as legislators and regulators spew out endless reams of new statutes and rules requiring an ever larger number of lawyers to argue, judge and arbitrate them. Legal costs to society are more egregious and less excusable than medical costs, and produce far less desirable results. The criminal justice system is an unspeakable cesspool. Here government can do something.
Technological progress tends to create unemployment rather than jobs, as life becomes more automatable. This trend is parallel to the pattern of companies like Google, with few employees but immense market capitalization, leaving traditional manufacturers like automakers with the reverse phenomenon: a large number of employees sustained by less well-capitalized companies. No one that I have encountered has any idea about what to do about the trend toward industrial disemployment and the extreme disparities in income that it generates.
Trump will promote rising employment and reduce the shrinkage of the workforce. But it is a long and winding upward trail back to a contented America, and to some extent, all advanced democracies are on the same trail.
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