A year-end thought on Trump, the GOP, Maria Bartiromo, etc:

Adam Smith, in 1776, identified a fundamental potential crisis in capitalism, one that is especially naked now.

1/

To improve the human condition, capitalism requires bizpeople continually earn their place by offering goods and services at the right price.

But, once bizpeople have some dough, they seek to bend the rules to maintain their place without continuing to earn it.

2/

This is not just unfair, it's destructive of the core premise of capitalism: that self-interest leads to the common good.

Economists call it rent-seeking, when wealth comes not from creating value but from capturing the wealth of others.

3/

Trump has always been a full-throated rent-seeker.

https://www.nytimes.com/2016/03/20/magazine/what-donald-trump-doesnt-understand-about-the-deal.html

Manafort embodies the rent-seeking oligarchification of our economy.

It's all naked now. It's all out in the open.

4/

We will be hearing from the GOP, any day now, about the horrors of debt, welfare, etc.

But preventing economic failure by those with entrenched wealth is--according to any school of economics--the single greatest threat to an economic system.

5/

I write all this, knowing that--starting in, roughly, 27 days--the media will go back to covering the "free market" GOP and taking their economic claims as deeply held beliefs.

6/end