In WaPo, conservative pundit Jennifer Rubin notes how many American international businesses do not find Trump’s Muslim travel ban palatable. Her final thought:
Perhaps this will mark a watershed, the time when businesses refused to be bullied. In the midst of a populist political earthquake, they heretofore have been circumspect in defense of trade, immigration and the rule of law. That may come to an end. They are figuring out that Trump’s strong-arming and irrational policies are bad for the bottom line.
Trump and his low-information voters may not get it, but the U.S. economy is integrated with the rest of the world. Our businesses are global and rely on markets, employees around the globe and smooth travel to be profitable and, in turn, to hire more U.S. workers. That’s the fallacy at the heart of Trump’s know-nothing economics: We can’t turn back the clock, pull up the drawbridge and tell the world to get lost without severely damaging our economy. Maybe one of the billionaires whose wealth far exceeds Trump and who has built an international, public company (where profits and losses cannot be hidden) can explain it to him.
I don’t think this is entirely fair, given the reaction of businesses to the so-called “Religious Freedom” laws passed in Indiana and Georgia, as well as the reaction to North Carolina’s HB-2 law – each state was threatened with the cancellation of business, and North Carolina has suffered quite a lot of business loss.
And we need a metric for measuring just how many businesses are international. Corporations vary in a number of dimensions, so counting on the fingers doesn’t work. Maybe sales, maybe employees (so, not to irritate Constitutional Originalists or anything, but how do you count a robot?), maybe net profits? So does that gas station down the street count?
Or am I picking a nit? I work at a huge international company, but a lot of people also work at grocery stores. Perhaps the big clue here is “Our businesses are global …”, which is a lurking contradiction. As companies go global, the nationalistic urges fade as the potential for profit appears to be everywhere.
Universal Basic Income once again occurs to me, but I shan’t expand on it here, except to wonder if it’s a promise or a mirage. It might allow the free enterprise urge to flourish once again in currently depressed areas, though.
