Trump’s Attacks on Institutions Threaten a Bulwark of Economic Strength
22nd August 2025
The New York Times, paper of record for the Deep State.
Through recessions, wars, financial crises and political turmoil, the U.S. economy has maintained its reputation as the safest place in the world for investors to put their money and for entrepreneurs to build their businesses.
That has given the United States a nearly incalculable economic advantage, allowing it to borrow more cheaply, grow more quickly and emerge from downturns more successfully than nearly any of its global peers.
President Trump may be chipping away at that advantage.
This proceeds from the statist assumption that a managed economy is stronger than a free economy, and since a managed economy needs metrics by which it can be managed (“You can’t manage what you don’t measure” my Business School teachers ceaselessly droned), Trump’s actions (which, according to the Narrative, impair that measurement) are striking at the foundations of the managed economy. Orange Man Bad.
A good case can be made, however, (and has been by Milton Friedman, Friedrich von Hayek, and others) that a managed economy is weaker than a free economy because the metrics that it uses for such management are inaccurate and incomplete compared to the totality of the knowledge available on a distributed basis (what the modern world calls “crowd-sourcing”) to the population as a whole. This is the whole basis of the fight between free-market people and managed-market people (communists/socialists, Keynesians, and Modern Monetary Theory people like Paul Krugman).