Alternatively, by inducing a company to keep employees in Indiana, the Hoosier state loses incentive to enact pro-business policies that create better conditions for all businesses across the board, thereby dooming a start-up company that might have benefited, for example, from an overall lower tax rate or infrastructure improvements. Again, Trump is helping to make the United States less competitive, and hence poorer.

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One more scenario to ponder: Trump induces workers to stay at a dying plant in Indiana. Meanwhile, a thriving plant in Arkansas is starved for workers. The Indiana employees don’t move. Instead, the Arkansas plant hires foreign workers (as Trump’s Florida resort does!). Once again … well, you get the idea.

Trump acts as though he is smarter than the markets, as though he and he alone understands where best to invest and where best to send employees. (Alternatively, he might not care.) This has been tried in all sorts of places — Cuba, the Soviet Union, banana republics in South America and socialist countries like Sweden in the 1990s. (Sweden isn’t even Sweden any longer. What’s more, Sweden has boomed recently while taking in huge numbers of refugees.) These command economies with egocentric leaders failed, which is why Republicans, before abandoning all intellectual integrity, used to favor policies that limited economic distortion.

The more the government distorts economic decision-making (e.g. with tax expenditures), the less productive and less rich the country becomes and the greater the need for even more distortion. (None of this is inconsistent with an effective safety net, or with policies that promote effective training, incentivize work, etc. — without special favors, preference or punishments depending on the identity of the recipient.)

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