Poverty Impeding Development

In the 1980s, the advent of some newly-industrializing countries (NICs) in east Asia, such as Taiwan and South Korea, was generating excitement around the world that the gap between the least developed countries (LDCs) and the developed countries (DCs) then had a viable bridge through foreign direct-investment; that is, what had been a dichotomy was becoming a spectrum. The hope that globally-circulating capital might raise even the LDCs out of poverty. Of course, there was scarce any thought that the combined pollution of an economically developing world would raise global air and sea temperatures above 1.5C. Human beings are too near-sighted for that, and, of course, there is the allure of profits and higher salaries and wages. Also, the sheer inexorability, or stubborn persistence, of poverty in scaring off rather than being lifted up from foreign-direct investment may have been minimized by the hope. Roughly forty years later, Oriana Bandiera of the London School of Economics spoke on the theory that economic opportunities are impacted by how much wealth a person has at the outset—the alternative theory being that the opportunities are just as good for the poor as for the rich because differences are due to exogenous (i.e., outside) factors. The micro-level condition of a country’s poor impacts the attractiveness of a country to foreign direct-investment.

Poor people are more likely to be doing casual, self-employed work than running a small business or raising livestock, according to Bandiera. Wage-labor tends not to go to the poor. Sustenance-level casual work, which is not as regular as wage-labor, is typically not enough to accumulate savings, which could be spent on training or education, or to buy livestock or equipment to increase production of crafts such that economies of scale might be realized. A bimodal structure thus emerges with equilibria being at subsistence level and middle-class, but not in between them. In terms of public policy, craft-oriented small-business loans can perhaps increase the number of poor people who can enter the interim space between the two equilibria. Only governments would be willing to take the risk, and should be willing to make sure that the loans are not spent on consumption, for pressing consumption needs are part of the reason why the poor do not save money on an ongoing basis.

Similarly on the macro level, the Asian NICs were distinguished from the LDCs in Latin America in the 1980s because only the former group had governments strong enough to withstand the political pressure from the people for increased government spending for consumption. Strong states, even if they are authoritarian rather than democratic, can resist popular pressure to exhaust government coffers by expanding entitlement programs. That by 2025 several E.U. states had deficits and debts greater than the limits prescribed by the Stability and Growth Pact and those governments faced no real accountability from the E.U.’s federal government adds support to the argument that democracy may be at odds with sustained and balanced fiscal policy unless, as the U.S.’s Thomas Jefferson and John Adams agreed, the citizenry who vote (i.e., the electorate) are educated and virtuous.  

In terms of business, enterprises in LDC’s tend to be smaller than those in developed countries (and NICs). Smaller organizations are less competitive in trade because they cannot realize the benefits of economies of scale. Such organizations also have less job-specialization and job variety. Bandiera even referred to the labor of such companies as a “disassociated group of self-employed.” Additionally, the CEOs of those enterprises tend to be managers more so than leaders, meaning that those CEOs spend more of their time oriented to functions inside the organizations and less time oriented to external stakeholders and even society as a whole. Visionary leadership is something that the head of a small business in a developing country cannot afford.

Even in business schools in developed countries, the business field of business environment has a place similar to that of Pluto in the solar system. Situating the field of business ethics within business environment is logically and conceptually dubious—but not to worry; few “scholars” of business ethics have actually studied philosophy, of which ethics is a subfield. One business ethics “scholar” at MIT told me in 2024 that ethics is actually situated in sociology rather than philosophy. Being in the humanities, I only smiled and wished her well. Rather than copy the business systems of developed countries, perhaps LDCs should grow their own varieties. The question is perhaps whether the governments should first not only invest in infrastructure, but also underwrite small-business loans to a sufficient portion of poor households before enticing foreign direct-investment. After all, forests develop in stages.

A European Army: A More Perfect Union

At the Munich Security Conference in February, 2025, Ukraine’s President Zelenskyy bluntly asserted, “I really believe that the time has come that the armed forces of Europe must be created.”[1] He could have said in 2023 after Russia’s President Putin had sent tanks and bombs into Ukraine; instead, the inauguration of President Trump in the U.S. that was the trigger. “Let’s be honest,” Zelenskyy continued, “now we can’t rule out that America might say ‘no’ to Europe on issues that might threaten it.”[2] At the time, Trump was planning to meet with Putin to end the war without Britain and a number of E.U. states at the table. After all, they had failed to push Putin off Crimea in 2014, and even in 2025, they were not on the same page on how to defend Ukraine militarily. Amid the political fracturing in Europe, Ukraine’s president was urging that the E.U. itself have an army, rather than merely the 60,000 troops for which the union was dependent on the states. Even on being able to borrow on its own authority, the E.U. was hamstrung by the state governments that were more interested in retaining power than in benefitting from collective action. It is difficult to analyze Zelenskyy’s plea without including the anti-federalist, Euroskeptic ideology that was still eclipsing the E.U. from realizing a more perfect union.

 

The full essay is at "A European Army."

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1. Joshua Posaner, “Zelenskyy: ‘The Time Has Come’ for a European Army,” Politico, February 15, 2025.

2. Ibid.

E.U. Defense: The State Governments Exploit a Conflict of Interest

Sometimes lemons can make use of political gravity to become lemonade. Of course, behind the lemons are human beings, who are of course innately economizers, political actors and moral agents. When accosted by proposals that additional governmental sovereignty be delegated from state governments to the federal level, state-government officials feeling the gravitas of narrow self-interest are inclined to resist even if the transfer is in the political and economic interest of the union as well as all of its states. I am of course describing a drawback that goes with state governments having too much power in a federal system, whose interests are not always identical with those of a particular state or even those that pertain to the state level as distinct from the federal level. I submit that a federal system in which such dynamics are ignored in favor of focusing on particular issues, such as the E.U.’s increased need for defense given Russia’s unprovoked invasion of Ukraine, can gradually slip “off the rails” toward dissolution or consolidation. By ceding the E.U. itself (i.e., the federal level) additional authority, including for revenues and expenditures, the European Council, which is composed of the state governors, could “kill two birds with one stone,” as that saying goes. Those birds would be unbalanced state power in the E.U. at the expense of a common purpose, and Russian President Putin’s military adventurism in Eastern Europe.

One casualty of excessive state power in a federal system is accountability that the federal institutions could exercise on state governments whose officials willfully violate federal laws and regulations. Those officials, I submit, are all too acclimated to turning the “lemon” of being held accountable in the federal system into “lemonade” by turning a proposal made by a branch of government at the federal level for more authority at the expense of the power of the state governments (and thus of their respective officials!) into a proposal to suspend the federal measure of accountability on the state governments. In short, the state governors would be saying to the federal officials: You want more federal power? We reject that and will exercise the requested power ourselves and we need you to waive a federal constraint, which some of us have been violating, in order for us to exercise the power. I contend that this is how the following can (and should) be interpreted and understood.

On February 14, 2025, the President of the E.U.’s executive branch, the Commission—a name that seems more imposing than The White House—announced that she would “propose to activate the escape clause in the [union’s] fiscal rules in a bid to ‘substantially’ boost member states’ defense investment.”[1] Alternatively, the federal president could have carried through with her earlier proposal to increase the E.U.’s own authority in defense, thus enabling the union to benefit in terms of security from collective action instead of each state doing its own thing. Arguably, such collective action would be necessary should the U.S. back off from defending the E.U. against potential and actualized threats from Russia.

From the perspective of a governor of a state in the E.U., the benefits from going beyond coordinating to pool military defense at the federal level are less important than gutting the federal requirement (in the Stability and Growth Pact, which is really a federal law rather than a pact) that state fiscal deficits be “under 3% of GDP and debt under 60% of GDP” of a given state.[2]  Seeking to obviate the Commission’s Excessive Deficit Procedure (EDP), which includes penalties, including fines, on violators, the governors meeting in the European Council had only weeks earlier stated a preference for putting the EDP on ice so the states could increase their defense spending (and not have to pay fines) instead of enhancing the Commission’s defense competency (i.e., enumerated power) at the expense of the remaining sovereignty that the states still had.

Eight states—Belgium, France, Hungary, Italy, Malta, Poland, Romania, and Slovakia—were in violation of the limits on deficits and/or debt. It is no coincidence that the governments of the E.U. states of Poland, Italy, Greece and the Baltic states had been requesting that the Commission review the required limits on state deficits and debt. It also no coincidence that at the “informal” session of the European Council held only weeks earlier, the state officials considered lifting the required limits to be “among the least controversial options on the table.”[3] Waiving being held accountable is of course not controversial for the people who would otherwise be held accountable. Relative to the Council, the power of the Commission and the Parliament individually and even combined was insufficient to object, citing both a federal system’s need that state governments be held accountable when they violate federal law and regulations and the defense-benefits from the collective action in energizing the E.U. competency on defense.

Put another way, to the E.U. state governors, removing the federal constraint on state spending that is not covered by tax revenue and resisting the delegation of additional governmental sovereignty to the federal government are more important—both for self-interested reasons—than strengthening both the union’s federal system, such that the federal level could effectively hold violating state governments accountable and thus make federal law real rather than mere parchment, and the union’s ability to stand up militarily as a unit rather than conglomeration to Putin, especially as the U.S. was sending clear signals of a desire to pull back from defending Europe from Russia. The triumph of narrow, private-benefit-delimited—self-interest over the good of the whole—in this case, Europe—and the related (i.e., not coincidental!) political weakness of federal officials to be a check on the exploitation of the conflict of interest at the state level are themselves (and especially together!) internal threats to the viability of the European Union. Lest the threat be presumed to be solely external, from Russia being militarily in the Ukraine, E.U. citizens could have done worse than exchange their binoculars for microscopes, at least for a while.  

1. Alice Tidey, “EU Commission to Activate Fiscal Escape Clause to Boost Defence Spending,” Euronews.com, February 14, 2025.
2. Ibid.
3. Ibid.

The Patriots for Europe Party: On Anti-Federalism

At a party meeting in Madrid, E.U. on February 8, 2025, the Patriots for Europe party sent out the message of wanting to be the new normal in the E.U., as against the default of the “mainstream” parties, which include the Renew Europe party and the European People’s Party—the president of the E.U. being in the latter party. The Patriots party’s banner, “Make Europe Great Again,” shows a kinship to U.S. President Trump’s MAGA movement, but the E.U.-specific planks are significant and thus should not be dismissed. As is the case with any large political party, the planks can be a bit like a tossed salad, with even disparate ingredients being in the mix. I contend that this makes it difficult to discern the will of the voters who vote for a party in terms of how much support there is for a particular policy. As a result, if a party is like a grab-bag of various policies, one such policy could be enacted without much of a democratic will behind it.

The Patriots for Europe party’s officials had high hopes for their party at the party meeting. At the time, the only sitting governor at the state level was Viktor Orban of Hungary. In the E.U.’s parliament, the party held only 89 seats, but this was enough to make the party third after the European People’s Party (EPP) and the Socialists and Democrats party (S&D). The Renew Europe had slipped in the last federal election. To gain more seats, and more governorships at the state level, the Patriots for Europe party had taken positions on a variety of issues, so as to attract more single-issue voters.

André Ventura, the leader of a political group in the E.U. state of Portugal, said at the Patriots’ meeting, “We have to reconquer a Europe that is ours and that belongs to us. A Christian Europe.”[1] That E.U. society had long before become secular was not the point; rather, the party was against the contentiousness of anti-assimilation Muslim immigrants from Africa, and especially their refusal to accept free-speech even on matters of religion. Therefore, this plank should not be confused with the revivalism of evangelical Christianity in the 1740s, wherein a conversion experience was newly stressed as part of the litmus test for whether a person is or is not a Christian. In 2025, calls for a Christian Europe were really about going back to the days of a relatively homogeneous E.U. culture. By relatively, I mean to account for the expected cultural differences that exist from state to state in any empire-scale federal system.

Indeed, one of the main benefits of federalism is that the system is able to deal with those differences without the polity being rent asunder by political conflicts between individual states. In calling for the return of governmental sovereignty to the states, which means even doing away with qualified majority voting at the federal level, even cultural differences within a more narrow Christian European society could throw a confederated (rather than dual-sovereignty-based federated) E.U. against the rocks within a decade. At least some governmental sovereignty must be delegated by the states to a federal government (rather than a confederated council) for conflicts between states to be resolved before they become insurmountable.

Diluting its anti-federalist, states-rights political ideology, the Patriots for Europe party was also against federal regulations because they stifle business, the Green Deal for the same reason, and LGBT rights because they are progressive. For example, Andrej Babis criticized the parties in power then in the E.U. for imposing “regulations that strangle businesses and [E.U.] citizens.[2] A pro-business voter could thus vote for the PfE party in the European Parliament and a social conservative could vote for the party so transgender men would not be allowed to be on women’s sports teams and use women bathrooms in the E.U., while still believing that returning the delegated federal sovereignty to the states would destroy the union. Yet because the party contains that plank, voting on business-interests or social ethical interests would make it more likely that the E.U. could be vitiated. Put another way, being pro-business or anti-trans does not mean that someone is a Euroskeptic to the point that the E.U.’s governmental sovereignty should be vitiated.

Therefore, with regard to whether the E.U. should continue to have a federal system characterized as “modern federalism,” with dual sovereignty being its basis, or become a confederal inter-governmental council wherein governmental sovereignty is fully vested in the state governments, something more than merely voting for an variegated party is necessary. A referendum on the question could be put to the E.U. citizens, for example. Just because pro-business voters would be inclined to vote for the Patriots for Europe party to see a drawback in federal regulations does not mean that they reject the E.U. having some delegated governmental sovereignty. This argument can be interpreted as claiming that direct democracy can be applied to significant political issues where it cannot be assumed that the voters of a major party agree with every plank. For it is one thing to contravene specific federal policies and even laws, and quite another to fundamentally change the type of an extant federal system.

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1. Paula Solder, “’Your Time Is Over:’ Far-Right Leaders Take on the E.U.’s Mainstream Parties,” Euronews.com, February 8, 2025.
2. Ibid.

On the U.S. President as Chief Executive

As the chief executive of the U.S. Government, the president is tasked with executing the law—the passage thereof involving both the Congress and the presidency. It follows that a president cannot legally stand in the way of appropriated federal funding of projects and programs once such allocations have become law. For otherwise, a president could simply ignore appropriations passed by the Congress and signed into law by a previous president. The powers of the unitary executive would reach dictatorial proportions. Within roughly one week of being sworn into office for his second term in 2025, U.S. President Trump decided to pause all foreign aid, and “grants, loans and other federal assistance . . . to ensure spending is consistent with Trump’s priorities.”[1] Those priorities, I submit, would properly have influence on bills in Congress that were not yet laws, as per the legislative veto-power of the presidency and the ability of a president to put pressure on members of Congress by speaking persuasively directly to the American people. The value of leadership available to a presiding role should not be ignored. In terms of symbolic leadership befitting a presider in chief, refusing to enforce laws sends the wrong signal. To be sure, delaying rather than cancelling funding that has already been appropriated as law may fall within reasonable discretion that goes with the executing, and thus executive, function. However, the size, or magnitude, of the federal spending being held up but not cancelled may test the test of reasonableness. This may also be so if the political dimension—that is, the salience of political judgment in the issues involved—is significant.

President Trump “issued an executive order for a 90-day pause in foreign development assistance pending a review of efficiencies and consistency with his foreign policy.”[2] At the time, the United States was the world’s largest international-aid donor; in 2023, $68 billion was spent for this purpose. That number includes “everything from development assistance to military aid.”[3] Interestingly, military funding for Israel was exempted from the delay even though the ICC had issued a warrant for Israel’s sitting prime minister for decimating the civilian population of Gaza, the International Court of Justice (the UN’s court) had ruled the occupation and military attacks by Israel to violate international law, and Amnesty International had found sufficient, credible evidence of genocide perpetuated by the Israeli government. If this exception to the U.S. president’s 90-day delay—and Trump unfroze Biden’s hold on the delivery of the 2000lb bombs to Israel because, Trump said, that country had bought them—reflects Trump’s foreign-policy priorities, then the matter of selectively delaying foreign aid cannot be reckoned as merely technical in nature; rather, the salience of the political dimension means that even a 90-day delay could be unreasonable without Congressional consent in the enacting of resolutions or even law.

With regard to pausing grants, loans and other federal assistance—excepting Medicare and Social Security benefits—again the sheer scale of the funding involved and the salience of politics in the decision to delay test the limits to what is and is not within the reasonable purview of executive discretion in executing federal law that includes federal spending. “Diane Yentel of the National Council of Nonprofits said the order could stop cancer research, food assistance and suicide hotlines.”[4] If so, even a significant delay could be unreasonable as well as contrary to the law concerning SNAP (federal food-assistance to 42.1 million individuals as of the fiscal year 2023) because—to put it bluntly—an awful lot of people need to eat on a daily rather than a monthly basis. Again, the president’s political-ideological judgment here is arguably debatable (hence suggestive of a Congressional legislative role even in the delay): delaying food assistance to Americans while exempting military aid to Israel from delay. Both, and especially juxtaposed, are contentious politically (i.e., ideologically). Furthermore, the memo delaying domestic financial assistance, “signed by acting OMB chief Matthew Vaeth, calls on government agencies to temporarily pause their financial assistance [programs], so they can review spending that could be impacted by the various orders Trump has signed” relating to diversity programs, “woke gender ideology, and the green new deal.”[5] It is difficult to square such overtly political reasons with a technocratic delay in the execution of laws. Of course, this is a judgment call, for the length of the delay is also a relevant factor. Aside from the financial assistance to Americans bearing on sustenance, a few month’s delay may be reasonable, but both the scale of the foreign and domestic funding and especially the political rationales for the delay arguably make the delay a significant political matter rather than merely an executive function in implementing law.

My assessment should not be assumed to be in line with my own political ideology, for I oppose affirmative action programs as being contrary to merit and woke “thought-police” as being repugnant to free-speech liberty; I am not obliged to “give my personal pronouns” (in fact, “one” is the neuter third-person singular pronoun in English). I assume, moreover, that we are all human, all too human in fact, and thus that none of us have a monopoly on truth to be imposed on others. My point here is that the use of reason to dissect even a controversial issue, such as presidential power in the U.S., should not cower to the bullying force of the mind’s own ideology. Incidentally, this point is vital in distinguishing between scholarship and opinion-pieces.

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1. James Fitzgerald and Ana Faguy, “White House Pauses Federal Grants and Loans,” BBC.com, January 28, 2025.
2. Ibid.
3. Ibid.
4. Ibid.
5. Ibid.

The Tech Industrial Complex

Democracy, Plato and Aristotle both theorized, is a governmental system that is most susceptible to the mob—meaning mob-rule. Accordingly, the Electoral College and the appointments of U.S. Senators by state governments, the latter being the case from the establishment of the U.S. Constitution to a few decades into the twentieth century, were meant to limit any damage from momentary passions of the People to the U.S. House of Representatives. The governments in the United States, like those in the European Union, are republics in which democracy is a part rather than the whole. What neither Plato nor Aristotle could foresee in their agrarian city-states is the threat to democracy by plutocracy—the system of government in which private wealth rules. It is less understandable why the American electorates have ignored repeated warnings of the threat, especially as governmental power has concentrated at the federal level since the war between the CSA and the USA in 1861.

Much like U.S. President Dwight Eisenhower had done “in 1961 when he expressed concerns about the ‘military industrial complex’ in his farewell address,” President Biden said in his address, “’an oligarchy is taking shape in America’ as power and money become more concentrated in the hands of the few.”[1] Biden “criticized the ‘tech industrial complex’ and social media, where ‘the truth is smothered by lies for power and for profit.’”[2] It seemed likely in 2025 that Biden’s warning would not eventuate in any policies oriented to breaking up the concentrations of private wealth, which I submit are inherently incompatible with a democracy. Simply put, seeing billionaires visibly chatting with government officials during President Trump’s second swearing-in presents a picture that may suggest that the influence of private wealth on public policy (and thus government officials) had gained such a foothold that the confluence could be shown brazenly without fear that the American people might vote for candidates campaigning on enforcing anti-trust law and raising the effective tax-rates on billionaires to the point that, with anti-trust, being so rich from an oligarchic business would not be possible going forward.

Tech titans amid the incoming administration: Just the visible tip of an iceberg. (Getty)

Besides Elon Musk, perhaps the richest billionaire in the world at the time, Mark Zuckerberg of Meta (Facebook) as well as the titans of Amazon, Google, Apple, and Microsoft could be seen on television in front of, and amicably chatting with the incoming administration's Cabinet secretaries. Musk was chatting with Trump's proposed secretary of defense in spite of the conflict of interest in Musk owning SpaceX. Zuckerberg could feel comfortable being seen chatting with secretaries and President Trump’s adult sons in spite of his power to minimize political dissent on social media. With 90 days to decide whether to close down or sell Tik Tok, President Trump expressed interest in a news conference in the evening of his second inaugural in letting rich Americans buy into a 50/50 joint venture that would allow China to continue Tik-Tok operations in the United States. Were Zuckerberg or Musk to invest enough that they could exercise control on the company through the American half, the investments could put the two social-media titans closer to achieving monopoly control over social media in the United States. 

The real power evinced in the inaugural ceremony was in the seating area where the Cabinet nominees, the tech titans, and Trump's business-oriented relatives were sitting. At one point prior to the arrival of Trump himself, all of the living former U.S. Presidents, Democrats and Republicans, were looking across the aisle at the cadre of Trump’s nominated cabinet secretaries, the billionaire tech titans, and Trump’s business-family. Those former presidents undoubtedly knew where the real power was, and perhaps they were surprised to see the public-private collusion so brazenly visible. After the ceremony, hidden from the public’s view at the lunch in the Capitol, members of Congress, “Cabinet nominees and business titans within Trump’s inner circle” mingled.[3] The luncheon was an “opportunity that VIPs use to mix and mingle with members of the administration and advance their policy priorities. Apple CEO Tim Cook [was] seated between Donald Trump Jr and [U.S. Senate] Minority Leader Chuck Schumer.”[4] I submit that most such mingling takes place behind closed doors, even and especially in regard to the writing of laws. It is not uncommon for Congressional committee to use language written by the companies to be regulated.  

Lest President Eisenhower’s warning of the dangers to democracy from the military-industrial complex be replaced by Biden’s warning of a tech industrial complex as if the former had gone away on its own,  President Trump promised in his second inaugural address, “Like in 2017, we will again build the strongest military the world has ever seen.” Lest it be forgotten, President Biden has approved weapon-sales to Israel even as it ravaged the residents of Gaza on a scale that openly deified international human-rights law. Rather than assuming that Eisenhower’s problem was only existed in the second half of the twentieth-century, the American people in the twenty-first century would not be wrong in perceiving the tech industrial complex as being on top of the continuing military industrial complex. How many such complexes must there be before a existential threat to democracy itself be recognized and combatted? The sheer power of huge sums of private money, such as the influx of Elon Musk’s millions in Trump’s 2024 presidential campaign, and the magnitude of the discretion that Zuckerberg showed he had in unilaterally firing fact-checkers on his social-media company, can indeed be peeled back to reveal just how much the American voters could be manipulated on whom to vote for and even what issues to focus on. Rarely, if at all, did a candidate for federal office propose applying anti-trust law to the social-media’s big companies in the U.S.—an oligopoly. Nor was there any traction from the few voices in Congress suggesting that maybe the U.S. Government should stand up to military contractors by refusing to buy weapons for Israel and give that country’s government money to buy even more American weapons. The shop was open for business; human rights be damned.

The point is seldom made in American public discourse that had the U.S. Government enforced anti-trust law, including stopping tech giants like Facebook and Twitter from peremptorily buying up potential new-entrants in the first two decades of the twenty-first century, a billionaire class would not have been so large, and thus such an implicit threat to democracy. Just in how social-media company financial (and political) interests can be tacitly presented to manipulate internet users in feeds without the voters realizing it, the reason why Biden’s warning was not likely to be heeded at the ballot box can be understood. I submit that the televised images of tech “competitors” sitting together at Trump’s second inaugural points to an inter-related oligopoly instead of a competitive market (wherein new entrants are not bought up). But this is not all that we can take away from having watched the ceremony; we could also see the billionaires amicably chatting with likely high officials in Trump’s second administration, with Musk’s SpaceX having a financial interest in being NASA’s exclusive space-sub-contractor, and with Musk’s “X” and Zuckerberg’s social-media giant having a financial interest in what the Trump administration does about Tik-Toc. 

Extreme personal and corporate wealth literally in front of government officials at the inauguration in democracy's own Capitol Rotunda. 

My point is that, had the inherent threat that having billionaires poses to a viable republic been grasped by the American public, then governmental power would have been used such that the Musk, Zuckerberg, Bezos, and other tech managerial-visionaries would not have been able to become billionaires in the first place. As of 2025, and perhaps even back in 1961 concerning the military contractors, the proverbial horses were almost certainly already out of the barn. Thus, the electoral grass-roots energy going forward from 2025 needed to upset the proverbial apple-cart being steered by individual teckie billionaires to advance the financial interests of their respective companies in the halls of American government would be, realistically speaking, virtually unattainable. One of the most remarkable visuals from President Trump’s second swearing-in ceremony was that of the former presidents all looking over at the billionaires' very visible nicities with the incoming Trump officials and Trump's financially-inclined scions. The former presidents looked like bystanders rather than as pillars of power in themselves even though power had presumably been given to them by the People. I’m just glad that it does not fall to me to get the horses back in the barn. Ultimately, the American People since World War II are to blame for not having minded the proverbial shop as a going concern, for they should have known from the Titanic that most of an iceberg is hidden from view under water. Yes, I think people should know that, even with respect to icebergs in the ocean of political economy. Perhaps, though, I think too highly of popular sovereignty, which, unfortunately, is admittedly quite vulnerable to being manipulated. Both the manipulation itself and the sources are very difficult for the public to detect. Whether through social and/or mass media, even just a few very rich people or a large company, or a network of large corporations with  oligopolistic shared financial interests can frame what is debated, and keep out what is not. It is precisely because detection is so rare that the visuals coming out of Trump's second inaugural are so important, for they give us a rare glimpse of the nature and dynamics of real power in America.

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1. Chris Megerian and Colleen Long, “Five Things To Know about Biden’s Farewell Address that Also Served as a Warning to the Country,” APnews.com, January 15, 2025.
2. Ibid.
3. Michelle Shen, “Trump Attends Congressional Luncheon Where Key Politicians and Business Leaders Mingle,” CNN.com, January 20, 2025.
4. Ibid

GDP Per Capita in the E.U. and U.S.: Changing Perceptions

Historically speaking, the E.U. and U.S. are relatively large in territorial expanse and population, so it is only to be expected that significant economic (and cultural) differences exist from state to state in the respective unions of states. In Europe, some medieval kingdoms have relegated to being but regions in E.U. states. Holland, for instance, is a region in The Netherlands, which in turn is a E.U. state. The same can be said of Bavaria (and England, were the United Kingdom still a E.U. state). To compare the economic inequality in such a region with the inequality in the E.U. (or U.S.) over all would be deeply misleading. For example, rural/urban economic patterns that pertain to an economy containing one major city do not translate into the multiple rural/urban patterns that exist in a modern (empire-scale) union of states. In short, scale matters, especially in how we make use of mathematical averages.  Comparing GDP per capita is a case in point; states should be compared with states.

Although recent studies had suggested that upward mobility was higher in the E.U. than in the U.S., the GDP per capita in the latter was significantly more in the latter than the former. To be sure, the gap is less “when adjusted for purchasing power parity (PPP)—which accounts for cost-of-living differences.”[1] Also, comparing the E.U. and the U.S. misses out on the significant differences between states in each of the empire-scale unions; such differences in turn can be used to compare individual states in one union with individual states in the other.

It is difficult to believe that in “the third quarter of 2024, Mississippi’s GDP per capita was €49,780, just €1,524 less than Germany’s at €51,304.”[2] That the industrial base in the latter state greatly exceeded Mississippi’s industry makes the respective numbers all the more perplexing. Because the E.U. average GDP per capita was €40,060 as compared to the U.S. average of €80,023, a person might begin to wonder whether a false economic-equivalence has pervaded both the American and European general perspectives. Certainly geographically, Americans may be surprised how much smaller Europe is than North America (and, accordingly, the E.U. in relation to the U.S.).  The GDP per capita comparisons may thus be like superimposing geographic maps at the expense of previously-held perspectives and assumptions of equivalence.

This is not to say that every E.U. state was poorer than every U.S. state; Luxembourg’s €125,043 is more than New York’s €107,485.[3] Nevertheless, it is significant that the figures for Germany, France, Italy, and Spain are less than those of West Virginia, Arkansas, Alabama, and South Carolina—each of these being below the U.S. average. It would not be at all surprising to read that these figures are incorrect, but, then again, the generally-held false geographical equivalence that Americans and Europeans naturally hold concerning the E.U. relative to the U.S. may, as a phenomenon of a false assumption of equivalence, exist economically too.

Were I to attempt an explanation—not being an economist—I would want to look at whether the relatively higher tax rates in the E.U. discourage economic activity. I would also want to investigate the extent to which the shorter work-week in Europe may also be a factor in the relatively lower GDP per capita. Furthermore, the relatively generous social policies in many E.U. states may also discourage the long-term unemployed from filling job openings, thus reducing factory efficiency and output and lowering per capita averages. Lastly, I would want to know just how much the different PPPs decrease the gaps of GDP per capita. I suspect, however, that all of these possible factors operate only on the margins, rather than explaining the entirety of the differences, given the magnitudes of the differences. It may simply be that hoch Kultur and the higher population (urban) density in the E.U. carries with it the false assumption that the E.U. must be as economically productive per person as in the U.S.

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1. Servet Yanatma, “How Do America’s Poorest States Compare to Europe’s Largest Economies,” Euronews.com, January 6, 2025.
2. Ibid.
3. Ibid.

Certifying a U.S. Presidential Election: A Constitutional Conflict of Interest

That it should go without saying that a constitution providing a government with its basic framework and procedures should not contain any conflicts of interest makes it all the more astonishing when an actual constitution is found to contain a obvious yet undetected conflict of interest that could be exploited by an institutional or officeholder and yet is easy to obviate, or fix. The implication in such a case is that a society can be too comfortable with institutional conflicts of interest without realizing that if such a conflict is exploitable, it is likely that it eventually will be even if not right away. Because U.S. President Don Trump’s pressure on his vice president, Mike Pence, on January 6, 2021 to refuse to certify the votes of the electors in some of the states did not result in any serious proposals to have another office than the vice presidency preside, a societal tolerance for even known conflicts of interests in general and in a constitution more particularly can be inferred. I submit that such a tacit willingness to continue with the status quo can eventually put even a republic itself at risk.

Speaking on January 6, 2024, U.S. Vice President Kamala Harris referred to her constitutional duty of presiding in a joint-session of Congress tasked with certifying the election that she had lost as something she took very seriously. The American people should not have to worry about whether a vice president might exploit the presiding role by resisting or thwarting a peaceful transfer of power. “Today was obviously a very important day,” she said, “and it was about what should be the norm and what the American people should be able to take for granted, which is that one of the most important pillars of our democracy is that there will be a peaceful transfer of power.”[1] Such a transfer lies at the core of representative democracy, so it is important that any risk of any impediment, whether an opportunistic person outside of a constitution or something lying in a constitution itself, be minimized. It is not, in other words, a minor matter.

Simply tasking the loser of an election with presiding over the counting of votes and the announcement of the winner should give anyone pause. At the very least, no one should be duty-bound to perform such a function—which can be thought of as “rubbing one’s face” in the affair, which can feel humiliating to the person.

Furthermore, politically, whether a vice president is a candidate for president as Harris was or is pressured to do the partisan or personal bidding of a president as Pence had been, having a partisan office preside is itself problematic not only for the presidency itself in terms sheer credibility, but also for a vice president in terms of the election process itself. Simply put, the vice president who is running for president or for another term as vice president is an active player in the contest and thus should not preside over the tabulation and certification of the results. As simple as this is to grasp, it must be difficult for enough Americans that the problem has been allowed to persist.

This is especially damning because the conflict of interest is easy to remove. The chief justice, or any justice, of the U.S. Supreme Court would be a natural fit for the presiding role as the judiciary is not (supposed to be) partisan. Put another way, a sitting president pressuring the vice president to declare some state slates of electors invalid is more likely than pressuring the chief justice to do that same. Institutionally, given the separation of powers in the U.S. Government, reaching out to the chief justice would be much more difficult than trying to pressure a vice president of one’s own administration. Having the chief justice, who swears in presidents, preside over the Congressional counting of the Electoral College votes for president as both the sitting vice president and Speaker of the House look on makes so much sense that it is sad state of affairs when the status quo is almost mindlessly retained even four years after the conflict of interest could have been exploited, with a riotous mob of partisans literally breaching the Capitol to convey additional pressure.

Putting the loser of an election in the position of having to publicly announce the victor is the smoke that points to an underlying constitutional conflict of interest; a mob pressuring a loser on a presidential ticket to abuse the presiding role of the vice president is more like fire than smoke. That the ensuing public discourse did not contain a proposal of a constitutional amendment assigning the task to the chief justice of the U.S. Supreme Court reflects very badly not only on the elected office-holders (and the media), but also on the American people, as it is government ultimately by the people. Perhaps a people gets the government, and constitution, that they deserve, for institutional conflicts of interest should be obviated whether in government, business, or in non-profit institutions.

Neither institutional relations nor processes should contain conflicts of interest that can be exploited because human nature is itself rather inclined to exploit them because of the instinctual urges that manifest as self-, office-, and institutional-interest even at the expense of the interest of the whole. Even though governments and economic systems tend to be based on such interests, the latter don’t have to be encouraged by the ongoing existence of institutional conflicts of interest. Continuing with the status quo can itself be thought of as a choice—one that reflects a certain underlying set of beliefs and assumptions that are valued, and even the extent of basic awareness.  Having seen not only smoke, but even fire, a people can indeed be faulted for having insufficient awareness, and this verdict is perhaps even more damning than that which concerns the naivete concerning human nature being able to withstand conflicts of interest without exploiting them in the long run. The sting of these verdicts hurts all the more when an institutional conflict of interest can be obviated relatively easily with a solution that is, or should be, obvious. Because power is that which is channeled in a political constitution, risking the exploitation of a conflict of interest that is in a constitution is not a smart choice if a viable, ongoing republic is desired.

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1. Aditi Sangal, “Congress Certifies Trump’s 2024 Election Win,” CNN.com, January 6, 2025.

Undermining the U.S. Supreme Court: Non-Jurisprudential Ideology and the U.S. Constitution

As in the case of the Roman Empire, which internal corruption likely weakened and even destroyed centuries after that empire had been a republic, modern republics are also not immune from internal decay. Even though political corruption can go under the radar, especially if systemic rather than merely episodic or around particular office holders, the subtle, gradual impact can be just as destructive than had Carthage defeated Rome’s general, Skippio Africanus, in north Africa. Making subtle decadence all the more embarrassing is the fact that it can be right under the noses of upstanding office-holders. I contend that this is the case with Chief Justice John Roberts of the U.S. Supreme Court.

In his annual report in December, 2024, Roberts “slammed what he described as ‘dangerous’ talk by some officials [in the two other branches, or arms, of the U.S. Government] about ignoring court rulings,” as that could result in a judiciary that is less than independent of the legislative and executive branches and their respective members.[1] Both Republicans and Democrats had “hinted at ignoring rulings in recent years.”[2] To Roberts, that every presidential administration “suffers defeats in the court system—sometimes in cases with major ramifications”[3]—is the main reason why some presidents, including Andrew Jackson, have been tempted to leave it to the high court to enforce its rulings rather than rely on the executive branch. But this explanation ignores something else—something just below Roberts’ nose.

Even as Roberts “lamented that ‘public officials’ . . . had ‘regrettably’ attempted to intimidate judges by ‘suggesting political bias in the judge’s adverse rulings without a credible basis for such allegations,” the chief justice dismissed the claim of political bias as “inappropriate.”[4] I submit that the claim has sufficient basis to be taken seriously, and, furthermore, that it goes beyond questions about the ethics of particular justices, such as Thomas’ acceptance of vacations and Alito allowing his wife to fly a right-wing flag at one of their houses.

Proverbially with a straight face, the chief justice wrote in his 2024 year-end report that the role of the judicial branch is “to say what the law is.”[5] I submit that the justices do more than that. Just in the media referring to “the conservative 6-3 majority” contains the implicit assumption that there are indeed conservative and liberal justices and that such labels go beyond referring to jurisprudential hermeneutics (i.e., approaches to interpreting the U.S. Constitution) and even what opinions on what law itself is. Emphasizing what the words in the document meant in 1787 versus what they mean today, or privileging the original intent of the delegates at the U.S. Constitutional Convention versus interpreting the text in terms of the modern world are just two examples of how the words conservative and progressive (or liberal) could appropriately be applied to court justices in a way that delimits the extent to which their ideology can play a role.

I submit that when Justice Sandra O’Conner wrote the U.S. Supreme Court’s majority opinion before the oral arguments in Bush v. Gore—the ruling that effectively gave George W. Bush the federal presidency—something more political than jurisprudential hermeneutics being applied was in play. That O’Conner had been a Republican in Arizona’s lower house from 1969-1974 may have something to do with why she subsequently wrote the Bush v. Gore opinion for the conservative, Republican-nominated majority before even oral arguments were heard.

Furthermore, that justices who were against abortion constituted the majority opinion that overturned Roe v. Wade (1973) may suggest that a non-juridical ideology played a role, and thus that those justices went beyond merely deciding what the law is to stating what it should be. That the justices who constituted the majority in the Citizens United (2010) case were conservative, and thus likely pro-business, may have meant that the nonjuridical economic ideology of free, unencumbered markets even manifesting with money being free-speech was in play.

On the other ideological side, it is likely that attitudes towards race played a role in the liberal majority’s opinion in Brown v. Topeka Board of Education (1954) that separation is not equal and thus racial segregation in public schools is unconstitutional. Similarly, the finding of an implicit privacy right in the due process clause of the U.S. Constitution in order to render abortion legal in the Roe v. Wade decision may point to an extra-judicial ideology bearing on life and abortion, and even religion, as being in the driver’s seat.

When moral, political, cultural, or even religious ideologies or beliefs are salient in a judicial decision, then the designation of conservative or liberal points to a broader judgment both as concerning the justices themselves and their respective rulings. If such broadly-informed judgment is really what the electorate in a republic should bring to voting, then the implication is that public matters requiring or even just fitting such broad judgment should not be decided by unelected justices. I submit that such deference is precisely the point on which Roberts and his court (as well as other, past courts, including that of Warren) has lapsed. Individual judges and even an entire court can thus be seen as opportunistic in short-circuiting the prerogative that actually belongs to the popular sovereign: the people. This does not mean that the will of a majority of an electorate should trample over individual rights, as a judiciary is rightfully charged with protecting such rights precisely because a majority of an electorate may act heedless of minorities, as can legislatures and even presidents; but defending rights from majoritarian tyranny does not mean or require a judge coloring beyond the jurisprudential lines on a page to impose one’s own exogenous ideology, which anyone could do—hence the deference.

That the U.S. presidency, which unfortunately has been partisan at the expense of the credibility needed to preside, nominates U.S. Supreme Court justices and Republican or Democratic U.S. Senators (and occasionally an Independent) confirm the nominees means not only that politically conservative or liberal justices can be expected to be sitting on the bench, but also, and perhaps more importantly— though unfortunately almost invisible to the naked eye—the selection process itself is culpable in essentially exporting political judgments from the American electorates to the unelected justices. In short, Americans should not be surprised at all that political ideology, infused with moral, economic, and even religious valued beliefs, has such an impact in U.S. Supreme Court decisions. The U.S. Constitution itself is biased in favor of this, and that the amendment process is itself so hard to complete means that the vulnerability to partisanship on the bench that is structural in the document is effectively intractable.

Being human, all too human, all of us would love to imprint our respective ideologies on law, whether statutory or common. So, we should all have the means to do so through the vote. Essentially, I am arguing that popular sovereignty—government by the people rather than vice versa—has unwittingly ceded too much territory to the U.S. Supreme Court under the subterfuge of an expansive notion of judicial interpretation. Ironically, there is thus a silver lining in this respect to the anti-abortion justices imposing their moral or religious beliefs in overturning Roe v. Wade because as a direct result, some state legislatures have voted on legislation bearing on abortion and even the voters in some states have been able to exercise their popular sovereignty by being able to vote directly on the matter via referendi.[6]

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1. John Fritze, “Roberts Warns Against Ignoring Supreme Court Rulings As Tension With Trump Looms,” CNN.com, December 31, 2024.
2. Ibid.
3. Ibid.
4. Ibid.
5. Ibid.
6. That last word is the plural form of referendum; you can blame Latin, and ultimately the Romans whose empire fell at least in part due to corruption within. No human social artifact can be expected to last forever.