After centuries of bloody warfare, the landed aristocracy was eventually displaced by a merchant class, based on commerce and industry, and after wresting power from the landowners they established a similar caste, one that kept the others out by the same barriers of inheritance and marriage, and now with education.

Today, the lackeys of that class feel they are on the ascendant, they are the managers and administrators, and the true inheritors of the business aristocracy. They are only a step above the industrial serfs and retail worker bees and data-entry peasantry, and actually little more than the overseers and craftsmen and head servants on the plantation. But they are convinced that they are “businessmen”, entrepreneurs, and the only real men of vision and enterprise. Actually, they are just temporary fucking employees like everybody else, but they see themselves as tycoons in training, and that if it wasn’t just for the poor, and the “Socialists”, and the gummint bureaucrats, they too would be able to turn their innate business skills into the genteel positions of creative power they feel they are entitled to by their DNA.

Remember Johnny Reb? The sharecropper and tenant farmer who joined the Confederacy in order to fight for his God-given constitutionally guaranteed freedom to own his own slaves? Yep. Same mentality and psychology as today’s Deplorables. They’ve convinced themselves that if they join their masters in a fight against the bureaucrats and govvies and artsy-fartsies and hippies and queers and lawyers and Kollege Perfessers and Hollywood Celebrities, those same masters will lavishly reward them with the slots alongside them in the entrepreneurial Nirvana they feel they are genetically entitled to be a part of. You and I know that’s not going to happen. Those guys are at the top because they are bright enough to know there’s not enough room up there for everybody. They promise whatever they have to if they need help, or votes, but they will never deliver, not to chumps like you.

You’re right. The ones that whine the loudest about the virtues of free enterprise are only the ones who have been most abused by it, and conned to support it. They do not have the courage to recognize the magnitude of the lies and crimes that have been perpetrated against them, instead, like all sycophants everywhere, they only wish the opportunity to work alongside their own oppressors. They just want the freedom to own their own slaves.

Well, with Trump and the rest of the Conservative medicine show, they’ll get exactly what they deserve.

This last Republican primary, the other “businessperson” was Carly Fiorina, during whose tenure at HP, a graph of their stock price looked like a cross-section of the Grand Canyon. Then in 2012 there was that pizza guy, what was his name? “999″ something? Ah, Herman Cain.(?) And of course Mitt Romney, perfectly-equipped to take the country through a leveraged buyout and liquidation sale.

Closely related, I’ve always loved the simple-minded contention that you could balance the US budget as easily as balancing your household checkbook on the kitchen table. Note that we’re talking about an operation so large that you have to take into account the speed of light when balancing the books, and acknowledge that it’s impossible for anyone to know within a few billion how much money the government has on hand. But sure, that’s just like your checkbook, why not, let’s go with stupid.

Why couldn’t it have been, for example, Musk…or Branson? The fact that they’re constitutionally ineligible is a minor quibble, really. After all, that guy from Kenya worked out pretty well.

The government is not a business. It is just the opposite. A government does not provide goods and services for a price, and then has a surplus income which rewards the owner or which can be plowed back into the enterprise for maintenance and growth.

The government is just the opposite, it is meant to operate at a loss, it is meant to engage in activities which are not profitable. We do not expect it to generate surplus revenue. Governments are assigned tasks no business should be expected to do, and vice versa. The whole point of having a government is to do those things business can’t do.

To “run a government in a businesslike manner” is folly. It is foolishness. Oh sure, we have a right to demand good management, competent administration, efficiency, fiscal responsibility, all of those things we expect in our business affairs. But the whole point of government is to do those things business can’t. Likewise, the purpose of business is to do those things government can’t or shouldn’t do. The relationship is not interchangeable, in fact, it may often be adversarial.

A businessman can be a good politician if he brings with him those qualities we expect in a good businessman, good management, competent administration, efficiency, fiscal responsibility, and so on. Those are necessary, but not sufficient conditions for a politician or government bureaucrat. But he must not bring the business ethos with him. The qualities we expect in a man we hire to run our business are not those we expect in the man we elect to run our government. In fact, they are just the opposite.

This idea that a good businessman is instantly qualified to be a good politician inevitably leads to a Trump. If we haven’t learned that lesson by now then we deserve him and people like him forever.

Trump shows us the other side. A stereotypical Capitalist Robber Baron, right out of Dickens or Sinclair, the quintessential middleman, providing luxury status symbols for other deplorable wannabees.

But he does have a pretty wife. Of course, if you can afford to replace them when they get stale, that’s the easy part.