The net worth of
As someone utterly immune to plutophobia -- fear of wealth -- I have no problem with this. (For what it's worth, I know
Just as it is not automatically terrible to have a clowder of fat cats descend on
"I want people that made a fortune because now they're negotiating with you," Trump explained recently. "It's not different than a great baseball player or a great golfer."
It shouldn't surprise anyone that the president-elect sees it this way, since this is pretty much exactly the case he made to voters for 16 months. And it's precisely why his biggest supporters said they wanted him to be president. It would be weird if he didn't follow through on this promise. Trump was the change candidate running against the record of a former-community-organizer president who once said that his brief stint working for the private sector made him feel like he was "working behind enemy lines."
So, again, there's nothing undemocratic about what Trump is doing. Nor is it "unprecedented" to draft the business community to
President
The dollar-a-year men certainly helped with the war mobilization effort, but they often did so by creating rules that helped their own industries, mostly by establishing cartels, which almost abolished competitive bidding. The War Industries Board, for instance, staffed almost entirely by eminent industrialists, also fixed prices on commodities, froze wages, commandeered railroads and the like.
Of course, this was all in service to the war effort, at least in principle, and hopefully the days of total war mobilization are behind us. Still, there are lessons to be drawn.
One version of this chapter in American history holds that the dollar-a-year-men were greedy and grasping scions of Big Business bending the state to their needs, particularly the munitions manufacturers. This tale can be overstated -- and has been for a century -- but it's not like there isn't any evidence to support it.
A more modest interpretation is that "big players" -- to borrow a phrase from
Conventional policymakers have this tendency as well.
Ostensibly pro-market cheerleaders for the coming rule of businessmen should at least keep that in mind in the days ahead.
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Jonah Goldberg is a fellow at the American Enterprise Institute and editor-at-large of National Review Online.