It goes down too easily “America First”.  On the face of it, it’s an obvious goal for anyone running the country.  But in fact that’s not right.  The real objective is the well-being of the country and everyone in it.  “America First” doesn’t say that, and the difference is important.

America First has embedded in it the idea that all our problems are because someone else has put himself first in line.  So it sells you on what the problems are without even pretending to look at what’s true.  And it’s not just a matter for foreign affairs.  Any problem you have becomes someone else keeping you from getting what’s yours.  It’s a slogan of grievance masquerading as a solution. It doesn’t want you to ask questions.  We know who’s evil and we’ll get rid of them. It’s a slogan to hide behind.

Economics can be complicated, but this story doesn’t have to be.  Let’s talk about the good old days that Trump says he is bringing back—the postwar decades of the fifties and sixties.  What made those times happen?  Coming out of World War II we were the most equitable society we had ever been. The difference between CEO’s and working people’s wages was laughable compared with today.  The GI Bill made college affordable.  Government-funded research and development won the war and established the US predominance that remade the world.

What’s the message today about how to reestablish that prosperity?  It’s certainly not what worked before.  No major government role in education, infrastructure, and forward-looking research.  No commitment to democracy.  No unions.  The solution is simple: the rich and powerful will make you rich, so you just get rid of anything in their way and all will be golden.  Don’t look at us–it’s other countries and immigrant parasites stealing everything that’s yours.

The one thing you can say for all that is that it has certainly been great for making them richer.  Inequality in America has reached levels far beyond even the “gilded age” of the nineteen century.  The following chart of net worth values show the magnitude of the change. The recent Big Beautiful Bill fits this picture well.

Elon Musk is worth more than a trillion dollars.  Trump has made on the order of 10 billion for himself and his family since the election. But the broader payoff is for the indefinite future–maybe.  After all we’re told the economy is already great, the greatest economy ever.

What about all those people we’re getting rid of?  Is it really all about them?  We were told they were all murderers and rapists, but that’s not who they’re rounding up–productive families who’ve been here decades.  Supposedly that’s still okay, since once we get rid of the immigrants there will be more of the pot for everyone else.  It hasn’t worked that way.  And  there’s a lesson for that also from the good old post-war days.   The war didn’t bring all elements of society together, but it did bring some marginal groups—Jews and Italians for example—into the mainstream.  That didn’t make things worse for the others, it made things better.  Bringing everyone in meant everyone could contribute. 

What matters is to grow the pot for everyone, and that’s actually more true now than ever before.  Most of the pot is being reinvented before our eyes.   We live in a time where winners and losers are decided by companies and technologies coming from nowhere to dominate the world.  We’ve lost the real main message—what works for individuals and our country is full opportunity for everyone. We need the best and brightest from everywhere to help reinvent the future.  But we can’t work at that one, because we’re too busy spending fortunes on ICE. 

Finally we need to get back to the international part—it’s “America First” after all.  To begin with we need to recognize that the America First rhetoric about the whole world taking advantage of us is manifestly false.  Apple is an example of why.  We import the hardware and sell it in a combined hardware/software product worth far more than the input.  This is hugely profitable but a net negative for the balance of payments.  The rest of the world is not predatory in this transaction—we retain the high margin part, and the hardware is an intermediate product we can’t make without destroying the economics of the deal. (TSMC does make chips here, but only a small, lower-tech part of their output.) The balance of payments calculation is hardware-based and doesn’t capture what we earn from trade-enabled business.  Even adding in the contribution to balance of payments from services misses most of it.  However once you actually try, it’s not so hard to get a real trade number and see that our trade relations with the rest of the world are a clear net positive.

It’s possible in  the future that some currently outsourced production comes to the US, but the main driver for such cases will be robotics bringing down production costs. Despite all the rhetoric, there’s no change to this picture that will recreate lots of 1950’s jobs.  If we want to solve the problems of people left behind in the last decades, we need to get past the blinders of “America First”—and follow the money. To really create jobs we’ll need some of those billionaires’ stratospheric profits.

For the international case too there is a lesson from the good old days.  After World War II we put real money into the Marshall Plan for the recovery of Europe.  That money paid itself back in spades with the spectacular growth of GDP in the whole Euro-American zone.  America First would have left us vastly poorer.  The world is different now, but the economic realities are more similar than you might think.

We have to recognize now as we did then that stability has enormous value.  Even today we can see how war hurts. Conflicts are prodigiously expensive, and nuclear proliferation risks even worse.  The only way out is an international system that works for everyone—American gains far more from a system of rules than it does from turning alliances into protection rackets.  We haven’t profited from the freedom to start wars whenever we want.  And American’s freedom to declare climate change a hoax and sabotage climate action will hurt everyone—with ourselves as deniers most of all.

We as a country and as a world have a primary interest in stability and making things work.  There is no golden age to be found in holding everyone hostage—such a world would be less prosperous, and we have no assurance it would be peaceful or that we would always be on top.  Peace and prosperity are the objectives—nothing less.