I. Trump’s America: Open for Business

In the last couple of days, President Trump has said America is open for business and it’s the hottest country in the world. Mark those words.

He is reinventing capitalism. He’s reimagining capitalism. And the rest of the world believes him.

And if you listen to the media cacophony of leftists against Trump, you wouldn’t believe a word of it.

There’s supposed to be this enormous wave of pessimism aimed at the president and presumably the country too. And I’m not buying it. And you shouldn’t either.

Yes, Mr. Trump’s polls are somewhat under water, but he’s in better shape at this stage in his first year of his second term than a whole lot of other recent presidents.

Rasmussen has him down 47 percent approval, 51 percent disapproval. Big deal.

Money is flowing into this country like we’ve never seen before. Whatever the right number is, $9 trillion, $15 trillion, $20 trillion. It’s all remarkable. It’s a vote of confidence in the American economy and the dollar. And our national security policies.

Mr. Trump is cutting taxes, deregulating business, “drill baby drill,” reciprocal fair trade.

There was no global retaliatory trade war. There has been a global move to make fair trade deals with America. Big difference. The stock market indexes are just short of record highs after phenomenal performance this year.

The economy could be growing at close to 4 percent. More than twice what the so-called experts believe is possible.

Today’s jobs report was twice as strong as predicted. Next year working folks are gonna get several thousand dollars tax refunds. 

Already this year businesses large and small are making use of immediate cost expensing made retroactive. Buying machinery and equipment, and building factories.

The border is completely closed. Nearly 2 million people have self-deported. Most of the streets are safer. Peace is breaking out in the Middle East and elsewhere. Something folks thought they would never see in their lifetime.

Peace through strength is working. As Ronald Reagan always put it, a nation strong at home is a nation strong abroad.

Mr. Trump is fulfilling that mission. I don’t care what the lefty press is saying.

America is getting better and better.

II. Why Free Market Capitalism Works

Free market capitalism is the best path to prosperity. For many years, I hosted a TV show where that was always the opening line.

Of course, it reflected my view of how best individuals and nations could prosper. And I have served two presidents who fortunately agree with this point of view.

Let free people think for themselves, use their God-given talents to come up with Earth-shattering ideas that can change the course of the economy. We’ve seen it happen, several times over in our lifetime.

Here’s one: Nvidia and Microsoft are now each individually larger by market cap than any other national stock market in the world except Japan. Apple’s market value is about equal to Communist China.

Adam Smith’s “The Wealth of Nations” is one of the Bibles of the free market capitalist movement.

On the 250th anniversary of America’s founding, it’s important to note that many of our Founding Fathers communicated with Adam Smith, and were deeply influenced by his ideas.

Life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness is not a bad place to start.

And our freedom comes from our creator, not government. Another good place to start.

And it’s also a good reminder that Adam Smith’s book “The Theory of Moral Sentiments,” which preceded “The Wealth of Nations,” was, if I may oversimplify, about playing by the rules and abiding by the laws of a nation.

And I’m not going to draw on lots and lots of numbers right now, but I am going to say that democratic capitalism always produces more than democratic socialism.

Certainly communism, where the godless state ran everything, was an abject Soviet failure.

I know that it’s fashionable in some of these left-wing blue states and cities where Mamdani-ism is kicking up at New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, and Seattle. But it won’t work.

Price controls, rent freeze, Soviet-style grocery stores, free everything, high confiscatory tax burdens, it won’t work. Incentives matter, let’s not forget that. 

My friends at the Committee to Unleash Prosperity periodically run economic comparisons of the success of red states and the failure of blue states.

Take New York and New Jersey, where over the last 10 or so years, their left-wing statist policies have seen nearly 3 million people abandon those states.

And where cumulatively have lost about $700 billion of income — and rising.

Yet here comes President Trump riffing at the Kennedy Center today about his supply-side tax cuts, deregulation, “drill baby drill,” and reciprocal trade.

He didn’t exactly say it, but what he was talking about was the idea that free-market capitalism is the best path to prosperity.

This on a day when the Atlanta Federal Reserve marked up its third-quarter gross domestic product increase to 4.2 percent, including a business boom and a lower trade deficit.

Mr. Trump is not ideologically inclined, but as a former businessman, he knows what makes the economy tick.

As the Wall Street Journal’s James Freeman put it, let Americans produce more goods.

Let the government produce less money.

That’ll get us to virtually unlimited growth and affordability.

Mr. Trump is a common-sense capitalist. And he may well be raising $20 trillion of new investment money pouring into America, bolstering our currency, reducing our inflation, and balancing our trade.

America is the hottest place in the world right now. And no matter how hard they try, Democrats are not going to sabotage Mr. Trump’s version of free-market capitalism and a “peace through strength” foreign policy.

Free market capitalism is worth fighting for.

Lawrence Kudlow is a Fox News Media contributor and host of both “Kudlow” on weekdays and the nationally syndicated “Larry Kudlow Show” each Saturday. This column is adapted from his monologues on “Kudlow.”

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