The Worst Part Of Trump's Latest Gaffe

The title of this article runs a serious risk of being ambiguous. For who knows what Trump will say before this article is posted? But the latest, greatest Trump gaffe has to do with him preferring immigrants from Norway to those from 'shithole' countries like Haiti, El Salvador and those in Africa. The term 'shithole' takes on a personal nature once people from one area are preferred over people from other areas. And racism rears its ugly head when there are racial differences between the preferred people and the unpreferred people. Here we should note that the education of the immigrants coming here from Africa is at least comparable to that of natural born American citizens (click here).

The reactions to Trump's comment are quite predictable. There is justifiable condemnation from his opponents and regret or lamenting from his allies. Paul Ryan called Trump's comments 'unfortunate' and 'unhelpful' indicating that Trump's depiction of people from Haiti, El Salvador, and Africa inconvenienced him more than it showed disrespect for the people from those areas. Btw, Ryan's description of Trump's gaffe is similar to Obama's description of the Iraq invasion as a 'dumb war' and a 'rash war'  (click here). The similarities rest in the fact that just as Ryan never really condemned the racism in Trump's gaffe, Obama never characterized the invasion of Iraq as being immoral. 

But the worst part of Trump's gaffe is not the racism despite how intolerable that is. The worst part of Trump's gaffe is that it reduces the significance of immigrants to their net effect on America as a market place. In short, Trump's gaffe denies the intrinsic value of people whether they are from shithole countries or Norway, and it judges people on the extrinsic value of what they can provide to the market. People have little to no intrinsic value according to Trump's statement and, like the racism implied in his gaffe, that seems not to bother Ryan and some other Republicans at all.

Some business people have a difficult time realizing that there is a world outside of the business world. Everything is about commerce to them--note that it is about commerce, not economics. When I suggested to a friend who owns some businesses in Oklahoma that our current form of capitalism denies the intrinsic value of people, he immediately said that the free market fairly values people. Apparently, my friend did not know the definition of the word 'intrinsic,' but he was eager to clear today's capitalism of all charges.

What is painfully evident by Trump's gaffe and the damage control or even defense of his comment provided by his supporters is that our government will soon be passing domestic policies based on the belief that a person's value to society is more and more determined by what they have to offer to the free market. And we should note that the free market is not a democratic venue. For democratic venues promote an equality among all its participants by counting one vote per person. The free market, on the other hand, counts one vote per dollar. Thus, those who have the most dollars have the most control over the market. And in a country where one's value is becoming increasingly more determined by what one has to offer to the market, one's value is becoming more and more determined by what one has to offer to those with the most control over the market.

At this point, since today, not the day this article is posted,  is Martin Luther King Jr. day, we should close with a quote from him (click here for the source):

 I am convinced that if we are to get on the right side of the world revolution, we as a nation must undergo a radical revolution of values. We must rapidly begin the shift from a "thing-oriented" society to a "person-oriented" society. When machines and computers, profit motives and property rights are considered more important than people, the giant triplets of racism, materialism, and militarism are incapable of being conquered.