VDH UltraAbsurdities of the Age. Part One
Victor Davis Hanson
The Stock Market Entitlement Complex
On Friday, April 24, the stock market closed about 40,000 on the Dow Jones, or where it was variously just recently between May and August 2024. Yet we still hear from the investor class (10 percent of the nation’s own 93 percent of stock market capitalization) cries of furor about the “trillions we have lost!”
Lost?
Apparently, in the elite mind, the stock market is adjudicated by fixating on it at its highest level of roughly 45,000 in December 2024, right after the election. Then that pinnacle becomes petrified in amber as an entitlement. Any subsequent gyrations and downturns create panic—and furor.
The Wall Street Journal does not reassure readers (50 percent of the country collectively owns 1 percent of our stock market capitalization) that such fluctuations are normal, and there is no entitlement baseline from which to mark “trillions of dollars in losses.”
It does not reassure the nation that our 10-percent elite received a 65 percent increase in their portfolios during the Trump first term, much less that 40,000 is an astronomical figure in itself.
Nor does the investor class think of the other 90 percent of the country, who routinely face losses in business, wages, and commodity prices but do not then fall into similar panic. In 1980 the price of raisins reached $1,300 a ton. Then in 1983, it crashed to $450—and never returned to an inflation-adjusted high of $1,300 for the next 30 years.
Overproduction, asymmetrical EU subsidies and tariffs, and the 1981–83 high interest rates to break inflation all contributed to the crash. The same could be said of tree fruit, nuts, and other commodities.
Yet as I watched my family and others lose tens of thousands of dollars in income, I don’t recall blaming anything or anyone for “losing us thousands of dollars of our income.” Instead, most farmers went broke silently or simply toughed it out. None thought $1,300 was their birthright. The same is true for millions of small businesspeople and wage-earners, who do not mark their best year in income as a sort of permanent standard and then equate any decline from that summit as real losses.
I grant Wall Street is vital for the nation. But when April reports come in that corporate profits are up, inflation subsiding, job growth surging, and energy prices down, and Wall Street still goes berserk over a policy in progress of trying to achieve symmetrical trade, what are we to think of these people’s collective sanity?
The Hollow Tit-for-Tat Warning
The media is going insane, warning that Trump the revenger is on the rampage. He is now in Obama and Lloyd Austin fashion, dismissing boards and supposedly going after his Biden-era tormentors. The Left cautions us of a descent into tit-for-tat chaos—well after their tit and before Trump’s tat.
Whatever Trump is doing, he will never catch up to the lawlessness of Biden and Merrick Garland. The FBI is not scouting out Trump opponents at school board meetings. It is not raiding Joe Biden’s house to find classified files he may have taken, as he had for some 30 years prior.
It is not rounding up local, state, and federal prosecutors to start investigating the Biden family syndicate to see whether its various members (those without Biden amnesties) ever paid taxes on the millions of dollars of their ill-gotten gains.
No Trump affiliate is preparing to round up 25 red states to deballot the next Democratic nominee. Trump is not bromancing Mark Zuckerberg to see if he will team up again with the FBI and go after now-liberal political opponents and suppress unfavorable news.
Kash Patel, John Radcliff, and Tulsi Gabbard are not rounding up “51 intelligence authorities” to swear a lie to the nation that Biden was working with the Chinese (likely lucratively, in fact).
So yes, we all wish to avoid third-world weaponization of the legal system. But those who are issuing warnings about potential Biden-like abuses from the Trump administration were stone silent when Biden and Garland made a mockery of an independent and disinterested judiciary.
(Do we remember the Hunter Biden sweetheart IRS deal before an honest judge called a stop to it? Or the Joe Biden campaign oath not to pardon Hunter only to later pardon numerous Bidens?)
The media attitude on lawfare resembles the Left’s border views: just as lawfare was welcomed by Biden and forbidden under Trump, so too it was lawful for Biden to let in 10 million illegal aliens and destroy immigration law, but it is unlawful for Trump to find and deport those illegal aliens and thus restore the sanctity of immigration law.
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