Virginia Postrel, Columnist

Trump Would Crush the Winners of the U.S. Economy

He wants America to win again. But not today's America -- not economic engines like Google, Facebook and Amazon.

May 24, 2016 at 1:00 PM UTC

Virginia Postrel is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist. She is a visiting fellow at the Smith Institute for Political Economy and Philosophy at Chapman University and author, most recently, of “The Fabric of Civilization: How Textiles Made the World.”

A retro way to "win."
Photographer: Ricky Carioti/The Washington Post via Getty Images

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Donald Trump says it all the time: “We don’t win anymore.” If you got all your economic news from the presumed Republican nominee, you’d think U.S. businesses hadn’t added any new jobs or accomplished anything worthwhile since sometime in the Johnson administration. Americans nowadays, he keeps suggesting, are total losers.

While Trump’s rhetoric denigrates the achievements of U.S. companies and their millions of employees, his specific proposals are worse. They reveal a vision of the good economy as static, uninnovative and controlled from the White House. President Trump’s America is, despite the rhetoric, an economy with no place for winners.