John Stossel offers a rebuttal to the idea that Trump "drained the swamp" even a little bit during his first term:

Image by Florida Memory, via Wikimedia Commons, license.

"He made government bigger," Economist Ed Stringham says in my new video. 'That's going in the wrong direction. Looking through a list of agencies, every single one I could see, there were more employees after his presidency than before."

Trump added almost 2 million jobs to the federal workforce.

He did make some cuts at the State Department, Labor Department, Education Department, and his own office. But total spending under Trump nearly doubled. Some was in response to COVID-19, but billions in extra spending came before.

That spending increased the size of the swamp. New programs filled Washington with more bureaucrats.

Trump launched a $6 billion "Farmers to Families" Food Box Program to bring food from farmers to families.

"Last I checked," jokes Stringham, "we have an industry for that. It's called the supermarket industry. It exists for a reason. Markets are good at getting things from farmer to consumer."

I've noted Trump's spending contribution to "Bidenflation" here before, but had not seen other specific examples of his profligacy mentioned until this column.

Specifically, I did not know about the two million new federal employees he hired.

The welfare state is so big that size can be a proxy for abuse of government -- but only if we remind ourselves of the proper purpose of government, which is the protection of individual rights. We need a government to do that, and it should be no bigger or smaller than necessary for the task.

To the best I can tell, Trump's first term included a few marginal -- and often easily-overturned -- improvements on a few things, while, overall, he governed like a Democrat from a few decades ago, to put it charitably.

When Stossel says Trump "doesn't understand the source of the swamp," he's understating or missing the problem: Expanding the swamp as he did (and threatens to do again if elected) indicates a stupendous degree of ignorance or indifference about the problem.

-- CAV

Political and academic elites have successfully convinced the public that they should fear private enterprise. However, people really should fear an out-of-control government.

Despite statements from Biden and other progressives, profits in a market economy are not a form of plunder. Instead, they represent entrepreneurial gains that mostly benefit consumers.