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Philosophy, Religion & Society / Re: Trump
« Last post by honk on Today at 03:38:45 AM »Wrong. When you pay a business for a product or service you get something in return. It is a stretch to say that a business owner owes something more to someone who already bought a good or a service from him.
The overwhelming majority of businesspeople would strongly disagree with the notion that the relationship between a business and a customer immediately ends once the purchase is made. Businesses spend a lot of time and money trying to make sure their customers become returning customers. And depending on the caliber of the business or their customer, patronizing a business could absolutely be seen as doing them a favor. Obviously most large businesses won't really care if you or I spend twenty dollars or so there, but a very wealthy client, such as a foreign government, that's willing to throw millions of dollars at Donald Trump, a very divisive public figure who's publicly burned most of his bridges in the world of big business, might reasonably conclude that Trump owes them a favor now.
It's also worth pointing out that a conflict of interest doesn't have to involve another party. Something much simpler is going on in this particular case. Trump is now deeply involved in the cryptocurrency business, a new, evolving industry that's subject to numerous laws, regulations, and restriction, and will very likely be facing more in the years to come. Trump's involvement in the business entirely compromises him on this subject. Whenever a possible new law or executive order regarding cryptocurrency crosses his desk, Trump will act in the interests of Trump the businessman who's trying to make money, not Trump the president who's (ostensibly) trying to do what's best for the nation. We deserve a president who can be impartial on these subjects, not one who's strongly incentivized by their own financial interests to act one way or the other.
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In contrast to owning and operating a business, politicians regularly solicit and receive millions of dollars through donations. Politician like Obama were asking for large sums of money from donators, even in his last term. Why should we believe that a business owner is more likely to be corrupt than a politician who is handed a wad of cash by a corporation for vague reasons through donation companies?
I'm also not a fan of enormous financial contributions, but at least those highly regulated by the government. There are limitations on who can donate how much money and how often, foreigners are prohibited from taking part, and perhaps most importantly, donations must be disclosed. That's how we knew that Trump was in Musk's pocket from the beginning of this term. I'm not going to say that it's a perfect system or that there aren't loopholes, because it's not and there are, but there is at least a regulated, transparent system, which is preferable to a secretive free-for-all.
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What you believe should happen is also irrelevant to the fact that Trump's voters knew that he would be running his businesses once elected, especially when he was elected for his second term. Trump made that very clear, and people supported him for it, especially in light of the malicious prosecution against Trump and his companies. The voters wanted this. That is called democracy, and supersedes your small leftist complaint.
No, I don't believe that an appeal to popularity supersedes my ethical concerns, and even if I did, a vote for Trump doesn't automatically indicate approval of or agreement with every single specific thing that Trump has said or done. Trump was found liable for sexual abuse, but presumably most of his voters don't "support" sexual abuse as a matter of principle. Same for Trump's criminal conviction. People can vote for a candidate despite a certain issue just as easily as they can vote for a candidate because of a certain issue. And because you'll probably say here that Trump's voters didn't believe that the right decisions were made in those cases, I'll add that we can just as easily suppose that Trump's voters didn't believe he'd be in business for himself while serving as president. "He's just trolling," and "Take him seriously, not literally," are, after all, common refrains among Trump supporters.
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Quote from: honkWe were doing just fine with the expectation that the president should not be making money on the side before Trump came along, and we'll continue to do just fine by taking the next step of codifying it into law.
Laws which are codified through Congress are the result of democracy and representative democracy. Congress votes on the matter, and people vote for congress members. In this case, the people have already voted on this.
The fact that businesses have existed long before the creation of the country and neither the founders of the United States, its many congresses, or its courts up to present have had an issue with this also shows that you are on the losing side of this and do not have a supportable argument. You would be better off with a list of examples of corruption which have harmed the country through this mechanism, rather than handwaving a potential one in contrived scenarios where people owe strangers favors from unsolicited money and without agreement that a favor is owed.
No, a law that was never proposed or voted on not existing does not automatically mean that "the people" oppose it. There's no law prohibiting me from calling you a big dumb poo-poo head. That doesn't mean that the public therefore oppose the creation of any such law and are therefore in support of me calling you a big dumb poo-poo head. The only reason why a law requiring the president to divest from their business interests hasn't existed historically is because it was believed to be unnecessary. Every president in the modern era has understood that it would be wildly unethical to be in business for themselves while also serving as president - there do seem to have been a few issues with the "blind trust" that Carter set up for his peanut business, but he at least made a solid effort to distance himself from it. Nobody expected Trump to shamelessly flout precedent. If you're right that Trump voters support Trump's right to enrich himself through business while also serving as president, then we need to at least add a major caveat that their support of this right is conditional on their support of Trump. They support Trump, therefore they support Trump's right to make money in office. It's not a sincere opinion of the actual issue in general terms; it's a reaction to what they see as an attempted check on Trump. If you had asked people ten years ago, before Trump muddied the waters, what they thought of presidents enriching themselves in office, the overwhelming majority of them would have been firmly opposed to it.