… is from page 96 of the late Christopher Hitchens’s October 9, 2008, Vanity Fair essay titled “America the Banana Republic,” as this essay is reprinted in Arguably, the 2011 collection of several of Hitchens’s essays:
How very agreeable it must be to sit at a table in a casino where nobody seems to lose, and to play with a big stack of chips furnished to you by other people, and to have the further assurance that, if anything should ever chance to go wrong, you yourself are guaranteed by the tax dollars of those whose money you are throwing about in the first place! It’s enough to make a cat laugh.
DBx: Hitchens here wrote about the cronyism that was uncorked by the subprime crisis, but his words apply with equal relevance and force to the cronyism now being further uncorked by Trump’s protectionism. Trump is playing with other people’s money – specifically, the money of his fellow Americans. What fun for him! Anything that goes wrong – and much will indeed go wrong – Trump’s personal fortune will be unaffected and he’ll blame others. And members of his base, despite being made poorer by him, will bask in the fantastically false belief that he’s saving them from economic predators.
