america is the land of the free and the home of the brave

Because prices stay high, wages buy less, so workers’ lifestyles, unless they borrow, get squeezed in real terms while those at the top get paid ever more with impunity. Investment in the US has been falling for 20 years. This monopolising process gums up everything. Google, Amazon and Facebook have been allowed to become supermonopolies, buying up smaller challengers with no obstruction. US healthcare is impossibly expensive, with drug companies fixing prices twice as high or even higher than those in Europe health spending is 18% of GDP.

Profits per passenger airline mile in the US are twice those in Europe. So it is that mobile phone bills in the US are on average $100 a month, twice that of France and Germany, with the same story in broadband. When firms dominate a sector, they invest and innovate less, they peg or raise prices, and they make super-normal profits by just existing (what economists call “economic rent”). Market power is the most important concept in economics, he says. The US economy is becoming increasingly harmed by ever less competition, with fewer and fewer companies dominating sector after sector – from airlines to mobile phones. A free trade agreement post 31 January with the US is the number one strategic policy aim for Brexit Britain – unshackling the UK from the declining old, and embracing the English-speaking, dynamic new. It is so degenerate it cannot even defend itself – as Trump will undoubtedly remind its leaders over the next two days. The EU is sclerotic, undynamic, stifled by quasi-socialist red tape, and hostile to insurgent startups.

With the unerring capacity to be wrong that defines the Brexit right, Britain is about to decouple itself from a continental economy beginning to get things right, and hook up with one that is palpably beginning to fail.

Despite the boasting and the trappings of superpower status, he is an emissary from a country whose economy and society are in increasing difficulty, and whose global leadership is under challenge not just from the usual suspect, China, but from Europe. T omorrow, President Trump arrives in London for the annual Nato summit.

America is the land of the free and the home of the brave