If you treat Trump only as a monkey, then …

If you treat Trump only as a monkey, then you miss the intelligent things the monkey says. Example: the tweet about the USPS pricing too low for Amazon was widely reported in an almost derisive manner, except he’s exactly right that the USPS loses money and is likely not charging enough to Amazon, that as the biggest package carrier it should charge enough to make a legitimate profit. Maybe the USPS is, but I doubt it and, more importantly, that should be analyzed. I’d love to see if USPS – or any government agency – actually knows the cost of their services like a private company does. They can do the silly thing and divide by some number: pieces delivered by total costs, perhaps even divide by trips and people to the extent they can be allocated, but this kind of cost accounting is crucial to running a business. The failure to understand that is one of the biggest problems small business faces, especially in competition with more sophisticated competitors. I can tell you one thing: the Chinese understand this much better than the US does and that is a source of their overall comparative advantage because they aren’t locking themselves into a labor cost advantage system but are moving up the ladder of sophistication in a way that shows they understand cost considerations to a great depth. One of America’s weaknesses is that unless focused by some externality, it is unable to focus very well on issues like this, preferring instead to allow ‘the market’ to sort things out. It’s certainly true American companies can do this but the knowledge hasn’t spread and isn’t picked up by government.