The Greatest Good for the Greatest Number

“The greatest happiness of the greatest number is the foundation of morals and legislation.” 

– Jeremy Bentham, 1843

As frequently done since Bentham equated the moral good with the greatest happiness of the greatest number, I’ve replaced “happiness” with “good” as the former as in our Declaration of Independence’s “pursuit of happiness” clearly has wound up to mean “the guy with the most toys at the end wins.” To refer to “good” has both a moral and a utilitarian aspect. Also, “the pursuit of happiness” is in our American reading always “I’ve got mine, you get yours,” happiness always meaning yours and not others. Bentham is here not grounding moral behavior in Natural Rights of ambiguous meaning and origin but in determinable criteria and accountable results. At bottom rights are described as inalienable, natural, substantive, constitutional, original and so on but remain de facto and presumed. Bentham bypassed this hazard zone with what he thought was a straight forward principle of utility. However, we now know that an economic system, capitalism, can leave most without and a few with all and yet described as by Lee Edwards, leading historian of American conservatism, as benefiting all.

Blindness to what is clearly not for the good of all as well as the obdurate allegiance to what is hurting most is a problem of the first order we cannot leave alone.

By some accounts, at the end of all political conflicts, the winner is the side that offers to the greatest number the greatest amount of good, or pleasure, and the least amount of pain. Happiness and its absence are derived from this. By other accounts, the winner is the one who has the most money to capture the attention of the most voters. If we don’t include Bentham’s caveat that what is good benefits not one but all, Market Rule is our huckleberry. It puts individual good and happiness in your own personal stock portfolio.

This individual focus on life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness (Let others get their own) lies deep in the American cultural imaginary, from Emerson’s “Self-Reliance” to Ayn Rand’s rational self-interest. This last is a bible of the Republican Party. Any brand of socialism not only leaves an anti-American bitterness to the tongue but threatens to curtail or end Market Rule, although that Rule cannot bring the greatest good to the greatest number, nor is it interested in doing so. In fact, as Senator Bernie Sanders never tires of pointing out, three men in the U.S have more wealth than the bottom half of the country. While this enrages Sanders and he sees it as persuasive in attracting voters away from the Republican Party and its at the hip attachment to Market Rule, it’s not denied Donald J. Trump two terms as president of the United States.

Exploring what is going on here discloses the well springs of a political confusion that was triggered variously, starting with Reagan’s transference of $79 trillion in wealth from the bottom 90% of Americans to the top 1%. In 2023 alone, the same study found that $3.9 trillion was redistributed from the bottom 90% to the top 1%. Trump’s “New Big Beautiful Bill” continues to increase the wealth of the wealthy impressively while further eroding income and Federal assistance programs of the bottom 80%.

If you separate Trump’s megalomaniacal edicts from standard Market Rule trickle down economics, you can separate a passing madness that will self-destruct from oligarchic economics that persist and won’t pass that easily. And one of the reasons for this being that the wealthy have gotten greater control of the dispensers of power, what Foucault refers to as discourse, practices and institutions.

I am not saying that Trump’s pathologies have not extended from there to what benefits Market Rule. For instance, he personally dislikes the Press because they are not loyal to him. He dislikes any part of the Constitutional order that he can’t extort. Inspector generals and oversight committees can out his errata. Megalomaniacs don’t like to be schooled, regulated, indicted, or observant of what gets in their way. He is, in short, a personification of Wild West, unfettered Capitalism. He’s Ayn Rand’s John Galt, a law unto himself, which in Romans meant someone who follows his conscience and not written law.

Because Americans are exceptional in their attachment to their own views and conflate written law with the restrictions of a liberal Federal Government, no matter how greatly Trump’s troglodyte madness is not heroic or how illiterate it is, he is glorified as a law unto himself with a steadfast 97% of Republican voters identifying as MAGA and 15-25% of total U.S. population. Trump is not the first historically speaking to be something of a grifter and fraud yet be admired as a rebel hero. The Big Beautiful Bill his minions enforced makes him more like the ”tax the blood out of the peasants” King John than a Robin Hood of distributive economics.

This is a hero who is using the economic and military power of the U.S, nationally and internationally in the same way Don Corleone used Luca Brasi to enforce his will,. And like the mafia Don, Trump is using this power to make a buck, 3 billion since 2025. And like Michael Corleone, Trump is a grifter in chief conning his way over and under the politics upon which liberal democracies have been built: free and fair elections; co-equal branches of government; due process in law; the equal protection of human rights, civil rights, civil liberties, and political freedoms. The one feature of a Western liberal democracy he upholds is a market economy and private property, the one feature that has placed the greatest good in the hands of the few and immiserated the greatest number.

Some few of these tenets of a Constitutional Republic have not been troublesome to the preservation of a market economy but in his personal campaign to get rid of annoying oppositions, Trump has proven a good tool in accomplishing a grandiose program to create a new Leviathan, but not a Hobbesian absolute sovereign but one where power resides in enterprises that create Wall St moguls and cyber tech and AI innovators, an Alpha class, once again like Rand’s John Galt and his cronies. Algorithms and Derivatives have teamed up as the New Leviathan, one built on the ruins of government nt.

The front of the Project 2025 screed asserts that the government has been “weaponized against American citizens and conservative values” and a liberal democracy doesn’t restore God-given individual rights the Christian Nationalism would. I say all that is a front because neither fortresses of power Wall Street or Silicon Valley tech bros Peter Thiel and Elon Musk, or Goldman Sachs and J.P. Morgan are interested in a mission of Christian Nationalism. They are however interested in replacing electoral politics with techno/investor leadership, which an extreme form of unitary executive power or plenary presidential power could provide.

This violation of Constitutional co-equal branches of government emerges not because this violation is long a part of a plan, as crazed plans and their Russell Voughts are a dime a dozen, but because a crazed anomaly, Donald J. Trump, against all odds assumed the seat of power, and Vought’s plan like Musk’s before him serve Trump’s Arc de Trump delusions. Our Prez is the guy in the asylum who thinks he’s Napoleon. The asylum is what he’s making of America. Make America Sane Again would be a Democratic Party slogan if that party wasn’t complicit in bringing the insanity on.

The fly in the ointment of this Triumvirate of Trump and his Myrmidon MAGAS/Project 2025/Tech/Wall street is that elections still happen.

There is no way in which Market Rule, the Monopoly zero sum game it plays, can bring the losers in this game to the side of its political frontman, the Republican Party. The greatest good to the greatest number is not going to happen under any configuration of rule by the Winners. The Techno AI Robotics Crypto hierarchy is just monarchy and aristocracy that gives TED talks.

Before Trump came down the escalator and lassoed MAGAs by spelling out for them who to hate and blame for their misfortunes, the political presence of Market Rule and its party were heading for extinction. Casino capitalism is not designed to  back the wounded or the dead. You either compete on a winning level or you vanish. That’s not a strategy that wins the popular vote.

And yet, the mind boggling conundrum is this turn in working class affiliation. “Now, it is the Republican Party that represents the middle-class and poor regions of the country that were once the Democratic base. In 2010, Democrats represented 81 of the poorest 25 percent of districts, and Republicans just 30. Last year, Republicans held 65 of those districts, compared with 46 for Democrats.” (Brody Mullins,“How Democrats Became the Party of the Well to Do” New York Times Oct 23, 2025)

Unbridled, Monopoly game style capitalist play is not a greatest good to the greatest number plan. One can hope right now that two things will happen: the greatest number will detach themselves after some hurt from an economics that erodes their “good,” and, the Democratic party will return, after a long absence, to representing wage earner/working class stranded outside an investment/dividend divide.

Two things have caused this turn around in party affiliation: one is the detour made by the Democratic Party away from kitchen table/pay the nut issues, and the other is Donald J. Trump, our American Svengali. Another hope is that the greatest number will find themselves new representation given that our duopoly is as much mesmerized by a predatory economics as MAGAs are by Trump.

MAGAs may dissolve when Trump leaves the stage, just as the Tea Party did, complaining about government overreach. When the cost of living rises and savings dwindle, MAGAs will be reaching out for government help. The United States of Amnesia, as Vidal called it, won’t remember Reagan’s pitch from Wall St that government is the problem, when clearly his eight years in office was the problem to the greatest number of people.

When the B plan is to foment insurrection, send the military in and close down elections “until further notice” you need to fabricate enemy lines. This country is not divided into white Christian Nationalists vs. Anti-fa. There’s no there there on either side but only rage and shock. However, as Charles Foster Kane says in Citizen Kane “You provide the prose poems. I’ll provide the war.” Part of our postmodern paradigm shift is the replacement of reality by simulacra. What we find in Trump is a regime of the artificial in which all “has no relation to any reality whatsoever” (Baudrillard)

Can Trump use all his tools of imposing lies for truth, simulacra for reality and so cause a civil war he wants?

A search for a civil war, a search that is ongoing since Trump 2 went into office, has to go macro on a level of heat and rage that only clear and real antipathies can produce. Trump would like to stage this in the hope that such will dissolve a Constitutional Republic order that began on March 4, 1789.

Pushing an order of things off stage so that a clever Grifter can take center stage as King does not resemble the French or Russian Revolutions. Trump’s is an ass-backward revolution as Tom Paine would have described it. Tyranny of monarchy is overthrowing a Constitutional democratic order. Trump wants to incite insurrection at the polling booths where the nominalist realities of “Anti-fa” and “Radical Leftist Lunatics” and “Wokes” clash with ICE and every enforcement agency Homeland Security can muster.

Seeking to create a hierarchy of technocrats and investors whose hierarch is a mountebank with a worshipping audience is of course, firstly, an overturning of a country’s struggle for independence as a liberal democracy. But what amazes is that such a thing only Rabelais’s mockery and Bosch’s murals could capture has come to pass.

I think we wound up letting a fox in the hen house, a predatory grifter into the presidency, twice, for what causes we can now see clearly.

There has been failure to represent legislatively a bulk of the population where nothing trickled down to them. What resulted has been a buildup of angst, confusion, hard times, and anger among these. Point blank, the greatest good has gone to the smallest number. And just as a clever con man spies his mark, a huckster/grifter emerged who knows how to play his audience and at the same time ferret out where he could be thwarted As in a war when communications are first taken out and then all opposing forces, Trump has set out to unsettle and undermine all opposition. And he’s done it. Thus the shock on one side of the simulated war.

The Democratic Party as oppositional leader is seriously compromised.

First by some 16 years of party rule in which the greatest good for the greatest number turned into a restriction of personal liberty for some in order to secure what they assert as fundamental and established rights of marginalized groups. What this resulted in was a waiting audience seething with anger at everything from political correctness right up to DEI, Woke and Pronoun Protocols, much of which were in no way part of traditional American life before Civil Rights and the socialist leanings of Liberals and Progressives. Before anger and growing immiseration could be traced to Market Rule’s transferring the goods of 80% of the population to the 20%, Trump was on the scene. He deflected attention from where Bernie Sanders loudly and repeatedly places it to whatever targets lay in the dark recesses of the American Mass Psyche. Racism could easily be relit as a cause of frustration and anger. Hatred could be aroused against whomever Trump pointed a finger. Immigrants, not white Boers from South Africa, but Latinos were the villains. Most were criminals, rapists, thieves, murderers, sometime more than one murder. All weren’t white.

Trump played to the devils of our nature and he’s had a winning response.

If every variety of Democrat during the 16 years of Clinton and Obama presidencies had pushed for the distributive and redistributive policies countering the Market Rule move of wealth to the top, Trump, years later, would have had a far less economically disenfranchised group to pitch his politics of hate and retribution. If the Democratic party had a mission of creating legislation that would have left surplus capital in the hands of workers and not investors, worker cooperatives being themselves investors, a politics of reason would be here to oppose a politics of passion.

What is real, however, is that Democrats affiliated with Republicans in their unquestioning loyalty to Market Rule, even in areas like health care, prisons, war, and education.

Clinton argued for NAFTA, a bargain that left consumers, the environment and workers unaccounted for, because he believed that the drive of globalized capitalism had to be “leaned” into. Obama faced the 2007 financial crisis by securing that the greatest good would continue to flow to the few because he didn’t know what fight he was in. Before Biden was torn apart by his support of Netanyahu’s slaughter campaign and he was unfairly blamed for what was called the worst border crisis in U.S history, Biden was bringing Democrats back to the issues of economic equity. In his first year in office he enacted the American Rescue Plan and the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act. His expansion of the Child Tax Credit reduced childhood poverty. The Inflation Reduction Act (IRA) includes the largest-ever investment in clean energy and climate action in U.S. history. This has resulted in a boom in private-sector investment in clean energy manufacturing, with over $300 billion in new investments announced since the IRA was signed.

By executive actions, President Trump froze what he could of the IRA and dismantled environmental agencies under the belief that human accelerated global warming is a hoax. The biggest threat to Market Rule made by the Democrats was by Biden in first year legislation that followed the greatest good to the greatest number principle.

It would seem that the greatest good can not go to the very few for long. History tells us otherwise yet history hasn’t met Donald J. Trump, a man who is presently pushing to extremes, megalomaniacally driven, in a country that historically always retreats to the middle.

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