Barack Obama’s notorious admonishment to business owners that “you didn’t build that” was bad enough, but a recent statement by Donald Trump is even more collectivist: he claims he owns the store.
The Financial Times reports on a Time Magazine interview of President Trump (“Donald Trump Claims to Have Received Call from Xi Jinping and to Have Cut ‘200 Deals’ on Trade,” Financial Times, April 25, 2025):
When asked what Xi had told him in the conversation that Trump claims happened, the US president referred to the power he had as gatekeeper for the US consumer market. “It’s a giant, beautiful store, and everybody wants to go shopping there. And on behalf of the American people, I own the store, and I set prices, and I’ll say, if you want to shop here, this is what you have to pay,” Trump told Time.
It seems that Mr. Trump was confusing imports and exports, for what his trade policy is focused on is deciding which suppliers his store will buy from. But let’s ignore this small detail.
If the chief ruler of a country says he owns the store, he is expressing something quite close to Marxist theory, of which a major pillar is the collective (“social”) ownership of the means of production, which include retail outlets. The country is a collective, and the store is collective property. The apparent owners of private stores, if there are any, benefit from a special privilege from the collective or are simply state agents. Nobody can buy from, or sell to, the collective store without the permission—and tax gouging—of the gatekeeper.
Invoking “the people” is a mere excuse to justify the state’s ownership of the means of production. Nothing can be owned by everybody, for ownership means control. Collective ownership implies that no individual “owner” may sell his share; quite the contrary, he is stuck with it and must make sacrifices for it. In Chapter 13 of Justice and Its Surroundings, Anthony de Jasay discusses the “social ownership” pretense of Marxist collectivism. Owning and controlling the means of production “on behalf of the people” or the working class is only a propaganda trick. In both collectivism of the left (Marxism and socialism) and collectivism of the right (populism and fascism), the store belongs to those who control the state or act as its agents. (Note the big principal-agent problem there.) A populist leader gives a different flavor to the myth of collective ownership by pretending that he embodies the people.
Needless to add, no classical liberal theorist ever argued that the chief official of the government of a free country would “own the store.”
Who would have thought that the populist ruler of America was more Marxist than today’s run-of-the-mill social democrats or socialists? In truth, it is not surprising because the left and the right both hold collective and political choices as superior to individual and private choices. Mr. Trump is not a Marxist, he is just another sort of collectivist.
An alternative hypothesis is that, with his store ownership claim, Mr. Trump was just making noises with his vocal chords, without grasping the meaning of the sounds. An economist is methodologically reluctant to make this diagnosis but, in a recent Reason column, Jacob Sullum suggests something along these lines.
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The owner of the USA Store sitting behind his checkout counter
