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A common complaint about presidential candidate Donald Trump is that he is an amateur politician. People argue that the typical professional politician has many years of experience. This makes him proficient at understanding how the government works, and negotiating with other politicians.

They neglect to mention that experience makes him proficient at taking advantage of investment insider information, using government spending to encourage campaign contributions (the carrot), using government regulation to discourage withholding campaign contributions (the stick), turning campaign contributions into his own personal money, steering government money to relatives and cronies, steering government money to contractors who will return the favor when he is an ex-politician, and enjoying the personal services of interns (your daughters).

You see this quite often. You elect someone to congress. He starts out being principled. Over time, he cares less about his ideals and more about enriching himself. By the time you want to replace him with someone who cares, he argues that he has seniority, so his clout can bring pork to your congressional district. You are now stuck with him for decades.

We have several members of congress who were never elected officials before, so we are getting acclimated to trying amateurs. Will this work with a president? We have had amateur presidents before. Four presidents had no previous elective office experience, namely Zachary Taylor, Ulysses S. Grant, Herbert Hoover, and Dwight D. Eisenhower.

It may be that the key to a good presidential choice is not the amount of government experience, but private or military experience. One could argue that our best presidents had significant time away from elective office. Some examples are George Washington, Abraham Lincoln, Dwight Eisenhower, and Ronald Reagan.

Some examples of bad presidents who spent nearly their entire adult lives in politics are Warren Harding, Lyndon Johnson, and Richard Nixon.

Our current president and the president husband of one of the candidates spent nearly all of their adult lives in politics. Have they been good presidents?

We now have a choice between someone who spent most of his life making money by building things versus someone who spent most of her life breathing politics and generating $230 million (Forbes) from people who paid to listen to her and her husband talk.

Considering the track records of professional politicians with lots of experience, we should give amateur Donald Trump a chance.

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