Surely one Amer­ican party must be pro-enter­prise?

Edward Luce (“Wall Street’s bar­gain with Trump”, Opin­ion, Janu­ary 25) unne­ces­sar­ily throws Amer­ican busi­ness leader Jamie Dimon under the bus and misses a sig­ni­fic­ant and per­plex­ing stance of today’s Grand Old Party — the Repub­lican party.

Since 2016, the party has veered extremely off course on the issue of sup­port­ing busi­ness. As a gentle reminder, without busi­ness we have no jobs, no tax base to sup­port our polit­ical affairs, no edu­ca­tion, no health­care, let alone national or inter­na­tional defence.

Yet three of the last four Repub­lican pres­id­en­tial con­tenders advoc­ate that the state — cent­ral gov­ern­ment — should take over cer­tain busi­nesses.

Don­ald Trump is a pro­tec­tion­ist, and has act­ively dimin­ished free trade. Flor­ida gov­ernor Ron DeS­antis, who has now with­drawn from the race and endorsed Trump, had threatened to pun­ish private com­pan­ies unless they changed the type of car­toons they drew, or the fin­an­cial products they sold. Vivek Ramaswamy, the entre­pren­eur and polit­ical novice, launched his cam­paign plat­form on a sim­ilar concept.

If Amer­ica is to remain the strongest eco­nomy in the world, we must have at least one party that pri­or­it­ises private enter­prise.

Dino Adelfio
Oak­land, CA, US