William Watson: Not even Elon Musk can run the U.S. economy

financialpost.com:

After being gone for more than a century, Grover Cleveland is back in the news. Until last week he was the only president U.S. voters had thrown out of the White House and then, four years later, invited back in. But now they’ve done the same with Donald Trump

Muhammad Ali won and lost the world heavyweight championship three times on his way to becoming, as he styled himself, “the greatest of all time.” Trump, who compares himself to Abraham Lincoln, would need a constitutional amendment to be elected three times. No doubt someone in the MAGA movement will start working on it.

Cleveland was the 22nd and 24th president, serving from 1885-9 and 1893-7. Watching Elon Musk prancing about the stage at Donald Trump rallies over the last month, I found myself wondering whether Cleveland had a similar relationship with Thomas Edison — though prancing would have been out: in 1888, campaigning ended two weeks before election day out of respect for First Lady Caroline Harrison, who died of tuberculosis in late October.

I’m with Trump (words I seldom write) on Elon Musk. No doubt it’s a male thing — even if SpaceX is run by a woman, the aptly named Gwynne Shotwell — but the “chopsticks” manoeuvre in which a 20-storey booster rocket descends from the heavens and, as one observer put it, parallel-parks alongside the spaceport launch tower, whose arms then embrace it, is one of the coolest things ever. Pyramids-level cool. Eiffel Tower-cool. Moon-landing cool (which of course it’s a derivative of.) And then there’s Tesla, Neuralink and Hyperloop, not to mention PayPal.

A hundred years from now Musk’s achievements may not rank with the phonograph, telephone, electric battery, electrical transmission, light bulb, movie camera and many