October 17, 2023
Do you think that things have clarified somewhat over the last week since the Hamas massacres in Israel?
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I get the feeling that our beloved leaders are caught, just a little, between a rock and a hard place. They would like to equivocate on the Palestinian Question, but the Hamas atrocities make it just a little more difficult. Our leaders like to be on the side of the Left-approved victims, and are embarrassed to support our friends — like Israel.
And you know what? I couldn’t be happier. The harder it becomes for our rulers to support fake victims, the happier it makes me.
Oh, I get it. Ever since Marx, lefty politicians have recognized that the royal road to political power is to pose as the savior of the victims, whether workers, women, blacks, gays, Palestinians. Never mind that most of the problems of the workers was due to government screwing up the economy with wars, inflations, deflations, and central bank incompetence. Never mind that, after the passage of the civil rights acts, pro-black politics is simple racism. Never mind that feminism has benefited high-born women and destroyed the traditional family that supports ordinary women. Never mind that the gay rights movement has morphed into the trans rights racket.
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Never mind that our current leaders came to power upon the promise that they would administer an efficient and just state, replacing the horrors of the “spoils system” with educated and honest administration.
Can anyone doubt that our present rulers operate a “spoils system” that makes the 19th-century system seem like a walk in the park?
And the incompetence! Two world wars and a cold war. Two muffed credit crashes, in 1929 and 2008, when the central bank utterly failed. Two inflation episodes, in the 1970s and now the 2020s.
But… climate change and systemic racism.
And now our government is slow off the mark on the Hamas atrocities.
What exactly is the big idea in the Obama and Biden Iran negotiations? Maybe you chaps in the intelligence community can leak us a memo signed by 51 current and former intelligence chiefs to set us straight on Iran and Hamas and the $6 billion.
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What exactly is the point of the Squad and their Mean Girl antics? Do tell, you enlightened ones.
What exactly is the idea that Trump supporters are extremists and need deprogramming but Antifa rioters are mostly peaceful protesters that need to be bailed out of jail?
Why is it that bookstores all across the land feature Banned Books Week, that this year seems to be all about sexually explicit books to be used in elementary schools, while nobody talks about the “Books Banned by Amazon” over at unz.com. Not that Holocaust denialism is any more appetizing than gay sex instruction for the little kiddies.
Why is the confinement of the mentally ill in government mental institutions a scandal and Nurse Ratched a monster, but the confinement of children in government schools — government child custodial facilities — is okay and unionized teachers pushing trans propaganda are doing Gaia’s work?
We know why. Our ruling class has a Narrative on all kinds of issues, and you disagree with the Narrative at your peril. Our leaders have ways of suppressing disagreement, from mere marginalization of opposition figures to the development of government censorship agencies like CISA and its terrible MDM triplets: misinformation, disinformation, and malinformation, to the active demonizing of nonconforming opinions as literally Hitler, as in “climate denialism.” In emergency, break glass and play the Race Card.
Really, we shouldn’t be that shocked that our rulers use their power to suppress their opponents. Rulers gotta rule.
But we the people should remember that politics is a gussied-up lie to get you to think that your neighbor is your enemy. Government is a gussied-up lie to get you to think that straight-up corruption is really public service. Activism is a gussied-up lie to get you to think that regime paramilitaries are really peacefully protesting against injustice.
All this may not be pretty, but it certainly tends to clarify the State of Things in America.
There is another way. It is founded on the notion that there is very little that government can do to Make Things Better, and an awful lot that every government does to Make Things Worse.
Once upon a time there was a woman writer, George Eliot, who concluded her most famous novel Middlemarch with the following words:
[T]he growing good of the world is partly dependent on unhistoric acts; and that things are not so ill with you and me as they might have been is half owing to the number who lived faithfully a hidden life, and rest in unvisited tombs.
Only half, Georgie? I’d say that nearly all the things that help make the world go round have nothing to do with politics and government.
Christopher Chantrill @chrischantrill runs the go-to site on US government finances, usgovernmentspending.com. Also get his American Manifesto and his Road to the Middle Class.
Image: IDF
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