The Unwelcome Cup

     Once in a great while, a politician tells us something significant by doing nothing: more specifically, by not reaching for a seeming prize that would be his merely for the reaching. I have before me a historical reminder.

     In August of the Year of Our Lord 1914, when the great powers of Europe had decided to settle some minor issues by killing millions of their best and brightest, France was in a bit of turmoil. Several shattering defeats of France’s armies by German forces had greatly undermined the existing administration. Premier Rene Viviani decided to look for a few popular figures to buttress the government. His eye lit at once upon the man known as “the Tiger of France:” former prime minister Georges Benjamin Clemenceau.

     Clemenceau politely declined the honor:

     Viviani found [Clemenceau] in a “violent temper” and without desire to join a government he expected to be out of office in two weeks.
     “No, no, don’t count on me,” he said. “In a fortnight you will be torn to ribbons, I am not going to have anything to do with it.” After this “paroxysm of passion” he burst into tears, embraced Viviani, but continued to decline to join him in office.

     [Barbara Tuchman, The Guns of August]

     Politicians, however greedy for power, are nevertheless wary of traps that are baited with it. No one wants to be holding the baton when the Jacquerie kicks off, and at that moment in August 1914, popular sentiment was clearly inclined toward torches and pitchforks. Clemenceau, one of the ablest statesmen in Europe, could see that it was thus.

     Something similar is in progress in the United Kingdom. The current Labour government, headed by Sir Keir Starmer, has performed atrociously and seems likely to fall. However, a great deal of the odium for Labourite policies has fallen on Starmer personally. Labour’s “back room” has persuaded Starmer to resign his premiership: something of a “sop to Cerberus” so the rest of the administration might not fall as well.

     And so, there is a vacancy at Number 10 Downing Street. Who will be next to occupy that high post? Surely some grandee of the administration will put himself forward for the job. Deputy Prime Minister David Lammy? Defence Minister Dan Jarvis? Perhaps even Foreign Minister Yvette Cooper?

     Nope. None of them want it. Among the seated ministers, the lack of interest in accepting the mantle of leadership is total. In consequence, a brand new Member of the House of Commons from Manchester, Andy Burnham, is expected to take the post unopposed.

     That isn’t because Burnham has the glow of the heaven-sent upon him. He just hasn’t had any previous association with the sitting government. No one who has that taint wants the crosshairs upon him with the government in such dire straits. Burnham, whose highest previous office was as the mayor of Manchester, will be no better than Starmer – indeed, with no experience in Britain’s national administration he’s likely to be well out of his depth – but the strategists and kingmakers of the Labour Party are happy to let him be the focus of popular attention for a while.

     I don’t expect much. I didn’t expect much when Boris Johnson rose to the premiership. The national government of the United Kingdom is even more dominated by unelected civil servants than is the federal government of these United States. “Permanent secretaries” and their staffers get their way in the same fashion as do American bureaucrats: by simply ignoring the elected and appointed officials nominally over them. Radical changes are highly unlikely.

     It’s those bureaucrats who constitute the true and enduring government of Britain. Their primary interests are in continuity, both in policy and in personnel. They know full well that for practical purposes, their positions are guaranteed. They will move, or refuse to move, in whatever fashion preserves those interests.

     Politicians come and go; bureaucrats are forever.

     The Sceptered Isle has been in difficulties for some time. Those difficulties are destined to deepen further. It’s a pity, for America has – or had – much in common with Britain. But with every figure of note unwilling to challenge the untried Burnham for the helm, inertia will be the only victor… and inertia always points downhill.

An Intellectual's Duty

     [This piece first appeared at Eternity Road on March 12, 2008. -- FWP]

---

     There aren't many persons who, if asked whether significantly above-average intelligence could ever be a liability rather than an asset, would answer in the affirmative. That's because there aren't many persons with significantly above-average intelligence.

     Yes, you read that right. You have to be pretty smart to understand why smarts aren't a good fit for every context and every occupation. One of Jack L. Chalker's Flux and Anchor books presents a penetrating example. In it, a woman who has earned a large boon from a powerful wizard asks him to use his power to make her permanently happy and carefree. The wizard plies a spell that strips her of her memory, halves her intelligence, and turns her into an uncritical, limitlessly willing sexual plaything -- the simplest conceivable satisfaction of her request.

     True, most of us wouldn't aspire to that position. But some would, and dare anyone say (from a purely secular perspective) that to choose such a life would be wrong? Happiness and peace of mind are fleeting things; all but a few truly fortunate persons possess them only in snatches. Aldous Huxley is reported to have been greatly troubled by the number of persons who viewed his Brave New World, in which the overwhelmingly greater part of the population of the world was engineered for subnormal intelligence and high susceptibility to a happiness-inducing drug, as a depiction of a true Utopia.

     Still, there's that "Better Socrates dissatisfied than a pig satisfied" business. Most persons of high intelligence wouldn't sacrifice it for anything, not even a greatly prolonged, blissfully happy life. In part, it's because high intelligence enables the owner to imagine and pursue fulfillments inaccessible to the less gifted. In even larger part, it's because the esteem generally attached to intellectual power greatly stokes one's self-regard.

     High intelligence is a tool that can work many wonders. We owe much of our comfort and security to the insights of a few dozen geniuses. But that doesn't make a genius suitable for a position only a dullard can fit.

---

     Just this morning, your Curmudgeon stumbled upon the following at co-conspirator Travis Corcoran's site:

NZC: Didn’t Spitzer want to be president someday? So, that’s totally in the toilet.

     TJIC: One American disqualified for the office…only 299,999,999 more to go!

     NZC: And you’re allowed to say that, because you’re leading from the front - you’ve totally disqualified yourself a dozen times over.

     TJIC: Yeah, that whole “dig up the corpse of FDR, and then !@#% in his skull” blogging topic would totally come back to bite me in the primaries.

     NZC: Indeed!

     TJIC: …unless I ran as a Libertarian…

     It was good for a chuckle, but your Curmudgeon sincerely hopes that Travis is aware that his high intelligence disqualifies him from any and all public offices.

     What's that you say? You want very intelligent people in government? You, sir, are a hazard to the body politic. What on Earth are you doing at Eternity Road? Don't you know what sort of mischief smart people get up to when entrusted with power? Didn't we get enough of a demonstration from the Clintons? Do you really want a reprise of that disaster?

     No. No smart people in office. Please! Smart people are too good at reinterpreting their marching orders and rationalizing their way around moral or Constitutional constraints on their authority. If any of the Founding Fathers was a genius, Thomas Jefferson was -- yet he, most libertarian of them all, violated the Constitution's constraints on federal power several times in his first term of office. He rationalized his transgressions as "necessary" and "practical." So highly did Congress, and the people generally, think of him that he always carried the day.

     High intelligence is almost always accompanied by a high opinion of oneself. He who thinks that well of himself is all too easily led to see himself as above the rules that bind others. If you were looking for a capsule summary of Eliot Spitzer's downfall, you have it now.

     What Americans should seek in their public officials is men who can understand the duties and limitations of their offices, and will cleave to them unswervingly. This demands a routinier, an "organization man," a dullard. It's not the right billet for a genius. Very bright people chafe at taking orders, even from brighter, more knowledgeable people; they're always looking for an angle, a way to finesse their way out of doing what they've been told.

     The duties of an elected official are spelled out in either the Constitution of the United States, or some similar charter subordinate to it. The powers that attach to whatever government his office pertains to are spelled out in a similar fashion, albeit not always with the degree of specificity a libertarian-conservative would like. If those rules and constraints are seriously meant, then we don't want our officeholders looking for ways to chisel around the edges. We want good, solid dullards, schooled from the Bible and the handle of a broom, who'll do as they're told, without the slightest trace of creativity.

     We don't often get such men, these days.

---

     The word "intellectual" has acquired an unsavory connotation these past few decades. It deserves that connotation rather more than not. Intellectuals in the corridors of power, rich in self-regard and flushed with ambition to leave their footprints upon history, have wreaked great harm upon American liberty and our Constitutional order. But we were foolish enough to admit them, so the blame lies at least as much on us.

     Restoring the original Constitutional compact has proved dauntingly difficult. Once government opens niches for men of intellect, those niches prove damnably difficult to close. There's always an argument for genius in the power seat, usually that it's necessary if we're ever to undo the damage wrought by prior geniuses. Even when it's tragically wrong, it can be too seductive to resist.

     But an intellectual's duty is to resist. If the word "duty" has an objective meaning, a man of genius should feel a duty to move toward those fields where his gifts will bring good to the world, rather than to a post where others will have to pay for his mistakes. For even geniuses make mistakes. Indeed, they make more of them, and more rapidly, than persons of average attainments.

     Sadly, in our current milieu, wherein the achievements of an Edison or a Tesla are reckoned as grubby commerce while "high office" earns the highest of plaudits, too many bright fellows are drawn toward the profession of politics. But power doesn't merely corrupt; it attracts the already corrupt and corruptible. Thus, it's in the nature of political power that those with the weakest morals will be the most successful.

     This is not the time or place for the exploration of so perverse a situation; among other things, your Curmudgeon hasn't yet had enough to drink. Suffice it to say that we've created incentives that divert high intelligence away from its proper applications -- science, commerce, and philosophy -- and into the quest for power over others. Those incentives are self-reinforcing; they can only be unmade by the creation of even stronger counter-incentives, at whose nature we cannot yet guess. For the present, due to the excessive adulation of the hoi polloi for the conspicuously gifted, we're doomed to be ruled by persons of low morality protected by high intellect. It's the worst situation we could have contrived for ourselves.

     To young Americans seeking a suitable course in life:

• If you're smart, go into business.
• If you're very smart, go into the sciences.
• If you're not smart, but were properly raised and can follow clear, simple directions, there may be a spot for you in government.
• If you're a Certified Galactic Intellect...how about a nice game of chess?

---

     [Having reread and reflected on the above -- hey, what do you do at 4:00 AM when the dogs won't let you sleep? -- it occurs to me that a review of our recent, supposedly smart chief executives is in order:

• Woodrow Wilson: World War I, huge expansion of the federal government, the income tax, the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Amendments.
• Franklin D. Roosevelt: The "Brain Trust," a thirteen-year economic contraction, World War II, the destruction of the Constitution's restraints on the federal government.
• John F. Kennedy: The Bay of Pigs, hot and cold running prostitutes, and the elevation of the detestable, wholly amoral Kennedy family to a kind of American aristocracy.
• Bill Clinton: Semen-stained dresses and bombed-out aspirin factories in Sudan.
• Barack Hussein Obama: Please!

     Any questions?]

Berserk, Or Merely Bookless?

     [The following first appeared at Eternity Road on February 25, 2008 – FWP.]

---

     Your Curmudgeon strongly disapproves of psychologizing one's political or ideological adversary. For those unfamiliar with the term, "psychologizing" is the attribution of motives, character defects, or mental or emotional aberrations to one's adversary as the "real reasons" for his positions, instead of arguing against them on objective grounds. Persons who do such things are all too obviously seriously disturbed, dangerous to themselves and others, no doubt damaged by their toilet training traumas or failure to resolve their Oedipal conflicts before attaining puberty.

     Hm. Well, anyway, by way of Cassy Fiano at Wizbang comes this example of the practice from a conservative, aimed (of course) at liberals:

     Just when liberals thought it was safe to start identifying themselves as such, an acclaimed, veteran psychiatrist is making the case that the ideology motivating them is actually a mental disorder.

     "Based on strikingly irrational beliefs and emotions, modern liberals relentlessly undermine the most important principles on which our freedoms were founded," says Dr. Lyle Rossiter, author of the new book, "The Liberal Mind: The Psychological Causes of Political Madness." "Like spoiled, angry children, they rebel against the normal responsibilities of adulthood and demand that a parental government meet their needs from cradle to grave."...

     Dr. Rossiter says the liberal agenda preys on weakness and feelings of inferiority in the population by:

• creating and reinforcing perceptions of victimization;
• satisfying infantile claims to entitlement, indulgence and compensation;
• augmenting primitive feelings of envy;
• rejecting the sovereignty of the individual, subordinating him to the will of the government.

     "The roots of liberalism - and its associated madness - can be clearly identified by understanding how children develop from infancy to adulthood and how distorted development produces the irrational beliefs of the liberal mind," he says. "When the modern liberal mind whines about imaginary victims, rages against imaginary villains and seeks above all else to run the lives of persons competent to run their own lives, the neurosis of the liberal mind becomes painfully obvious."

     This is no more valid an approach to political argument than it was when liberal-leaning "scholars" in the University of California system claimed that their study proves that conservatives are inherently fear-ridden and deficient of imagination.

     Back about fifteen years ago, your Curmudgeon first heard the political Left styled "bookless." It was an apt characterization, and remains so today. The Left has run through all its ideas, all have failed, and it can generate no new ones. If a new one were to happen along, liberal political strategists would have to weigh the consequences of adopting it -- contradicting standing liberal dogma; alienating a special interest; admitting to error -- against the consequences of not adopting it -- trundling along on the same tired slogans and failed policies. Therein lies the danger of assuming a pose of moral and intellectual superiority while selling one's movement to a coalition of interest groups.

     But the Right is treading substantially the same ground. The "Republican Revolution" of 1994, so bravely begun, proved to be a wet firecracker. That wasn't because the ideas it had promulgated were bad ones, nor that its representatives were arrogant asses, but because once in power, Republican legislators overwhelmingly placed press approbation and "collegiality" above achieving what the voters had sent them to Washington to achieve. They allowed their victorious theses to be muddied by their conduct in office -- talking low taxes, free markets, and the rule of law while perpetuating the existing regime out of fear of criticism from their opponents and bad notices in the New York Times.

     The Left can no longer write books; the Right has burned the ones it penned.

     The Left seems a bit frenzied these days, frenzy being the behavioral evidence of having no new ideas, yet staring at the same old problems. But the Right is tinged with despair, having betrayed its ideological legacy, and seeing it badly stained by public disdain, for a mess of column-inches. Conservatives and libertarians had the intellectual assets with which to establish a truly enduring majority; they merely failed to act on them.

     The Republican majorities of 1994-2006 are now only a memory, and Republican officeholders have only themselves to blame. Their overt ideology is still vastly superior to that of the Democrats, but their embrace of the privileges of power, and their preference for praise over the public interest, have tarnished it in a fashion that might take decades to cleanse. That's what you get for burning the books you've written. Psychologizing your opponents is no substitute for well thought out ideas and their faithful execution.

Elections, Mathematics, And The Woke

     I’m a long-time admirer of Virginia State Assemblyman Nick Freitas. He exemplifies something the rest of the Republican Party lacks: courage. He speaks plainly and forthrightly, and he hews to his convictions. There aren’t many other Republicans of whom that could be honestly said.

     (Of course, it’s hard to stand up for something if you lack a spine. A great percentage of Republican politicians appear to have had that organ removed. In all candor, when your overriding priorities are to get re-elected and keep the media from denouncing you in boldface, convictions tend to look like a luxury item. But I digress.)

     Freitas recently had an illuminating conversation with political analyst Christian Hines about the recent leak of the Democrats’ unreleased assessment of why they lost the 2024 presidential election, and a lot of down-ticket races besides:

     If you don’t have thirteen minutes to spare for the video – entirely understandable; I’d never criticize you for it – here’s the gist:

The base of the Democrat Party is insane.

     That assessment – charmingly, Hines calls it an autopsy – could not be released because it says that and nothing else:

     …it's not just that they did crazy stuff; they allowed themselves to be more and more defined by the crazy stuff, and they do seem to understand that to a point within the autopsy. The problem is that they've created a situation within the Democratic party where if you actually implement some of the things, not even all of them, just some of the things that this autopsy is suggesting that they should – to for instance reach out to men or reach out to working-class people – it would devastate the modern Democrat base and the modern Democrat coalition.

     I’ve written about coalition politics several times before. The Democrat strategists’ approach to presidential politics is coalition-based: assemble interest groups, promising to advance their interests, until you reach 50% plus one of the voting populace. This has been the Dems’ approach to national elections since the presidency of Dwight D. Eisenhower. Yet of the 17 presidential elections since then, they’ve won only 8 and lost 9 – and one victory was over a “caretaker” president, and two of the losses were to a political outsider who lacked the full backing of his party. From that tally, you might think they’d be looking for an improvement on their approach. The leaked autopsy tells that tale fairly clearly.

     But that autopsy was deliberately suppressed. It was suppressed because its authors were aware that if it were published, the party’s base would rise in a fury. The base is composed of a coalition of hard-left “woke” activists from the furthest reaches of the Democrat Party: the segment that dominates issue activism, fundraising, and primary elections. Alienating any significant fraction of the base would be crippling in the near term. The strategists can’t bear the thought.

     But the base is the problem. The base chooses the party’s nominees. Thus, the nominees are satisfactory to the base, but wholly unpalatable to the larger electorate. They’re especially unattractive to unaligned and weakly aligned voters, who may be as much as 40% of the whole. The mathematics of America’s two-stage elections processes is hostile to that approach.

     The Dems are thus caught in a bind of their own making. That they can’t discuss it openly among themselves is a clear giveaway.

     While the problem manifests most clearly at the presidential level, it can have impact locally as well. State demographics are changing rapidly. This is especially visible in California, which by enacting a 5% wealth tax on billionaires – “We’re only going to do it this once! Cross our hearts and hope to die!” – has driven its wealthiest residents to relocate in massive numbers. A great many are hopping over Lake Tahoe to resettle in Nevada, which has no individual income tax, no corporate income tax, and no capital-gains tax. Given Muslim-socialist mayor Zohran Mamdani’s open hostility toward the wealthy, I would expect the best-heeled residents of New York City to follow suit.

     This may sound like unalloyed good news to conservatives and Republican partisans. It isn’t. If the Democrat Party becomes nationally uncompetitive because of its capture by the “woke,” what incentive will remain for Republican politicians to seek to please its conservative allegiants? Remember also that America’s plutocrats, with a few notable exceptions, have trended politically leftward in recent decades. Their relocation to “red” states isn’t guaranteed to be without unpleasant secondary effects.

     This is something to watch and ponder.

Creating Your Own Problems

     Good morning, Gentle Reader. Happy Vernal Equinox (traditional). Wherever you are in this blessed land, I hope you’ll enjoy beautiful spring weather today, because I won’t. Here on the World’s Largest Piece of Terminal Moraine, it’s predicted to be overcast and damp all day. Bummer.

     I’ve come reluctantly to the conclusion that, with the notable exception of the Gentle Readers of Liberty’s Torch, people are pretty BLEEP!ing stupid. They’re nearly always the source of their own miseries. They overspend and then complain about being broke. They cloister themselves and then complain about having no friends or social life. They try to drive North-South on East-West roads, get smacked up, and then complain about “careless drivers” and high insurance premiums.

     The enveloping diagnosis for this malady is “It’s Someone Else’s Fault” syndrome. Given its prevalence, I have no doubt that you’ve observed it in someone you know. There’ve been days when I’ve imagined it everywhere.

     That may be because it really is everywhere.

* * *

     A brief vignette: Many years ago I had a coworker whom I shall henceforward refer to as “old Ray,” because that’s how he was known around the office. “Old Ray” couldn’t be bothered about things the rest of us regarded as the basic requirements of courtesy, such as tossing trash in a trash can rather than on the floor. He was a well-respected senior engineer, but so heedless of his surroundings that he created chaos for the rest of us.

     In particular, “old Ray” regularly failed to check whether the coffeemaker had ended its cycle before grabbing the carafe and filling his mug. He created many messes in this fashion. I, being a snotty little shit, upbraided him for it one day when his proclivity had left a large puddle of coffee on the floor of our office. He took umbrage, and a shouting match ensued. Management intervened before blows could be struck.

     I was taken aside and admonished for the incident. I’d “created the problem,” you see. “Everyone” knew that we had to make allowances for “old Ray.” I asked whether management was aware of the effect on the rest of us, and was answered with a “what can you do” shrug. I went back to my own labors shaking my head.

     It got me a reputation as a boat rocker. “Be careful around Fran,” the office gospel ran, “He says things.” Never mind that I was also the one who “does things,” such as solving others’ intractable problems and cleaning up after “old Ray;” that was deemed immaterial.

     I realized then that the rest of us were fated to clean up after “old Ray” until his retirement date should arrive. Management policy had deemed the status quo preferable to an uproar. Given that consensus, I, who’d evoked an uproar, was “the problem.” We’d been doomed to trash tossed aside in hallways and regular puddles on the floor.

     No, I didn’t stay there very long.

* * *

     Why am I exercised about this particular subject, you ask? Because few have grasped a simple fact of life in society:

Politics is not the source of solutions,
But of burdens, dissatisfactions, and disharmony.

     A private problem can be mitigated or solved by private means. A politicized problem becomes everyone’s problem. It draws the State into the matter and compels everyone to “take a side.” Such an expansion of the scope of the problem creates several things:

• Resentment among the unwillingly involved;
• Hard feelings between those who disagree about the matter;
• An opportunity for the State to expand its powers, which it will surely exploit.

     As if further irony were required, it also lessens the feeling of responsibility among those who did the politicizing. Now that it’s “everyone’s problem,” they can sit back while “everybody” – meaning the State, of course – does whatever will be done about it, good, bad, or indifferent.

     It’s madness, but it’s everywhere. “The personal is political!” shout the rabble-rousers of the Left. That means the end of privacy – the end of private action in response to private problems. It means that we must wait upon the State for the remediation of what displeases us. Finally, it means those who disapprove of you, whatever the reason, can bludgeon you into complying with their preferences. Assuming they can assemble a local preponderance of force, that is.

     I’m not going to thrash this into the magma layer. I just needed a moment to vent about… well, about “things as they are,” including ordinary people’s lack of resistance to the politicization of what should be private matters handled privately. We keep getting sucked into it, when a moment’s consideration should make it plain that politicizing an “issue” nearly always makes it worse.

     For the love of God, stop politicizing petty shit! Stop trying to compel others to conform to your preferences! Accept human variation as long as it does you no harm. If you find it intolerable, either wall it off, or move away from it and build a wall around yourself.

     See also this old tirade. And do have a nice day.

The Dynamics Of Disgust

     [I’m a bit snowed under just now, so have a reprint of a piece from the old Palace of Reason. It appeared there on June 7, 2002 – FWP]

* * *

     How is it that this continuing circus of incompetence and corruption that we call Washington, DC hasn't turned the great majority of the American people off to politics completely?

     The ethical standard for political behavior has sunk to depths unimaginable by private persons even half a century ago. Go back a full century, and you wouldn't even find politicians able to imagine 2000's levels of depravity. I know a lot has changed, but have people really become so inured to evil that they can endorse, or at least tolerate, the behavior of our political class?

     There are a lot of stock answers, and many of them have some grain of truth in them. My favorite is the displacement of absolute right and wrong by the notion of situational ethics. But all the stock answers are vulnerable to the following challenge: We know this kind of behavior to be a detriment, not a support, to both personal survival and social stability. How is it, then, that its practitioners flourish, and our society stands?

     I have a good friend who works for the local headquarters of Head Start. He hates it and everything connected to it. He brings me stories of corruption and intrigue that would turn the stomach of a goat. Yet he's worked there for more than twenty years. It's his livelihood. He doesn't know how to do anything else.

     We might be witnesses to the emergence of a new (for America) kind of stability: the stability of the shepherds and the sheep.

     Once the sheep have gotten used to being herded and shorn in return for their daily groats, they forget what it was like to be free. They lose the use of their "freedom muscles:" the ability to reason, the willingness to accept personal responsibility for their well-being, and the courage to assume risk. This is all very well for the shepherds, of course.

     Our "daily groats" are the largesse that Washington and the states distribute to us in a myriad guises. In 1980, some 34 million people drew their whole incomes from government; the figure must be higher today. A great many more receive some sort of payment, tax break, or commercial benefit from government. It's likely that the number of us who are the "beneficiaries" of some government program or policy exceeds half the population of the country.

     People will seldom rise in rebellion against, or draw back in disgust from, that which they believe puts bread on their tables. One cannot even contemplate such a thing without suffering severe cramps in the wallet. And should the possibility of detail changes arise, everyone will strive most mightily to protect his own ox from being gored; that's the Public Choice effect in its most venomous form.

     If I'm correct about this dynamic, we've entered an era of impotent disgust: a disgust which contents itself with itself, rather than seeking to alter the conditions that produced it. It suggests that the modern American Leviathan could last a long time, despite all our earnest wishes to the contrary.

“Self-Government”

     Just recently, I stumbled upon this:

     If those percentages still hold, then once again we’re in the mystifying position where an overwhelming portion of the country is demanding a policy change that Congress is resisting with every trick at its disposal. Senate Majority Leader John Thune says one thing but does another. Several GOP Senators have pledged to oppose the SAVE Act anyway, so even were the filibuster barrier to be overcome, it probably wouldn’t garner a majority of the votes.

     Of course, it’s not the first time. A strong majority wanted Obamacare repealed; remember what happened to that? A strong majority wants federal taxation and spending slashed, the troops brought home from wherever, and Jeffrey Epstein’s porno-pedo clients hanged. Given those precedents plus what we know about the dynamic of power, the probability is that the SAVE Act – i.e., the act that would require voters to present proof of citizenship at the polls – will die aborning.

     Yes, that will allow the Democrats to steal future elections with fraudulent and otherwise illegal votes. Likely it will also cost the Republican Party both Houses of Congress in November. But so what? This is “the system.” You know, that nebulous but supremely important thing Pam Bondi has told us will collapse if Epstein’s associates are indicted and tried. Apparently that’s what Pam Bondi has sworn to protect.

     It’s out in the open, now. “The system” will defend itself and its allegiants a outrance against the nation itself. There’s no pretense of anything else any longer. “Self-government” has been revealed as a joke, an empty notion that regime propagandists have foisted upon us to pacify us. We are ruled by men whose aims run counter to our well-being, and they don’t care who knows it.

     Don’t mind me, Gentle Reader. I’m having “one of those days.” I’m sure that I’ll soon be numb enough to get back into step with the thing. I’ll get back to writing these screeds as if the details matter. It’s just that for the moment, I can’t believe any of it.

     Have a nice day.

The Pressure

     The technophiles and space-travel enthusiasts are moderately agog that Elon Musk has shifted his focus from colonizing Mars to colonizing the Moon. For my part, I’m pleased. It was always the more sensible first step, if less glamorous. It’s also a necessary one: the Moon is the low-gravity resource base from which to continue on to the rest of the Solar System.

     But questions have arisen, with this one front and center: Why would anyone want to live on Mars / the Moon? A lot of people appear to be entertaining it, which suggests that there’s been a fall-off in Americans’ imagination and drive.

     I can think of two reasons to remove my elderly carcass from this ball of mud:

• The sheer adventure of the thing;
• To live in freedom.

     While I’m no longer of an age or fitness to go adventuring in the classical sense, neither were a lot of the European migrants who populated North America. They went anyway, often entire clans at a stroke. Some of them believed that the choice was between migration and extinction. In the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries, for some of them that was demonstrably the case.

     But is that the case for anyone today? Are there subpopulations for whom the hardship of Lunar living would be preferable to remaining in the grip of an implacable fist that’s threatening to squeeze them to death? Perhaps we should ask the dwindling Christian populations of the Islam-dominated hellholes of the Middle East.

     We of the Western nations have begun to sense similar threats. Hostility to freedom is the central forward pressure of the Left. The elimination of all resistance is its aim. And it will never relax or relent.

     Eight years ago, I wrote:

     For a while I was cheered by the rapid development of privately owned and operated orbital transport. It seemed that free enterprise had at last accepted the challenge of taking Man to the ultimate frontier from which the U.S. government had retreated. And indeed, companies such as SpaceX and Blue Origin have made considerable strides toward more economical (albeit still too expensive for a holiday weekend) access to Earth orbit. Perhaps, in another decade or two, we’d see construction begin on space habitats, and perhaps on some persistent human-occupied installations on the Moon.
     Maybe...but more likely not. The principal customers for orbital access are national governments. It would be in those governments’ interest to squash any private effort to colonize space or any of the other bodies in the Solar System. They could do so rather easily, either by terminating all contracts with the company that tries it or by invoking “national security” laws to forbid the effort altogether. Of those two paths, the latter is the more likely. Any government with a “national security” statute could claim that its “security” depends on not being bombed from orbit – and never mind that the owners of a privately-operated space station would have neither a reason nor an incentive to do so.

     The political dynamic continues to operate in its time-honored fashion. Power still attracts the worst members of our species. Governments are still inherently totalitarian: “Oh no, there’s no law against it. You just have to get our permission. It’s just that there’s a little red tape to get through. Please be patient.” They don’t like competition, and they don’t like for anyone to get beyond their reach:

     On the morning of the fourth day, also, a delegation of high-ranking government officials, including a three-star general from the Pentagon and a gentleman from the President’s office, called on [Spacecraft CEO Theodor] Deane.
     The gentleman from the President s office was brief and to the point. Deane was forbidden to undertake any venture whatsoever in space without the permission and control of the Federal Government. To do so would be a violation of national security equivalent to treason. Injunctions would be issued at once if Deane so much as lifted a finger to put an unauthorized satellite into orbit.
     “Do I understand,” Deane demanded, “that a law has just been passed to that specific effect?”
     “Don’t talk foolish, boy,” the general said. “We can make the existing security laws fit you like a straitjacket. Try us and see!”

     [J. W. Schutz, “The Bubble”]

     SpaceX is now racing the clock. Colonizing the Moon is far more feasible in the near term than colonizing Mars. You can bet the rent money that the cleverer folks in Washington know that too. Unless SpaceX establishes a proprietary Lunar colony before the power-mongers in D.C. can get their forces mobilized, the federal government will make such a thing impossible.

     The same pressure that propelled the Puritans to board wind-powered wooden vessels to reach the New World is at work today. The possibility of colonizing other worlds is the last remaining hope for human freedom. Many of us, young and old, would risk all that we have for the chance to be free. The States of Earth will not be pleased should the Moon become a place where we can go to escape them.

The Epstein Files

     I haven’t read them. I don’t intend to. I don’t need more misery or darkness, thanks. But the following caught and held my attention:

People are now openly stating:

"If even a small fraction of what the Epstein files imply is true...

...the good guys lost WWII 💀"

We urgently need full disclosure and many arrests to nip such speculations in the bud.

The entire liberal world order depends on it.

Godspeed!

— Erik Dale 🇳🇴 (@EuroDale) February 4, 2026

     Whoever this gentleman is, I’m certain his heart is in the right place. But is he quite sure what “the entire world liberal order” is? One should know what one has set out to defend.

     The world, partitioned as it is into States that don’t recognize the concept of freedom, does not qualify as “liberal” in the dictionary sense. Not one of the nearly 200 States that exist today respects the rights of the individual. Rather, they assert supremacy – sovereignty, if you prefer – over all persons and things. You must ask their permission for damned near everything.

     Can there be a “liberal world order” when the States that dominate the world are unanimously illiberal?

     But let’s pass on to the Epstein files. From what I’ve read – all of it secondhand, of course – those files implicate many powerful, wealthy, and famous individuals in the most horrific crimes Mankind has ever known. The Iceberg Premise – i.e., that what we can see is only a tiny fraction of what there is – suggests that virtually the entire “upper crust” of American society is vile beyond imagining. That includes the national political class: everyone who wields power at the national level, or who has significant influence over the power wielders’ decisions.

     The word corruption pales beside the monstrousness of what the files have revealed. Yet though Lord Acton is probably spinning in his grave, I must admit that none of it surprises me.

     Visualize me shrugging as I write: So what now?

* * *

     Except for the ministry of Christ, the United States of America was the grandest effort in all of history. A dear friend has called America “the crowning glory of human civilization.” He’s right. Even in our decayed and tottering state, we outshine anything else any nation can offer. That’s why the rest of the world seeks to batten on us; what excellence and virtue remain belong to America and Americans.

     Yet we teeter at the edge of the abyss. We’ve gone badly wrong, and we know it. Some of us can even tell you why: We put our trust in princes.

     Outside the narrow bounds of the family, for any man to claim and wield power over another is evil. There are no escapes; it’s an arrogance that merits scourging or worse. So why do we tolerate it when it calls itself government?

     The lust for power is a lust that cannot be sated. It always demands more. And it demands proof as well. The proof is provided by power’s victims:

     ‘How does one man assert his power over another, Winston?’
     Winston thought. ‘By making him suffer,’ he said.
     ‘Exactly. By making him suffer. Obedience is not enough. Unless he is suffering, how can you be sure that he is obeying your will and not his own? Power is in inflicting pain and humiliation. Power is in tearing human minds to pieces and putting them together again in new shapes of your own choosing.’

     How many times have I cited that passage? Its insight into power-lust is unequaled. Yet even those who praise George Orwell’s masterwork to the heavens shy back from its full implications. The great majority of Mankind insists, vocally or silently, that the State is “a necessary evil.”

     What other evils would you deem “necessary,” Gentle Reader?

* * *

     “Utopia is not one of the options.” – David Bergland

     For as long as there are men, there will be evil men. Human free will and our susceptibility to temptation guarantee it. But the great majority of us are, if sinners, at least aware of the dividing line between what we can get away with and what will get us invited to a necktie party as guest of honor.

     It’s when evil men have access to power over others that the worst problems arise and proliferate. For over time, the dynamic of power operates to bring evil men to power. They have a natural advantage over good men in pursuing it: they want it more.

     It doesn’t matter what form the State is given: autocratic, oligarchical, republican, democratic, what have you. The State is where the power is, and therefore where those who most want power will go. Could it be any clearer?

     But we were talking about the Epstein files, weren’t we?

     What those files reveal are the foulest deeds of the evilest men of our time. Should it come as a surprise that those evildoers were power-wielders, elite members of the Establishment? It seems perfectly in keeping with their villainy. Yet millions of people are in shock: How could they? Look at all they have, all they were given!

     Shock can be useful. It can shake the scales from our eyes. I submit that it’s time and long past time. Don’t let this moment pass unrecognized for what it really tells us.

Savings

     The rapid increases in the dollar prices of precious metals are alarming for more than one reason.

     Yes, I’m alarmed. Even though I hold large quantities of the money metals, what’s happening has me frightened. The dollar prices of the money metals don’t say that gold and silver are getting more valuable. Rather, they say that a large number of people are worried about the future of the U.S. dollar and the American economy generally.

     You can’t pay for your groceries with gold or silver, just yet; you still need dollars for that. The metals are hedges against further declines in the purchasing power of the dollar. They’re something else, as well.

     Among the reasons gold and silver served as Mankind’s currencies for so long is that they’re easy to recognize. Yes, it’s possible to make fake gold coins by plating tungsten slugs with a thin covering of gold, but such fakes are detectable by simple tests. It’s harder to fake silver coins at a profit, though should silver continue to rise in dollar price, that might not remain true. So gold and silver make trustworthy currencies as well as reliable stores of purchasing power.

     Gold and silver in private hands represent purchasing power no government can control. They make possible both completely private transactions and completely private savings.

     States don’t like for private persons to have private savings. That’s one of the motivations behind the worldwide drive for Central Bank Digital Currencies (CBDCs). The State wants to know everything: who has what, in what forms, and what he’s doing with it. Over time, a CBDC decreed to be legal tender would allow the State to eliminate its physical cash – those Federal Reserve Notes in your wallet – and make all “above-ground” transactions vulnerable to State monitoring and control.

     Gold and silver are the State’s enemies. As long as there are reserves of those metals in private hands, there will remain an underground economy that’s proof against State intrusion. Worse – from the State’s point of view – those reserves could power a revolution. Their very existence would force a degree of moderation upon the State. Even the idea of that makes the masters of the State uneasy and sullen.

     You and I, Gentle Reader, aren’t the only ones watching the prices of the metals. The masters of the State are watching them too. And they’re as alarmed as I am. Their best hope for total and irreversible control over all human enterprise is being threatened by the rising consciousness of private persons that the State’s “money” is merely wastepaper.

     When the masters of the State feel threatened, they tend to do alarming things. They pass insane laws. They stifle private communications. Sometimes they go to war, to create a pretext for “emergency measures.”

     The Year of Our Lord 2025 was an interesting year. One thing many hoped for was an immediate, sharp decrease in the cost of living. That hasn’t arrived, though some commodities have dropped in dollar price. The new tariffs intended to rebalance America’s international trade, bring expatriated industries home, and garner new federal revenue have pushed the prices of imported goods upward. A lot of people who supported President Trump have begun to wonder if he can deliver… or intends to.

     Americans need reasons to believe in America’s future. Failing that, they’ll use whatever private measures promise protection for their resources. That’s clearly expressed by the prices of silver and gold and the expanding interest in the cryptocurrencies… and the State could shut down all traffic in the cryptos by throwing a switch.

     Verbum sat sapienti. For those interested in a fuller exploration of methods for financial self-protection, please read John Pugsley’s classic The Alpha Strategy.

The Betrayal Of The Meliorists

     It’s exciting and gratifying to see so many people on X talking about C. S. Lewis’s masterpiece That Hideous Strength. There’s a general sense that the Satanic dystopian England Lewis depicts in his novel is “where we are now” – a sense that is largely correct. But the understanding of why and how we got here / there remains to jell.

     Which of course calls your Curmudgeon into the fray.

* * *

     Time was, there was a movement called “Progressivism.” (Don’t laugh.) It was largely propelled by Christian religious sentiments that had been twisted into political activism – and for that perversion, twisted is exactly the right word. Another word for that movement, one that isn’t heard much today, is meliorism.

     Meliorism is a largely emotional position: the meliorist “wants to make things better.” For whom? Why, for everyone! He loves a particular vision of progress: a vision in which all desires have been satisfied, and all fears have been dispelled.

     Yes, Gentle Reader: meliorism implies a total detachment from reality. But the meliorist doesn’t allow that to trouble him. The vision is all!

     If meliorists weren’t gullible, they might be tolerable. But they are gullible. They’re easily swayed by the promises of politicians. And politicians are willing to promise them anything. (No, they don’t give them Arpege. )

     The politician, by definition, is one who seeks power over others. That and nothing else is what politics is about. What he promises you is not truly his objective. His objective is power. What brings him power, he will promote; what diminishes his power, he will oppose.

     The politician, therefore, must not be assumed a sincere meliorist. But he relies on the support of meliorists to put and keep him in power.

* * *

     Lewis’s nightmare vision of England in That Hideous Strength is premised on popular acceptance based on the unwillingness of ordinary Englishmen to object to melioristic initiatives. The N.I.C.E., a government program, is facially melioristic. In reality, it’s a grab for total power over everyone and everything on Earth.

     Contemporary Britain has some features in common with Lewis’s tale, and some that depart from it. Lewis didn’t imagine a huge influx of culturally immiscible immigrants, for example. But the central commonality, which makes all the other horrors – fictional and real – possible, is meliorism as a premise and political exploitation of that premise to extend and deepen the power of the State.

     Every State that lasts for a significant period must be founded on superior force. But to acquire that force, the masters of the State must persuade their subjects to allow it to them. The chief tools of persuasion are deceit and fear.

     It doesn’t matter whether the initial set of politicians sincerely want to “help” some subset of the people, or to ameliorate some nagging condition that affects all. Once the State has accumulated unopposable power, men willing to do anything for power will displace the original, supposedly sincere ones. For the sincere ones would balk at methods their challengers willingly adopt – including lethal violence. So nominally decent and trustworthy politicians are steadily replaced by men who observe no moral limits.

     Britain’s national government fell into the meliorist premise many decades ago. Each generation of power-wielders was succeeded by a harder-nosed, less scrupled set. But even as the quality of its politicians declined, the verbal emphasis on meliorism never waned; indeed, it seems to have increased. The power-wielders promise, hands on their hearts, that We’re here to help – to serve! If any of them really mean it, I’m unable to name them.

     Americans should not look at Britain with scorn. The same progression is in effect here. Leaving aside the Great Maverick, President Donald Trump, I’m hard pressed to name a high-ranking politician whom I would trust.

* * *

     In 1962, Joseph Clark, one of Pennsylvania’s U.S. Senators, was asked to define liberalism as he understood it. Senator Clark replied:

     “A liberal,” he writes, “[is] one who believes in utilizing the full force of government for the advancement of social, political and economic justice at the municipal, state, national and international levels.”

     That’s political meliorism straight up, with no chaser. Whether or not Clark was sincere about his aims, he was consistent. One of his enthusiasms was for the establishment of a world government to which national governments would be subordinate. He pursued that aim as a member and president of World Federalists U.S.A.

     Clark was very popular. His successors in the United States Senate have varied in that regard, but they’ve all given copious lip service to meliorism. And they’ve worked diligently to expand and deepen the power of the federal government. Republicans, unable to oppose political meliorism effectively, have largely endorsed it. Which is why I joke that the GOP’s true platform is “We Can Do It Cheaper!”

* * *

     Power over others always ends up in the hands of those who want it most. As Friedrich Hayek told us in The Road To Serfdom, over time the progression brings men to power who recognize no moral limits, regardless of the platitudes they mouth. Their sole aim is power: getting it, keeping it, and increasing it.

     George Orwell told us what follows:

     ‘How does one man assert his power over another, Winston?’
     Winston thought. ‘By making him suffer,’ he said.
     ‘Exactly. By making him suffer. Obedience is not enough. Unless he is suffering, how can you be sure that he is obeying your will and not his own? Power is in inflicting pain and humiliation. Power is in tearing human minds to pieces and putting them together again in new shapes of your own choosing. Do you begin to see then what kind of world we are creating? It is the exact opposite of the stupid hedonistic Utopias that the old reformers imagined. A world of fear and treachery and torment, a world of trampling and being trampled upon, a world that will grow not less but more merciless as it refines itself. Progress in our world will be progress toward more pain. The old civilizations claimed that they were founded on love and justice. Ours is founded upon hatred. In our world there will be no emotion except fear, rage, and self-abasement. Everything else will be destroyed--everything!...If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face--forever.’

     O’Brien was free to say that to Winston Smith because he had Winston totally in his power. But outside the Ministry of Love, the Party pretended that its governance was in the best interests of the people of Oceania. It had to lie and demand doublethink to do so, but the meliorist pretense was always there.

* * *

     I could go on, but I think the point stands. He who wants power over you will always tell you he intends to use it in your interests. Sometimes he’ll be sincere… but his successors will be less so, and on it will go until the nation is under a Stalin. Clive Staples Lewis has shown us the face behind the meliorist mask in a work of compelling power. Yes, his heroes invoked supernatural aid to cleanse Britain of the N.I.C.E. and its works. Perhaps that makes That Hideous Strength too fanciful for some. But Lewis’s depiction of the N.I.C.E. and its Satanic evil remains one of speculative fiction’s highest achievements.

     To the political meliorists who look upon the N.I.C.E. as a template for their own advancement in power, I offer no apologies.

Uncorrectable

WARNING!
The following piece will contain a common profanity.
For today, I found that profanity unavoidable.
Read on at your own risk. * * *

     There are two kinds of people: those who believe that there are two kinds of people, and those who don’t.

     Yes, yes: it’s an old gag. But I’m an old man; what do you expect from the likes of me? Anyway, I got up humming an old song, one that everyone has heard but is light-years distant from “the charts” in our time: this one. Being analytically inclined and surrounded by people desperate for an explanation for our current state of FUBARity, I gave it some thought.

     What’s that? You don’t understand FUBARity? Aw, c’mon! FUBAR is older than I am! FUBAR is a companion concept to SNAFU: “Situation Normal: All Fucked Up.” That droll assessment is commonplace these days:

• We know things are fucked up;
• We also know that fucked-upedness is “normal;”
• So we relax.

     But we’re not supposed to relax when things are fucked up. We’re supposed to fix things. Common though it may be, fucked-upedness is an undesirable state. So let’s get to work!

     Wait: there’s a missing step in the above: We can’t just blindly “get to work;” we must first understand why things are fucked up. Where is the error, the mistake, the wrong turning that led us away from acceptable conditions into the land of the fucked-up? We must isolate that first and foremost.

     So we try, and are repeatedly thwarted. Our search leads us to people much like ourselves, except that… well, they aren’t. They don’t respond to citations of that essential ingredient in all investigations of fucked-upedness: reality. We shower them with actual data drawn from the experiences of men and nations, and they dismiss it! They talk around it; they shrug it off; they change the subject, hurl imprecations, or both. There’s no getting them to live in the same universe as we do.

     Some of them counter-shower us, sometimes with inane platitudes, but at other times with “studies.” The conclusions of those studies strike us as perverse. But given our inclination to respect systematic investigations of any sort, we trace those studies back to the people and institutions that emitted them, and we find… more fucked-upedness!

     There’s an enraging circularity about it all. It can drive a sane man mad, a peaceable man violent. We resist those inclinations and try again. After all, we’re talking to people much like ourselves. They must be reachable! But nothing changes.

     Presently we give up. We accept that though we may have found the problem – indeed, we most certainly have found it – we cannot fix it without violating the “rights” of those people who, after all, are much like ourselves. We shy back from the required means. We look for other measures, but in vain.

     For what we have found is FUBARity: that condition of being which is “Fucked Up Beyond All Recognition.”

     There’s a small dissonance in there. We recognize the fucked-upedness; it’s those who suffer it that don’t recognize it. But fixing the condition is what matters. Fixing it eludes us because of our respect for their “rights.”

     Our frustration knows no bounds.

* * *

     It’s time for a quote. This is one for which my source is hearsay. I’m told that the person who emitted it said it at a public appearance that I did not attend. I trust the person who repeated it to me, so I’ll give it to you as he did:

     “Savages have no rights.” – Ayn Rand

     Enormous dismay ensues. No rights at all? Not even the right to life? That can’t be right! Surely there’s some escape clause here.

     But there isn’t. The problem lies in the meaning of that term savages.

     A savage, in Rand’s lexicon, is someone who doesn’t recognize or honor rights as such. His ethical metaphysic is “What can I get away with?” Dangerous as individuals, savages are genocidally lethal when they band together. And there are bands of them ravaging our land even now.

     Savages yield only before overwhelming force. But we shy back from using force against them, because… well, they have rights! The right to life, at least. So running one over is out.

     But that yields the street to the savages. Unacceptable! What, then? Drive around them? Well, if possible… which it often isn’t. To get to where we must go, force will be required.

     You cannot concede rights to others who don’t concede yours.

* * *

     As you can surely tell by now, I’m not talking about the stereotype of a savage. That “black Sambo” figure in a loincloth with a bone through his nose blocks a lot of people’s thinking. I’m talking about people much like us in appearance and overall conduct, but who are willing to do anything and everything to get what they want politically. It doesn’t matter to them whose rights they must trample, or whether the end they seek is fatally unstable. They get their satisfactions from their political stances and those who share them. That’s the sustenance they seek: acknowledgement from their sort that they’re “good people.” Compared to that, what relevance has reality?

     There’s the core of FUBARity: it cannot be corrected by reference to reality. Those people who look like us and (mostly) dress like us yearn for acknowledgement that they’re good people much too strongly to be deflected by reason or evidence. Reality is, for them, an obstacle rather than a reference point. It must be defeated, and it will! Surely older and wiser heads who share their views are already working on it.

     I could go on, but I don’t think there’s a need. In closing, please have a look at two tweets: This one, which fancifully compares those people just like us to “large language models;” and this one, which invokes a term from systems theory for the self-referential defensive behavior of an institution that resolves to ignore reality to the extent it threatens the internal logic of the institution itself. Yes, they’re a bit fucked-up themselves, and they complicate something that’s really quite simple, but they illustrate how far reasonable people will go to explain the impenetrability of FUBARity.

     Have a nice day.

Tyranny 101

     So! You have your eye on a career in Statehood, do you? You hope for a satrapy of your own? One you can enjoy lifelong, untroubled by the currents that roil the larger world, serene in the knowledge that “your” people love you and would never dream of rebelling against you? Well, my young friend: here at the Academy for Dominator Development, we’ve assembled a comprehensive program for the likes of you.

     Yes, our program is effective. It provides a complete education for the dictator-to-be. But it’s not an easy course of study. You’ll find yourself marveling in horror at the fates of the tyrants of yore. You’ll be expected to analyze the wherefores. Many a failed tyrant has spent his last moments wishing someone had counseled him against his follies. Ironically, in many cases someone did… and was summarily executed for his cheek.

     Let’s open the catalogue and have a look.

     The syllabus for the required introductory course, Stability of Regime, might suggest something other than a progressive programme. Rather than what you’d think would be the subject of a freshman-level course, it focuses on the elementary sins that have brought down mighty States. Also, it gives its overarching lessons in short, pithy phrases. You’ll look at the headings and scratch your dandruff. You’ll think “How did he / they not know that? It’s so elementary!” Yet those missteps have brought down failed States throughout history.

     How about this one: Don’t meddle with religion. You know that already, don’t you? Look at how many States have embroiled themselves fatally in wars with their neighbors over doctrinal differences, some of those differences finer than a red hair! Because its monarchs refused to let godly subjects alone, Europe didn’t know a moment’s peace for a thousand years. Royal families that had enjoyed centuries of hegemony were laid low over it.

     Then there’s this one: Don’t play favorites! Power requires the consent of those you rule. Once a ruler starts handing out privileges, exceptions from evenhanded justice, because the king owes this one money or fancies that one’s daughter, the jig is up. Your people will no longer think of themselves as “your people.” They’ll assign that status to those you let get away with their crimes… and out will come the torches and pitchforks.

     But this next one eludes all but the most insightful students. You might think it silly. After all, hordes of tyrants throughout history have done it. But where are those once mighty lords today, youngster? Do any still wield power? How about their descendants: what condition are they in?

     So Don’t fuck with the money!

     Money is to a nation what blood is to the body. It must be kept clean. It must flow freely. And above all, it must never be diluted! Yet the Sirens’ song of money manipulation is as indisputable as its fate is inevitable. When a monarch lays his ravenous hands on the coinage, he loses his reason… and often his head.

     If you tax with a light hand – never more than a tenth of the national product – it may pinch when you have a grand scheme to fund, but it won’t evoke unrest. The commoners are never more sensitive to their king than when the tax collector is on their doorstep. Besides, the history of grand schemes is anything but grand. That alone should be a stark warning to you.

     Yet there may come a day when you or some halfwit advisor concocts a scheme too beautiful to dismiss. It would solve a pressing problem! It would placate the restive and unruly! It would make your people love you all the more! But where are the funds for it to come from?

     And a demon in a gilt robe will whisper to you in the sweetest of tones, Why not debase the coinage?

     The seductive power of that suggestion is why Stability of Regime is an entrance-level course. You must understand the fury currency inflation would unleash. It dwarfs all else in statecraft. You must see it, in all its gory grandeur, and never feel it in reality. Else your reign will be doomed by your own cupidity and vanity.

     You may say to yourself, “I can get away with it.” You can’t. You may say to yourself, “Just this once.” That, too, is a lie.

     In all of recorded history, only one tyrant has resisted that lure: Napoleon Bonaparte. “I will pay cash, or nothing!” he proclaimed. He knew the importance of sound money, for the Revolutionary regime had demonstrated it by violating it. Had the rest of Europe not banded together to depose him, his descendants might rule France today.

     Stability of Regime is a one-semester course. It’s the prerequisite to all the Academy’s other courses of study. The textbooks are kept continuously available at the Academy bookstore. Yes, they’re hefty tomes for what seem simple lessons, but it takes a lot of pages to properly chronicle the errors of rulers past and present. Classes are held in the lecture hall at 8:00 AM. Bring pen and paper.

     Register at the desk to your right. Use black ink only. Tuition is due before classes begin on Monday. Cash only. No checks or credit cards. We will test your coin.

Things That Last And Things That Don’t

     I tire more easily these days than when I was younger. That’s to be expected of an aging body, of course. I certainly expected it. What I didn’t expect was the onset of a steadily deepening intellectual weariness, born of having to say the same things over and over again, as if no one were listening previously. Instead of the willingness to explain, I’m beset by fatigue and a kind of resignation: “They don’t get it. Maybe they never will.”

     The nonsense about America having violated Venezuela’s sovereignty has triggered that reaction. Domestic Leftists and international opponents of the Trump Administration are shrieking it as if it were God’s own law. Permit me a little foreshadowing: it isn’t.

     I’ve been here before innumerable times. “It’s such a simple thing!” I mutter to myself. I want to shake it off and think about anything else, but when the subject is this important, I can’t allow myself to do that.

     Okay, Gentle Reader. One more time.

* * *

     In my Baseline Essay on this subject, I wrote:

     One of the key concepts in international political discourse is sovereignty: the attribute a State possesses when it is effectively unchallenged within its boundaries, and is conceded by other States to be legitimate in that position. At one time, we spoke of "sovereigns" -- kings -- who were literally the personal possessors of the power of their States. Today the concept is more diffuse, extending to the government as a distributed entity rather than to an absolute monarch.
     Sovereignty is less a thing possessed by right than a thing conceded. The concession is important, for a State is unlikely to be able to hold its own against any and all opposition. A sufficiently large, sufficiently well motivated coalition of other States could bring it down. So State A's sovereignty depends more on the indulgence of other States, for whatever reasons, than on its claims to legitimacy.
     Now and then that becomes rather obvious. The Taliban claimed sovereignty over Afghanistan, but America decided otherwise. Saddam Hussein's Baathist dictatorship claimed sovereignty over Iraq, but once again, America decided otherwise.

     I thought that was a clear, easily comprehended statement. And to be fair, some did read and understand it. But many did not. More to the point, many refuse to understand it. It cross-cuts their agenda.

     The treaties we call the Peace of Westphalia, signed in the German cities of Munster and Osnabruck in 1648, constitute the first attempt of the Christian Era to define sovereignty. The great quarrels of the era had been about religion, but as always when States are involved, the real issue was force: who possesses it, who authorizes its use, and what others may “legitimately” do about it.

     The conception of sovereignty reached then was a compromise. It sought to achieve a limitation upon warmaking, which up to then had been practiced not just by kings but by lesser powers avid to impose their wills upon others of their kind. The Westphalian treaties explicitly reserved the privilege of warmaking to monarchs – sovereigns – and forbade it to others. But note this: those treaties did not call into existence a supranational entity with the power to enforce that agreement. The job was left to the aforementioned monarchs.

     Here we are, 378 years later, and there is still no supranational entity capable of enforcing anyone’s sovereignty against anyone else’s contrary opinion. The reason is quite simple: the States of Earth will not permit it.

     If such a supranational organization were to exist, it alone would be indisputably sovereign; i.e., it alone would possess sufficient power to sustain itself against the contentions of “lesser” States. Those lesser ones would exist and wield power only for as long as the supra-State should allow it.

     The national governments of Britain, France, China, the Soviet Union, and the United States of America would never have given the United Nations that kind of power. It would have reduced them to vassals of the UN, utterly dependent upon its dictates – and those who govern the UN would have made sure that the condition would be permanent.

     Thus, when I wrote:

     The States of Earth exist in an anarchic relation to one another. Each has its own regional code of law, which might differ markedly from all the others. Despite several thrusts at the matter over the centuries, there is no "super-State" to enforce a uniform code of law over them all. More, they view one another as competitors in many different areas; their populations and institutions are often in sharp economic competition with one another. Thus, they are often at odds. They resolve important disputes among them through negotiation or warfare.

     …I didn’t think I needed to explain why; in my naivety I thought it would be “obvious.” The States of Earth want it that way.

* * *

     The sovereignty of Venezuela’s government was wholly dependent upon the tacit agreement, by other States, that they would refrain from toppling it. Time was, in this connection a State only had to worry about its geographical neighbors. That’s not the case any longer. The United States of America, the Russian Federation, and Red China have “long arms.” Each possesses sufficient power to negate the sovereignty of other states… provided the other two permit it.

     That is all “sovereignty” means today. It’s also what passes for “stability” today. No one has to like it. I’m sure Nicolas Maduro doesn’t.

Locating The State

     Brownstone Institute president Jeffrey A. Tucker has produced a wide-ranging, yet notably compact essay that addresses several questions at once:

1. What is the State?
2. Whence does it arise?
3. Who really wields its powers?
4. Where do we look for its governor?

     I use governor above in its original, mechanical sense: a mechanism that limits the action of another mechanism. For those who insist that the State is “a necessary evil,” this is a critical consideration. Those who pursue power most successfully want it for its own sake. It follows that once they have it, they’ll delight in exercising it. But throughout recorded history, there’s always been something that limits such exercises of power. Where shall we look for it?

     America’s Founding Fathers believed it to be the consent of the governed. They sought to equip “the governed” with a written Constitution and a guarantee that “the right to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed.” Their counterparts in the several colonies followed in their train. Thus, the great body of the public would always be capable of reining in the State, and – hopefully – correcting its excesses.

     Any fairly observant American will know that it hasn’t worked out quite as the Founders hoped. But owing to our heavily armed populace and our rather firm notions about right and wrong, the State in North America hasn’t succeeded as wildly as have those on other continents. The masters of “our” State – local, state, or federal – are repeatedly thwarted in their aims. Now and then they find that, little though they like it, they must accept reductions in their power and scope. Why?

     (Rubs hands together while cackling fiendishly) Heh, heh, heh!

---

     Let’s agree, as a working postulate, that the practical meaning of the State and its power is the use or threat of coercive force. That’s the traditional approach. Who wields that force? Who decides that that force shall be wielded?

     Dr. Tucker notes the peculiar locus to which State power and functions have devolved:

     Cabinet-level appointees frequently complain in private that they face intractable bureaucracies with all institutional knowledge. They often feel like stand-ins or mannequins. Trump is the unusual president who has even attempted to be in charge. Most are just happy for the emoluments of office and the plaudits that come with it.

     In the great majority of cases pertinent to Americans’ common conception of freedom, the decision-makers are bureaucrats: usually faceless souls difficult to locate or identify. This is the great discovery of power-seekers throughout the First World: if the decision-maker is essentially anonymous, he can get away with a lot more. Therefore, political power is least constrained when its wielders are not known to those they rule.

     The seeker of public office is seldom fully aware of this relocation of the political power. He usually puts himself forward in the belief that he can “get things done.” The discovery that the opposite is the case has frustrated and angered many a President and Congressman. Quoth (yet again) retired United States Senator for Oklahoma David L. Boren:

     Boren, formerly a state legislator and governor, went to Washington expecting to make some changes. "What impressed me most is the great power of the bureaucracy compared to that of elected officials. All the talk about growing control by the bureaucracy is not exaggerated. The shift in power is very real.... There is almost a contempt for elected officials."...
     Senator Boren found, to his surprise, that a Senator has great difficulty even getting phone calls returned by the "permanent" employees, much less getting responsive answers to his questions.
     The voters can't "throw the rascals out" anymore, because the main rascals are not elected but appointed....
     Regulatory bureaucrats have extra power because they can outlast the elected officials. "Often," Boren explains, "I've said to a bureaucrat, 'You know this is not the president's policy.'
     'True, Senator, but we were here before he came, and we'll be here after he leaves. We're not in sympathy with his policy. We'll study the matter until he leaves.'"

     [From Armington and Ellis, MORE: The Rediscovery of American Common Sense.]

As I wrote in this piece: Look upon the naked, if anonymous, face of your true master, and be afraid.

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     Dr. Tucker surveys the various approaches to the genesis and development of the state put forward by the great thinkers of the past three millennia. This is good material to be conversant with. It stimulates thought about political path dependency, which is one of the least well addressed of all subjects that touch upon the emergence of the State.

     The path by which the State emerges among men is specific to those men: i.e., to their existing social arrangements and institutions before power-seekers start to swell among them. Those things also condition the form of the State, both immediately and further on. The divergences among the theses of such as Hobbes, Hume, Locke, and the rest point to that without making the larger and more nebulous patterns explicit.

     When your society is armed and generally freedom-minded, the critical need of the State is to deny potential rebels a clear target. Bureaucracy satisfies that need. But all things have their downsides; this is as true of bureaucracy as of any other mechanism for wielding power. Bureaucracy’s downside is that it’s made up of people who generally share the desires and convictions of those they rule. Thus, they are partially inhibited by those common convictions, especially if one of them is the “mind your own business” ethic that characterizes the great mass of Americans.

     That brings us full circle to the “popular consensus / consent of the governed” element in the political dynamic. Thomas Jefferson explicitly stated this basis for a legitimate State in the Declaration of Independence. However, he was thinking of traditionally overt governments: visible, identifiable decision-makers who could therefore be targeted by a populace in insurrection. Yet he identified the forebears of the bureaucracy in these United States:

     At home, fellow citizens, you best know whether we have done well or ill. The suppression of unnecessary offices, of useless establishments and expenses, enabled us to discontinue our internal taxes. These covering our land with officers, and opening our doors to their intrusions, had already begun that process of domiciliary vexation which, once entered, is scarcely to be restrained from reaching successively every article of produce and property. If among these taxes some minor ones fell which had not been inconvenient, it was because their amount would not have paid the officers who collected them, and because, if they had any merit, the state authorities might adopt them, instead of others less approved. [Second Inaugural Address, 1805

     Even so the bureaucracy is upon us. It took time – roughly 150 years from the founding of the Republic before it began to expand in earnest – but it’s upon us nevertheless.

---

     Many commentators have suggested remedies. Some have been tried. All have failed. Even famously freedom-minded Ronald Reagan allowed the bureaucracy to expand. President Trump is bearing down on the effort to corral it, but it’s unclear, given current Civil Service law, that he can achieve more than Reagan did.

     If we omit the possibility of a true anarcho-capitalist revolution – I do try to be realistic, but I can’t help but hope! – in the near term, whatever restraint of the State there may be, in all its 88,000-plus instantiations, will arise from the consciences of those who staff it and their cultural commonalities with us private citizens. That and only that will impose any curbs on bureaucrats’ exercises of power over us. Not that the alphabet-dwellers will ever renounce any fragment of their essentially unbounded power! Our hope is not for freedom de jure but freedom de facto.

     Elections and who wins them won’t matter nearly as much.

Nightmare Visions

     Is this true?

The world is run by people who are more cruel and more obscene than you can fathom. They're all pathetic in ways that feel like satire, and monstrous beyond your wildest imagining.

— Alana McLaughlin🏳️‍⚧️ (@AlanaFeral) November 14, 2025

     Sometimes I can believe it. At other times I can’t.

     My first difficulty stems from “The world is run.” What does it mean to say that someone or some group runs the world? “The world” is a rather vague phrase, and “run” is the most overloaded word in the English language. One dictionary lists more than 800 meanings for “run.” Is it possible that “the world is run” has no exact meaning?

     George Carlin would have agreed:

     ...but George Carlin was an entertainer. If you let entertainers form your opinions, you’re fishing in a sewer. Entertainers aren't much good at anything but entertaining – and a lot of them aren’t even much good at that.

---

     Let’s have a close look at that “the world is run” assertion. What do you suppose the speaker meant to express by it?

     She probably had big stuff in mind: the major institutions of our time. Big governments, big businesses, big media, and so forth. Yes, there are people, or small groups thereof, who control each such institution. And yes, they direct the large-scale orientations and policies of such institutions. However, they cannot control private citizen Smith. Though if Smith chooses to interact with their institution, his decisions will be influenced by theirs.

     But does that amount to running the world?

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     Let’s move on to “people who are more cruel and more obscene than you can fathom.” I can fathom quite a lot, so omit the hyperbole. Are the people who control major institutions cruel and obscene? What evidence do we have for that proposition?

     In the usual case, a man must have control of himself before he can rise to the management or direction of others. But to say that Jones has control of himself does not automatically mean Jones is virtuous. He may simply be skilled at keeping his evil desires reined in until he’s safe to indulge them. And indeed, we have seen enough evil uncovered among the great and powerful to suspect that there’s much more we have yet to see.

     Moreover, we have the dynamic of power to cope with. That dynamic does favor the elevation of evil persons. But when the lust for power is opposed by another dynamic – e.g., in commerce, the constraints imposed by profit and loss – power-lust doesn’t always win.

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     Some large institutions are run by evil persons. It’s the case with most governments. But other large institutions, in which the desire for power over others is tempered by other considerations, are run by persons no worse than you or I. If their desires sometimes clash with ours, what of that? Is CEO Jones obligated to get private citizen Smith’s approval before he decides on Acme Corp.’s next venture?

     So the notion that “The world is run by people who are more cruel and more obscene than you can fathom” isn’t uniformly true. Neither is George Carlin’s “big club” thesis. People move in and out of the seats of power: the positions from which they can “run” things. Those who fall aren’t always corrupt, and those who rise aren’t necessarily corruptible.

     Just some early-morning thoughts.

If You Yearn To Understand RussiaGate

     Sundance at The Last Refuge has produced a penetrating capsule analysis of the maneuverings and machinations that constitute the “prequel” to that extraordinary episode. It’s worth reading slowly and digesting in its entirety.

     To many American patriots, still reluctant to believe that even a Democrat would have stooped that low, the RussiaGate scandal can seem incomprehensible. To put it as briefly as possible, they don’t want to believe that a sitting president and a former First Lady could have been that vile. Yet the behavior of other Democrats has made it plain that there is no lower bound to their perfidy. For them, power is everything. Therefore, no tactic is too scrofulous to be considered.

     Mind you, many Republicans are no better. It’s in the nature of a political system that the worst, in Friedrich Hayek’s phrase, will rise to the top. In the United States, a nation steeped in Christian ethics, that dynamic was curbed for many decades by the restraint imposed by conscience in both its forms: i.e., both the inner awareness of wrongness, and “the inner voice that warns us that someone may be looking.” (H. L. Mencken)

     Put not your trust in princes. (Psalms 146:3) The letter after a politician’s name should be taken only as a guide to the direction of his villainy. Don’t allow exceptions such as Donald Trump to blind you to the general rule.

Bills Come Due

     If you’ve been paying attention to the caperings of the Usurper Administration, you’re already aware of some of the Usurper-in-Chief’s lunacies: e.g., letting China back into our national power grid; sending a large force of troops and armor into Syria; legitimizing “transwomen” in women’s and girls’ sports; yanking the Keystone XL pipeline’s construction permit; suspending all deportations of illegal aliens; and so on. The irrationality of these “policy decisions” is self-evident. You hardly need to think about them to realize it. Yet they’re a critical component of the Left’s initiative to cement itself into federal power.

     They’re payoffs, you see. The successful practice of coalition politics requires payoffs to the various components of the coalition. A component group that deems itself inadequately rewarded for its contributions will withdraw its support and look for a better deal elsewhere. And in this dynamic lies the greatest vulnerability of power-for-power’s-sake coalition building. For as soon as the coalition reaches a size that allows it to contend for majority status, the members of the coalition will all experience a strong incentive to increase their demands.

     The above makes a political coalition uniquely fragile—certainly more so than a politics of conviction. Even so, successful coalitions have been constructed, and have succeeded in wielding power for some time. But the natural fractiousness of a majority or near-majority coalition can be amplified greatly by another condition. I wrote about it here: the interests of the various components to the coalition must not be mutually antagonistic.

     At the time, I was concerned with the self-defeating behavior of Republican power brokers. Their behavior these past four years suggests that they thought the “If you don’t vote for us, you’ll get them” gambit would assure the continued support of sincere conservatives, constitutionalists, Trumpists, and America-Firsters. They were wrong, as they’re learning today.

     The Democrats are about to learn an even harsher lesson.

     The Usurper Administration has put itself in a bind. Several of the more important components to its coalition are mutually antagonistic to others. That makes payoffs to some component groups inimical to the interests of others—and that puts a strain on the coalition that such assemblages have seldom withstood. If you think the recent actions of AntiFa against Democrat offices are a harbinger of danger for the Usurpers, you ain’t seen nothin’ yet.

     Consider as an example the Usurpers’ action against the Keystone XL pipeline and their open hostility to hydrofracturing, a.k.a. fracking. This is a payoff to the militant environmentalist groups. But there are an awful lot of jobs and an ocean of money involved in both the pipeline and fracking. Big Labor especially loves fracking, as it produces copious amounts of both oil and natural gas. The Usurpers’ strokes against those enterprises will cost the Democrats a significant fraction of their traditional support: the American blue-collar worker.

     There are other, similar clashes between other components of the Democrat coalition. The feminist Left will not sit still as transwomen and transgirls flood into women’s sports. That’s to say nothing of their contention with actual women for elevation in corporate America. Big trouble brewing there.

     The most interesting area is in the enforcement of the immigration laws and border control. Low-wage jobs have been going preponderantly to illegal aliens for quite some time. President Trump’s policy of intensified enforcement of the border damped that trend for the first time in decades. Real progress was being made at not merely apprehending illegals and deporting them but at discouraging them from entering the country in the first place. Low-skill Americans were finding that those jobs were open to them once again, while the employers of low-skill workers were finding that one of their illicit controls over their workforce was slipping from their grasp. The Usurpers intend to reverse that course...but you can’t incentivize illegals, thus implicitly penalizing American workers, and expect both groups to support you.

     Oh, the fun we’re going to have as the cracks in the Usurper coalition widen and spread!

     Yes, it will take time to produce perceptible results. But those results are on their way. No one can long maintain a coalition of groups whose interests are mutually antagonistic. Some component groups will decide that they’re being shafted by the payoffs being delivered to others. They’ll cajole. They’ll threaten. Some will depart the Democrat flock. And the Usurpers, caught between many competing fires, won’t know what to do.

     Stay tuned.