The “right” triumphantly announces that it has cut spending by 60 billion
Before these mighty cuts, the projected 2011 deficit was $1,645 billion, an increase in spending, and an increase in the deficit, of 1,200 billion as compared to our last comparatively normal year, 2005.
After these mighty cuts, the projected deficit is, I suppose, reduced to a mere 1,585 billion, though of course chances are that somehow, by the end of the year, it will turn out to have actually been something south of $1,700 billion.
And, of course, this does not count a trillion or so of off budget expenditures, among them being that the federal reserve has purchased a large number of worthless mortgage backed securities and suchlike, and will not tell anyone how much.
So both parties, democrats and republicans alike, have moved far, far to the left, the extreme right of this year being far to the left of the extreme left of a few years back. Indeed, the same is true of the entire society. The government, all schools, all universities, all churches, and all institutions, are moving to the left with explosive speed. Big businesses are appointing CEOs by ideology and affirmative action – which strategy is in fact successful since success is by government favor, not competence, and ideology and affirmative action wins government favor. To appoint a CEO on the basis of competence, ability to make business turn a profit, you would have to be crazy.
Today’s Christian right believes that marriage and family law should treat husbands and spouses as if men and women were the same in mean and distribution, and played the same roles in sex and reproduction, and had the same desires and intentions with regard to sex and reproduction, and find the horribly sexist words of Jesus on divorce and suchlike far too embarrassing to mention. If family law should treat men and woman as interchangeable, why object to gay marriage? To make a principled opposition to gay marriage, the Christian right would have to make a principled opposition to the family law that treats husbands and wives as alike and interchangeable, that assumes there are no significant differences between the nature of men and women, which position would be horribly sexist, hence the Christian right would never dream of taking such a stand, a stand that in 1950, no one would have ever dreamed of doubting, nor would today’s Christian right ever dream of mentioning certain parts of the Bible that until recent decades were familiar to everyone. Just as not one nominated political candidate would today dream of suggesting measures that might significantly reduce the deficit, not one Christian preacher would today mention bits of the Bible that support patriarchy.
In the recent elections, the only candidate who was proposing significant cuts was Christine O’Donnel, widely derided as a lunatic extremist, and a witch. And she only proposed significant cuts during the primaries. As soon as she got the republican nomination, as soon as she faced the main election, and had to get votes from the mainstream, she immediately threw that policy overboard, and headed back to the “center” – headed back to what is now the center, but a few years back would have been the crazed lunatic left.
And indeed, Christine O’Donnel was crazy (though probably not a witch) because if you want to be taken seriously as a political candidate, you have to go along with policies that will destroy our society in the very near future. We are all in a bus, the bus is heading for a cliff at seventy miles an hour and the pedal is flat to the floorboards. If you are serious candidate, you discuss whether the pedal should be flat to the floorboards, or almost flat to the floorboards. Releasing the pedal, let alone applying the brakes, is not something any serious, responsible, sane, normal candidate would mention. You would have to be crazy – a lot crazier than Christine O’Donnel – to propose such a thing. You would have to be almost as crazy as a corporate board who appointed a CEO on the basis of his ability to turn a profit, rather than for his ideology, race, and gender.
I am reminded of the last days of the Roman empire in the west. In AD406, it was completely crazy, ludicrous, and absurd, to suggest that the barbarians could possibly threaten Rome. In AD410, the goths looted Rome, and raped every Roman woman. In AD412, it was still completely crazy, ludicrous, and absurd, to suggest that the barbarians could possibly threaten Rome, which bizarre response strikingly resembles the British failure to notice their humiliating defeats in Basra and the Persian Gulf. Rome failed to pull itself together in the way it had after past defeats, because it denied that it had been defeated, denied that the Roman empire in the west had ceased to be.
Total government debt was nine trillion, though this depends on how you count it – the nine trillion does not count the governments rapidly soaring pension commitments, nor the alarming multitude of promises it has made to backstop gambles made by bankers.
In the US there are about ninety million people who file tax returns and pay income tax (another forty million file tax returns, but pay no income tax). So if you are one of those ninety million tax paying households, your household’s share of the debt is about one hundred thousand dollars, and this year it will grow by about eighteen thousand dollars. It is not impossible that such a debt will be paid – it is physically possible to pay it. Whether it is politically possible to get people to pay it is another question. If you are a hundred thousand dollars in debt, and you ran up the debt in a big one off expenditure, like buying a house, you can probably pay it back. If you are a hundred thousand dollars in debt and you ran it up going to fancy restaraunts, going on trips, and buying friends, and you are still going to fancy restaurants and buying expensive friends, and next year you are going to be one hundred and twenty thousand dollars in debt, no way are you ever going to pay the money back.
So what happened: Why is everyone moving left, even the Christian right, even libertarians, even white nationalists and suchlike?
One factor is that western governments around the world have decided to elect a new people, through mass migration from the third world, on a scale that significantly, substantially, and rapidly alters the political balance.
Another factor is that in a program akin to the Soviet program to create New Soviet Man, the government is attempting to transform the people, through a highly politicized education system, an education system whose political intensity is rapidly increasing.
But why, you may ask? “Communist plot, Jooish plot, Islamist plot, Harvard plot?”
No, its a government plot, though to call it a Harvard plot is not far wrong. There are more conspiracies, committees, and special interest groups than you can shake a stick at, and all of them want to suck at the tit of the state. It is the nature of government to grow, and liberty to shrink. Government is a metastatic cancer. Each cancerous node spawns a dozen more. There are half dozen communist conspiracies each trying to smash each of the others, despite the expiration of their foreign sponsors, at least two Gaean conspiracies, one big tranzi conspiracy with extensive links to the two main Muslim conspiracies, ivy league academia is a seething mass of conspiracies that no one can possibly keep track of, and there are many more, not that one can draw any sharp distinction between a conspiracy and a special interest group.
Growth of government is not driven by ideology, or even political institutions, rather ideology is driven by the government’s need to justify the growth of government.
Government originates in a stationary bandit, a bandit king, a bandit so successful he deters or exterminates all competition. The government at first consists of little more than the bandit himself. Taxation consists of him suggesting that the eminent give him and his boys land and money, thus taxes, though capricious and erratic, are quite low. Laws are few, verging on nonexistent, but enforced with brutal efficiency, the main law being that no one else does any banditry.
All organizations tend to fall apart. It is simply difficult to have a large bunch of people efficiently coordinated. Organizations that are actually effective originate in intense competition, and sooner or later are apt to decay – the Peter Principle, Parkinson’s Law, etc.
Absent intense competition, they decay very badly indeed.
Over time bureaucrats, laws, taxes, quasi governmental organizations, and regulations multiply like vermin. Eventually, laws, taxes and meddling bureaucrats become a serious burden, and the bureaucrats face the need to persuade everyone that a horde of bureaucrats is a good thing.
The left (both Democrats and Republicans near equally) is the bureaucracy’s PR apparatus – a collection of government sock puppets, astroturf. Its mission is to persuade us that six hundred pounds of fat is a healthy and handsome physique, and that government has never been better, that more laws are good for you, the government is here to help you, and more government will help you more. Thus from time to time the story about what government is good for changes, yet the central theme, that government is good for you, never changes.
Ever since the original bandit chieftain, government has moved ever further leftwards, and will always move ever further leftwards until checked by crisis and collapse, or reformed by internal totalitarian terror, “left” being whatever rationalization justifies more government today, which rationalization is apt to change from time to time.
You cannot fix the problem by excluding the Joos, or getting rid of the commies in the state department, or even by excluding Harvard old boys (though excluding Harvard old boys would help quite a bit). The whole damn thing, including the patent office and the post office, has got to go.
Thus we see numerous supposedly anti government people telling us that the fact that government does X and proposes to do Y is itself proof that X is necessary and good, and Y would be even better.
The deficit is out of control because the government is trying to buy support, and buy internal cohesion. If it cuts some elements of itself off from the the trough, there will be internal warfare between different elements of the government. The government unions will physically attack legislators as they have in Wisconsin, the Pentagon will bomb the state department, as it has already bombed state department proxies, and the police will raid the DEA for drugs and the NEA for loose cash. If, on the other hand, it cannot get a coalition that supposedly represents fifty one percent of the voters to bless its budget, the budget will not be reduced. Instead there will be external warfare between the government and the people. The militias will shoot IRS reveneurs. Hence the import of cheap voters from overseas.
When the Soviet Union was about to fall, one of the symptoms that I noticed, yet was not widely reported, was warfare between the army and GOSPLAN. The army would randomly stop trucks, and if the trucks contained food, seize the food to feed the troops. The Soviet army would seize what it, or its suppliers needed, as if it was living off the land in a hostile occupied country, as, of course, it was.
Transnationalism is just an effort to obtain legitimacy from “world opinion”, when legitimacy can no longer be obtained from local voters – to obtain legitimacy from all those poor third worlders without the inconvenience and potential for civil war of allowing them to enter the advanced countries. The European Union is undemocratic because each European government wants to be able to have Brussels “force” it to do what it knows perfectly well it is going to wind up doing anyway.
From the fact that the deficit is $1,600 billion, and that the “right” triumphantly announces that it has cut spending by 60 billion, which “cut” will somehow fail to prevent the deficit from growing rapidly, I predict collapse in a decade or two – armed conflict between elements of the government, or between the government and the people, or, very likely, both. I have been making a similar prediction, for the same decade, since 1994, and events seem to be proceeding on schedule. The near civil war in France, and the violence by state unions in Wisconsin, are the beginning.