· dine, nibble, graze, feast, ingest, and others that all speak to eating

· damp, moist, soaked, drenched, soggy, etc., that address levels of wetness

…there are also euphemisms often used to avoid calling things what they really are. One of those is democratic socialism, whose adherents will henceforth be referred to as DemSocs, an ideology presented to a frustrated and weary public as the path to a new utopia that will create a society free of want, a goal that has eluded us no matter how people are governed or how their economies are organized.

It belongs alongside the “fiery but peaceful” protest and the “people’s republic” branding used by communist countries in the rhetorical hall of shame. Yet, democratic socialism is gaining steam in this election cycle despite the inherent ideological contradiction within the term:

· Democracy: a political system in which eligible citizens vote for and elect the people who represent them in govt.

· Socialism: an economic system in which the means of production are owned or controlled by a central authority.

Democracy and socialism are antithetical by definition. The former is the North Star of political freedom, which is always accompanied by economic freedom. Every nation whose people directly elect their govt representatives has a market-based economic system. Many of those nations have generous social and welfare programs, too, with the robust taxes needed to fund them, but each is a capitalist country.

Socialism, by contrast, is anti-freedom, stripping away things that Americans take for granted, such as consumer choice, private property rights, and abundant civil liberties, and replacing them with expanded state control, fewer available goods and services, and the shifting of power to a privileged elite. Calling it democratic socialism does not change the underlying reality. As such, DemSocs have to lie about themselves and their goals, and some of the most common deceptions are outlined in the addenda below.

The biggest lie, however, is one of omission; it is one the DemSocs and their allies adamantly refuse to discuss. It involves culture, which is something of a third rail in American life, meaning you’re not supposed to talk about it. At least not out loud. Because someone’s feelings might get hurt. But whether the reference point is the Nordic model used in the Scandinavian nations, or the systems that are predominant in the rest of Europe, the first-world Asian countries, Australia, and Canada, each of those places is populated by a largely homogenous population.

The people share a common history and traditions; they speak the same language; and they have similar ethical standards. This reality was even more pronounced when countries implemented their respective systems decades ago. Immigration may have shifted the demographic landscape in some locations, but it has not changed the underlying structure of how their systems operate.

These societies are driven by strong social norms. People follow the rules and expect others to do likewise. Not because they fear authorities or being arrested, but because that is how they are wired. It is what makes the unattended roadside stand in Finland possible, where patrons pay for product even though no one is watching. It is how public transit systems in multiple countries sell tickets but don’t necessarily verify them, relying on the honor system that expects riders to be paying customers. It is how a resident can leave a bicycle unattended on a Tokyo sidewalk for hours and be confident it will still be there upon return.

These examples define high-trust societies, where people believe their countrymen – strangers and friends alike – and their institutions are honest and reliable. In other words, these societies are nothing like America, where the public’s confidence in its institutions is a national embarrassment. The system that DemSocs are pushing requires a heavy dose of societal cohesion, which is in desperately short supply in a country where half the population hates the other half.

This doesn’t even get into the mechanics of making the DemSoc pitch work. “Free” is a mirage. A person in the other societies may not pay for services at the point of use, but that citizen does pay through multiple mechanisms that would spawn a second American Revolution. No, “the rich” do not fund it all; there is no generational welfare that promotes perpetual dependency; there are no discussions about what junk food people on public aid can buy (the answer is none); and even the vaunted healthcare systems function by necessarily saying ‘no’ to things that Americans believe can only be answered with a yes. I’ve seen the last one personally.

Two other points about culture: first, there is a high degree of labor participation because people understand that the ship of state can only move if every able-bodied person grabs an oar. And second, there is a built-in societal “shaming” mechanism that actively works to police fraud, freeloading, and abuse of the benefits.

Don’t take my word for it; check out what DemSocs believe for yourself. They reject capitalism despite its historical track record, they want to open the prisons and cut police funding, and they want a wholesale revision of the Constitution. They imagine a society in which “the people” own everything and get to make all decisions, but anyone who has ever worked or been in a group of more than five people understands how false this narrative is.

Perhaps their ideas sound appealing. But they mostly pave another road to authoritarianism, where a small cabal of the highly privileged makes the choices that people would otherwise make for themselves. The DemSoc is perhaps the current incarnation of the person in the Che Guevara t-shirt and claiming to be a rebel while ignoring that the face belonged to a mass murderer.

Addenda

The following are some of the most frequently stated DemSoc myths:

· “Everyone has free healthcare.” Maybe on paper, if they can live long enough to get treatment. More than a million Europeans died while on waiting lists in a single year. Another 23,000 Canadians did likewise during a 12-month period, and England is clocking about 1,300 deaths every month from waiting for care that is never delivered.

· “Everyone can go to college for free.” No, they can’t. The state typically decides who gets into what school, provided the student gets into any. High school performance often dictates whether one goes to a traditional college or vocational school. And entry into specialized programs involves rigorous exams. In other words, there are no allowances for demographics or legacies.

· We already have socialism through police and fire protection, roads, and schools.” Again, no. Each of the aforementioned is a government-run public service that exists under every political and/or economic system. This is the sort of claim that should require a disclaimer stating that the person making it is competent enough to breathe without being reminded.

Turns out that ‘free’ is expensive:

· Income taxes are progressive, as they are in the US, but people in every income bracket are expected to pay. In America, roughly 50% of income tax filers have zero federal liability.

· The Europeans, in particular, lean hard on the VAT or value-added tax, a national sales tax that ranges from 20-27% and covers virtually all goods and services. The standard refrain here is that sales taxes are regressive.

· Corporate taxes, especially on large operations, plus levies on high-wealth individuals and financial transactions.

· Shifts of funding from one govt agency or department to another, based on priorities, which is not a bad idea but good luck implementing that in the trough known as DC.

The use of “democratic” as an adjective does not alter the meaning of the noun “socialist,” just as putting “environmental” before “justice” has nothing to do with actual justice. This country is far from perfect, making it like every other nation on the planet, but you can’t deploy a methodology with a perfect record of failure and pretend that the results will somehow be different this time. Or you can argue the point and find out the hard way.

Venezuela, Russia, Iran, and another front you have likely not heard much about have something in common. Resources. Lots of resources. No doubt, you are aware of the first three. You may also be aware of the spurious reasons given for our involvement in each. I hate to tell the true believers, but Venezuela was not about the drug trade that continues mostly unabated; Russia is not about freedom for those plucky Ukrainians; and Iran is not about regime change. Less is known about the fourth conflict, one that few Americans know is happening. This one is in Somalia.

That’s right; Somalia. The country that many Americans first heard of in the 90s, initially through battle and later, in the film Blackhawk Down, was bombed this month for the 74^th time this year. Why? Because Somalia has resources other than grifting immigrants who rape the US taxpayer. The African nation is home to significant oil reserves, along with gas, uranium, lithium, and other vital minerals, and its govt is making deals with American states and companies who want a piece of those resources.

Meanwhile, the administration is sending guns and money – but to the regret of Warren Zevon’s ghost, no lawyers – to the Somali faction that lets American companies strip mine the country. That’s how these “wars” work – we hijack a foreign govt and ply it with aid, cash, and promises so long as the return justifies the investment. Turn on us, and we’ll put our horsepower behind a different faction. Somalia is no different than the talk of turning Gaza into a resort playground.

The US govt does not care about the average Somali any more than it cares about the average Iranian or Ukrainian. That’s not me speculating; that’s straight from the mouths of the war machine’s most vocal backers. The late Lindsay Graham told the malicious truth about the conflict in Ukraine more than two years ago when he said that the country is sitting on a ‘gold mine’ of critical minerals worth up to $12 trillion. A similar abundance of resources is why many have salivated over dismembering Russia ever since the collapse of the Soviet Union, if not before.

Iran is a similar case but with two caveats. That the state has a large oil industry that produces about 5% of the global supply and also sits atop the fourth-largest proven reserves are facts. More important is that Iran controls one of the main chokepoints in global trade, the Strait of Hormuz, as has been made clear during this conflict. That is the first caveat. Weaponizing the Strait is as effective as any military weapon, and the US approach in prosecuting this war confirms that, with the administration’s actions and announcements deliberately timed to keep energy markets calm.

The second point is the initial reasons for striking Iran have been replaced by a desire to destroy the country and turn it into one more failed state in a region that already has several others, most with our fingerprints on them. Iraq, Syria, and Libya spring to mind, and an Iran that can be reduced to internal sectarian warfare is not just a DC wet dream; it is also the fondest wish of a certain Middle East ally.

You may not want to hear this, but there is no grand strategy in any of the fighting. There is no multi-dimensional chess game being played out. And no good-faith negotiations are happening to end the conflict in either Iran or Ukraine. Because the powers that be do not want it to end. Trump the candidate, who talked of ending the latter war in 24 hours – and yes, I know the claim was hyperbole – will be Trump the president who is still funneling money and weaponry when the conflict reaches the 24-month mark of his administration. The Secretary of State made that clear.

Marco Rubio says that the US will help Ukraine strike deep inside Russia under the misguided notion that doing so will end the war. What such action does do, and this also applies to the European countries that are bankrolling Zelensky, is that it makes the West a legitimate target. Tell me how America would react if a foreign power, let’s use China or Russia as examples, were arming and funding forces in Canada or Mexico that were lobbing missiles at us. Thus far, Putin has refused to take the bait; at some point, he may reconsider. What sane person believes this is a risk worth taking?

Likewise, there is no danger of peace breaking out in the Iranian theater, either. On the contrary, that conflict has spread on multiple fronts. The Houthis are blocking a major export route that the Saudis use in navigating the Red Sea toward a second major global chokepoint, the Suez Canal. Iran is also targeting multiple Gulf states with attacks on energy supplies and desalination plants. This isn’t just a pending economic crisis; it’s a potential humanitarian and refugee catastrophe if clean drinking water is no longer available and millions are forced to leave. Where will they go and who is welcoming them?

Neither of these wars, not to mention the fighting in Somalia, is worth a single American life. Yet a ground invasion into Iran remains on the table, which would significantly add to the existing casualties. Moreover, what would be the objective in such a move? What will all those Marines who’ve been shipbound for months be tasked with doing, and how would land be reached without the force taking serious losses?

This is where we are. Claims of no new wars and no forever wars are now as credible as Obamacare promises that one could keep their doctor and how taking the Covid jab would immunize people from infection or transmission. Talk of peace with either Tehran or Moscow is now virtually impossible because no one in either place trusts the US and America shows little sign of trusting them. What a change in both theaters.

The end of the war in Ukraine, we were told, was contingent on an election outcome. The end of the one in Iran, we were similarly told, would be a matter of days. Both claims were false; saying that both would be false cost me a few friends, yet we are. Come November, the political landscape is likely to change. If control of the House flips, impeachment is certain. If control of both chambers changes, then conviction and removal from office become possible, especially when factoring in the usual GOPer suspects who don’t like Trump any more than most Dems. I wonder if anyone had that potential scenario on their wartime Bingo card.

Publication after publication after publication is breathlessly ‘reporting’ that hundreds of thousands are already dead because of the cuts and millions more will join them. I used scare quotes because the numbers are based on estimates that no one can credibly verify. None of those outlets spent a single word recounting how USAID squandered millions upon millions of your dollars on such notable causes as funding independent media in the Balkans, translating Sesame Street into Arabic, and providing sex changes in Guatemala. If you are wondering, those are very real expenditures and a big reason why the organization was put under the microscope.

It is almost certain that there will be negative fallout from the cuts; there always is when people who are used to getting something for nothing no longer get that thing. And that’s the point that is being ignored. Because noticing fouls the narrative. Noticing reveals the malicious truth about activism in general and aid programs in particular – there is no incentive to solve whatever issue is being targeted because doing so means the game is up. No issue naturally means no money.

As such, when money and other resources are given unconditionally year after year, the recipients have no motivation to fix whatever is wrong or even to reduce the severity of the issue because that would mean a lesser allotment of cash. Conversely, the organizations that spend our money are highly motivated to perpetuate and magnify the issue to keep the money flowing.

This aspect of human behavior is not unique to USAID. You may recall the pearl-clutching over states deciding to bar people from using food stamps to buy soft drinks, candy bars, and prepared foods. A parallel version of this dynamic surfaced when the US talked about scaling back its NATO presence and parts of Europe reacted as if the continent has a divine right to a permanent American-funded security blanket.

The pattern is the same: What starts as help sets a baseline for expectation. Giving money while asking nothing of the recipient sets the tone. Money came once and since the problem persisted, more money will follow. Repeat long enough and the result is dependency. That is painfully obvious here where the temporary safety net evolved into a way of life that spawned the term generational welfare by actively punishes anyone who tries to break free by immediately cutting some or all benefits if a recipient finds work, gets a raise, or otherwise engages in self-improvement.

Once aid starts - be it through subsidy, grant, donation, or other financial instrument – the expectation is that it will have eternal life. In other words, if you do not pony up and smile while doing it, a parade of horribles will follow. Dare to ask how much longer we have to tolerate dysfunctional states whose leaders steal directly from their people, pirate the aid we provide, or create conditions that guarantee a solution will never come, and you are treated as the villain.

Most of us care about the needy, but there are two distinct demonstrations of that. One side measures compassion by the ever-growing amount of money that is thrown at various issues. The other side measures compassion by how many fewer people still need the aid. It’s the difference between a hand-up vs. a hand-out.

The twin to dependency is entitlement. Giving unconditionally effectively makes recipients wards of the donors. Since nothing is required of them, many abandon any desire to do for themselves. This eventually leads to resentment that manifests in multiple ways. A small number of recipients will realize that aid without question robs them of agency; they have been rendered helpless by an initiative that was ostensibly meant to provide help. A larger group will complain that the aid is insufficient and demand more of it. And the activists will be right there to echo the latter sentiment because their livelihoods depend on it.

I don’t doubt that the cuts will make some people uncomfortable. But when programs pay out millions of dollars year after year and nothing changes, it is not unreasonable to ask we keep doing the same thing while expecting different outcomes. The spending is theoretically supposed to reduce need, not expand it. Again, look at the US and the trillions that spent in the war on poverty that was launched in the mid-60s, when the number of poor people had already been dropping for several years.

The poverty rate has fluctuated between 11 and 15% since the late 1970s. That is the result of the roughly 100 anti-poverty programs that exist just at the federal level. No one can say which work, which do not, which duplicate others, and no one involved wants to find out. There is little reason to believe that USAID’s spending overseas was any more effective than the domestic poverty-industrial complex has been. Had the initiative been successful, the apocalyptic stories would never been written. Instead, there would be endless tales of triumph. But, success in this realm is self-defeating, so we get the drumbeat of woe that typically follows when a gravy train is derailed.

That belief was augmented by the likes of Henry David Thoreau, who wrote that “government is best which governs least” in his 1849 essay, Civil Disobedience, the point of which was to advocate for a society whose citizens were as free as possible. And Thomas Jefferson put an exclamation point on this thought process by saying that the tree of liberty “must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants.”

A healthy republic requires involved citizens who are on guard against official overreach, people who fight against the complacency that comes with material comfort and relative peace, and an electorate opposed to the idea that every societal concern requires a govt intervention. By those metrics, the republic is not very healthy. The most glaring evidence of that is how the country was so fed up with the dysfunction of its federal officials that it twice elected a political outsider.

To be clear, Donald Trump is the result of decades of DC malfeasance, not its cause. In a healthy republic where elected representatives worked in the interests of their constituents, a billionaire real estate guy would have no interest in running for president, nor would millions take him seriously. The question is not about Trump; it’s about how things got so far off the rails that an outsider not only became viable, but was seen by millions as necessary, if only for the short-term, since 47’s successor will almost assuredly be someone whose professional life has been spent inside the political bubble.

Before we go further, it has been profoundly satisfying to hear and read about the adventures of the foreigners here attending the World Cup. Many are learning first-hand that the United States they were told about is a myth, or more accurately, a lie. Whether it’s discovering Waffle House, pulling into a Buc-ee’s, or watching an eagle circle a stadium before an exhibition soccer match.

These visitors are discovering that America is far from the hellscape they were told it was, much to the consternation of the galaxy minds at The Atlantic and other publications, who appear sad that the global futbol population does not share their disdain for America. If only they and other doomsayers were as grateful for the bounty that exists within these borders as our guests are, which brings us back to the Founders and how relative comfort leads to a structural rot that erodes society from the inside.

Not that long ago, the US was synonymous with freedom; that is no longer the case. Things that were once accepted as normal – children playing outside without adults hovering over them, airline travel where passengers were not treated like criminals, withdrawing cash from one’s account and not without being interrogated about it, or not taking an experimental jab for fear of losing one’s job – are now outliers. That society has been replaced by one with a camera on every pole, a mic over every doorway, a sensor on every corner, at least two of the above on virtually every roadway, and probably all three near the center of town.

With all that surveillance, one might expect that there would be fewer crimes and a bigger prison population without the need for a Fox Butterfield moment in wondering how that happened. For the curious, Butterfield is a former newspaper reporter who became a living punch line for his inability to understand how locking up more criminals correlates directly to fewer victims. But as Oracle’s Larry Ellison revealed, the existing surveillance hardware and that which is under construction is not to keep the bad guys in check; it’s aimed at the rest of us.

Did you ever imagine America as the land where “Citizens will be on their best behavior, because we’re constantly recording and reporting everything that is going on”? As AI matures, the vision of Ellison and others is an all-points network of interconnected cameras that track and record your every move, storing and analyzing the findings in a way that would make Orwell’s Big Brother blush. And this is happening while many in the US mock several European countries for locking up random citizens over social media posts.

None of this happened overnight. Relative peace and prosperity created a sense of contentment, which led to entitlement that fuels even more of the unsustainable federal spending that has produced the largest debt ever amassed by a people. The physical connections people once shared are in decline – membership in civic groups and churches has dropped, few of us have the same connection with neighbors that our parents had, civil political discourse is practically impossible, fewer people know their neighbors than in the past, and the default is to treat the unfamiliar with suspicion. That’s not a healthy republic; it’s a gilded prison.

As the nation’s birthday approaches, there will be endless speeches about how far America still has to go, accompanied by virtual silence on what has been achieved. There will be similar silence about the erosion of individual liberty, of being accountable for one’s actions, or of the Bill of Rights and how it alone makes our experiment in self-governance unique in the world. There is work to be done, but not in the direction that the critics imagine.

A republic, if you can keep it. Not a democracy, not a plutocracy, not a collective. A republic built on the consent of the governed, anchored by the rule of law, with a separation of powers, and a dedication to protecting individual rights. Have we kept it?

The story begins with a man named Ari Emanuel, who is Rahm’s other brother and also the CEO of TKO Group Holdings. Among TKO’s properties is the UFC, which is staging an upcoming event on the White House lawn. Emanuel is an ardent Zionist and a lifelong Democrat who has hosted fundraisers and given mightily to party candidates, both of which are factors in what follows, even if they appear counterintuitive at first glance.

Three of the biggest investors in Emanuel’s firm are the sovereign wealth funds of Qatar, Saudi Arabia, and the UAE, nations not historically known for their affinity to Jews in general or Zionism in particular. As you know, the Middle East is a cauldron of hostilities involving religion and ethnicity – sometimes between groups and at other times, among them – but any divisions that exist among the principals here are erased by a common denominator – the pursuit of profit.

You are likely aware of the friendly relationship between Trump and the UFC’s CEO, Dana White, a relationship that Emanuel accepts as a tradeoff for doing business. You also probably know about the Abraham Accords that were signed during the first Trump administration, formally normalizing relations between Israel and some of the Arab states around the Persian Gulf. Fewer people know that the Saudis gave Jared Kushner about $2 billion in seed money after he launched a private equity firm, or that the president’s son-in-law is still soliciting donations while he and Steve Witkoff masquerade as diplomats.

The point is not just that the pursuit of profit often drives unlikely partnerships; it’s also how political arrangements can be motivated by the same thing, but for different reasons. On the business side, looking past conflict is economically profitable to partners who otherwise have little in common. At the same time, perpetuating the conflict is often politically profitable to leaders who aspire to be seen as more than the president, prime minister, or monarch of a given period.

The intermediary in talks involving Israel and Hamas some months ago was Qatar, which was not necessarily motivated by the plight of anyone on the ground. More recently, the UAE pulled out of the OPEC alliance to get around the group’s production quotas in a push to expand capacity and, of course, maximize profits. The Saudis, meanwhile, are willing to give the appearance of supporting one belligerent in a conflict while doing business with the other and ignoring anyone who notices.

While much of the world has been choosing sides between the Israelis and Palestinians, or the US and Iran, or Islam vs everyone else, the moneyed class is cashing in. There is no doubt that there are true believers in the respective agendas of both the Arabs and Israel. There is even less doubt that there are people who are willing to use those true believers to advance their personal and financial interests.

A lifelong Democrat has a financial relationship with a nominally Republican president. A committed Israel supporter happily shakes hands and makes deals with Arab Muslims who we are told cannot brook the Jewish state’s existence. The money also keeps flowing to people who are more invested in death and destruction than they are in spreadsheets because war is also good business, just not for the people engaged in it. The overlap of these seemingly contradictory facts is stark, but it scarcely registers in the public consciousness.

The blueprint I mentioned earlier is about transcending generational conflict by using shared prosperity as a tool. That was the point behind the Abraham Accords – that competing interests could find common ground by prioritizing the benefits to themselves over the desire (and expense) of harming the other side.

That is the rub in the farcical talks between the US and Iran. Each side is more interested in pushing proposals it knows the other will reject than in putting forth viable recommendations that could be accepted. These are not negotiations; they are unproductive theater. A good deal means both sides get something, but neither gets everything. Some otherwise unlikely alliances have been forged by putting more emphasis on what is gained than on who wins.

I am sure it’s pure coincidence that the university is located in the same Lubbock as the court, though it speaks to today’s theme, which has nothing to do with judges or football or gambling. This is the type of ruling in which authority figures do things that defy logic and common sense, prompting the casual observer to ask, “Do they think we’re that stupid?”

Sadly – and this is probably not what you expected – the answer is no. They do not think you’re stupid. It’s far worse than that; they do not think about you at all. Your intelligence is irrelevant. People in power do stuff like this, just like they told you that Covid came from a wet market or that Tyler Robinson acted alone or that we can endlessly print money without repercussions, because they could. Because what are you going to do about it?

Human nature is very predictable in many ways. You will always, always, always get more of what you allow, encourage, subsidize, or tolerate, and you will always, always, always get less of what you penalize, punish, rebuke, or do not accept. This is true with children and it is just as true among adults, especially adults in positions of authority. When people pay no price for going against the will of their parents, their constituents, their customers, or their communities, they have no incentive to change.

The reason has a name – the FYTW Principle, and it stands as the definitive answer for whenever an inconvenient citizen dares to ask an impertinent why-based question. In case you have not yet puzzled out the letters, the sanitized version is “f you, that’s why.” It is a glib and condescending answer, but it makes up for that by also being patronizing and dismissive. Remember this whenever someone is trying to blow sunshine up places not accustomed to solar illumination.

I first saw this expression some years ago when ‘the consent of the governed’ was a far less empty phrase than it is today and when people still believed that they had a say in how they were governed. Once you are aware of FYTW, you will never become unaware of it. Its use will become evident time and again. For instance, when the CEO of BlackRock says the trillions needed to pay for data centers and a seriously expanded power grid will come from your pension funds and savings, that’s FYTW. And what Larry Fink says is backed up by new rules that change how IPOs are handled. When passive investors whose money is in index funds and similar investment vehicles ‘buy’ these initially overinflated stocks whether they want them or not, it’s FYTW².

The phenomenon is not limited to govt and public policy, not by a long shot. The brands you trust and purchase routinely ignore your feedback; the sports teams you already support demand further subsidies to build new stadiums at your expense, resulting in higher ticket prices; and the entertainment industry spends more effort making social statements than producing quality fare that consumers are willing to buy. Name the institution and odds are that multiple FYTW examples can be found.

Occasionally, people on the receiving end clutch their collective pearls and claim they’ll never again buy from company X, or they will never watch another film with actor Y, or they’ll quit supporting team Z. And maybe some people walk their talk and follow through on their convictions. But the momentary outrage is usually just that, momentary. It seldom creates the level of sustained critical mass that is necessary to compel the wrong people to do the right things, and without any reason to, these ‘wrong people’ neither notice nor care about temporary heartburn.

Nothing changes if nothing changes. This is such an unshakable fact that it is very easy to overlook. A friend of mine used it as his campaign slogan in running for and winning a school board seat. People will change their behavior when it is economically, politically, and socially profitable to do so. Human nature intuitively understands rewards and punishments.

Most of us learned how to do certain things by first recognizing how not to do them. Mistakes are wonderful teachers, but only when committing them carries a cost. When there is no downside to making the wrong choice, that choice starts to look like the right one, and when protest is fleeting, it is ignored. It does not have to be this way, but that’s up to us.

Is it simple? No, nothing worthwhile is. Is the system rigged against ordinary people? It is increasingly difficult to make the case that it’s not, but that mostly confirms how meaningful change comes with discomfort. You can accept things as they are and live as a subject. Or you can recognize that you have far more in common with your neighbor than with any powerful person and live like a citizen, one who confronts the anointed on their terms with a different application of FYTW.

So what products were featured? Pharma. Endless pharma. For everything from autoimmune disorders to skin conditions to obesity and beyond. If the condition exists, there is almost certainly a drug for it, usually to manage the condition, not to resolve it. Because resolution means that the user was a patient who is back on track, rather than a consumer who can be milked for life.

Industries need customers, preferably repeat customers. Once a person starts a drug regimen, they rarely come off it. Which means business is good. Very good. Good enough to justify billions worth of advertising. The old saying of “better living through chemistry” is on steroids, to the point where not being on one or more prescriptions makes one a societal outlier. That is just the plainly visible part, and it is where the title of this article comes into play.

If you don’t know, Prozac Nation was a 2001 film based on a novel written in the 1990s as a period piece set in the 80s. Did you follow that? It’s the tale of a young woman’s struggles with depression while at Harvard, and today, it reads as a clarion call for the radical spike in antidepressant meds prescribed to adolescents and young adults that took hold during the pandemic. Between 2020 and 2022, the use rate in this age group jumped by more than 60%; for teen and young women, it jumped nearly 130%.

And it’s not just depression. There are also ADD and ADHD, anxiety, mood swings, and so forth. The US has shifted from discussing mental health in hushed tones with people paying cash for counseling to avoid a paper trail, to the subject being shouted from the rooftops as if every diagnosis and condition is to be celebrated. That mental health has come out of the shadows is a good thing, but the pendulum effect that comes with it is not so good, beginning with the side effects and continuing with the long-term implications.

I cited the absence of ads for products like Viagra in the synopsis about the hockey game for a reason. If you recall those commercials, they invariably featured an older couple, with the man in his 60s or thereabouts. That’s no longer true. The marketing for ED products is now mostly online and the target market is also completely different. The prime audience now is guys in their 30s, which makes no sense to someone my age. At least not initially. Why is this dysfunction so prevalent in what should be a healthy, virile cohort?

That question is more rhetorical than genuine. Between the drugs that are force-fed into young people at increasingly early ages, the deterioration of the American diet, the appalling deficits in vitamin D levels, and the digital madness with its attendant issues, it’s not hard to imagine how those things might conspire to create an issue. Or if you’re a pharma exec, how they create an opportunity.

A workplace colleague is right around 30 with a prescription for anxiety. Well, with a new prescription and perhaps no prescription before long. The original medicine killed his libido; its replacement had the polar opposite effect. Neither outcome is good, but this anecdote dovetails into broader issues such as lower fertility rates among young people in general, and reduced sperm counts for men and parallel issues among women in particular. Not to sound conspiratorial, but if someone wanted to reduce the population while raising the least amount of suspicion possible, it’s hard to think of a more effective long-term approach.

To be clear, I am not anti-medication but there is such a thing as over-prescribing drugs. What’s worse is that one would expect the key reasons for the rise in use among the young – academic pressures, struggling to fit in, the isolation that came with Covid – would stop being applicable since the pandemic is over and they have presumably matured and settled into some sort of routine. But that’s just it; once on these meds, discontinuing their use is no easy feat. Again, customers. Not patients. And you thought the cartels moving illegal drugs were bad.

Pharma ads of old used to carry this disclaimer: medicines can’t help you if you don’t take them right. It’s the most obvious thing imaginable, but too many people labor under the notion that if one unit of something is good, then three units must be great. No, three units may well be catastrophic. And this says nothing of the growing use of non-medicinal testosterone and performance-enhancing peptides among young men.

Replacing the body’s natural production of something with an artificial substance means that the body eventually stops making that hormone. That hardly seems like a beneficial tradeoff. Neither is automatically prescribing a drug regimen for someone who is struggling a bit with normal life, something that pretty much all of us have done at one time or another, with no exit plan. It’s become too easy for providers to write a script for what ails ya, with little consideration of what may follow.

This country is not averse to tackling difficult things. At least, it did not used to be, and virtually one of us has learned by experience that meaningful change is almost always accompanied by temporary discomfort. These issues are not necessarily political in nature, though some involve elected officials, none of whom ran for office at gunpoint. Addressing or failing to address concerns is often manifested by how people vote with their feet, which is one thing if the goal is to leave a badly run city or state, but it’s quite another when the topics are national in nature.

The defense dilemma – No nation spends more on defense, but is the return worth the investment? The Cold War ended more than 30 years ago. The nature of warfare itself has changed significantly; drones, hypersonic missiles, and other advances have changed the battlefield, as we’ve seen in both Ukraine and Iran. Among other things, these developments challenge the dogma of forward deployment, turning the hundreds of bases scattered around the globe into targets.

Reducing the US overseas presence is long overdue, but it’s not just numbers. It’s also about an updated doctrine, one that relies less on heavy, cumbersome divisions and fleets directed by a bloated command structure that slows decision-making, and more on smaller, decentralized units that are rapidly deployable.

The Soviet Union is dead and NATO’s time is over. Instead, America’s alleged partners are fixated on provoking Russia into taking a shot at Western Europe, while ignoring that several nations have made themselves targets by arming and otherwise aiding Ukraine. Europe already has its war with Moscow; the Russians just aren’t participating, but what if they did? How quickly would the tough-guy talk among prime ministers continue before someone called daddy for help?

The three pillars – massive change is coming in the form of AI and data centers, and the best summation of what lies ahead that I’ve heard comes from Catherine Austin Fitts, an investment banker who also did a stint in the first Bush administration before moving into the advocacy business. Some will dismiss her points, which have been echoed by others, as conspiracy talk, but when King Charles openly directs his nation’s govt to enact a digital ID, this is not likely to stop with the UK.

The digital ID is the first of the three building blocks Fitts cites in the evolving digital grid and serves as the baseline. The second component is digital, programmable currency, with the hardware that will enforce this new paradigm as the third piece. From a distance, it reads like a dystopian novel; in reality, it’s a roadmap toward total behavioral control of populations that we ignore at our peril.

Americans are pushing back in some jurisdictions, while energy companies in states like Georgia and Pennsylvania are trying to use eminent domain to seize private property for the land needed to house the data centers that will house the tools of the expanding surveillance state. Irony is pushed to the breaking point as elected officials talk of bringing freedom to Venezuela, Iran, and Cuba while working diligently to curtail it here. And this is not limited to the current administration. Companies like Palantir are politically agnostic; they will support whichever side they believe will win.

The kids grow up – One of the lesser-discussed aspects of the 2024 campaign was the number of young people who shifted to the right. They voted for Donald Trump in the belief that he was the opposite of “the system,” or however you prefer to characterize the DC cabal. They supported a guy with FU money who would not be beholden to special interest or big money donors, one who saw them and the challenges their generation faces with employment, housing, and so forth. How many remain convinced that they made the right choice?

It’s important because Trump’s time is limited; there is not another outsider waiting in the wings. The contenders in either camp are professional politicians, the very people behind the dysfunction that made Trump viable in the first place. There is no substantive case to be made for returning to business as usual. Sure, there will be fewer overheated social media posts, but there will also be everything else that led people to Trump.

The younger cohort is gradually replacing the Boomers as a core voting group and their rightward turn in ‘24 is tenuous. Look at New York City, for example, where the fear of economic change resulted in a political change that will end badly. No nation has ever taxed or spent itself into prosperity; any plan that begins by scapegoating one group eventually expands to other groups. If you doubt this, study how the income tax has changed since its inception.

Will anything happen? – One way or the other, yes. It’s inevitable. A hidden reason for the Iran war is that the country’s central bank lives outside the global programmable money system. So did the other countries on Wesley Clark’s famous – or infamous? – seven nations in five years statement. When in doubt, ‘follow the money’ is the closest thing to unshakable advice that there is.

Domestically, the pillars that have undergirded the country for 250 years are crumbling right along with the public’s confidence in them. Govt, education, big business, media, and justice all face waning support, and the low level of institutional trust is also reflected among individuals. For all of its vaunted progress, society is regressing to base tribal instinct, us vs. them, ignoring that ‘us’ means Americans, including those with whom we disagree. You and people you know may not care about a single thing mentioned in this piece or the previous one, but the actors behind it all care about you. In the worst ways.

These issues do not lend themselves to pithy sound bites or X posts or blaming the other side because they are complex and non-partisan in nature. The following topics are not presented in any particular order; each is important and this is an effort to recognize their existence, why they matter, and what might be done to address them.

Artificial intelligence – Let’s start with AI because why not? The subject is endlessly discussed but only at a surface level. Like every other tectonic shift in history, this one will result in significant change, arguably far more consequential change than what followed the industrial revolution, globalization, or the advent of the digital age.

Typically, these moments trigger a combination of creation and destruction, making them simultaneously exhilarating and terrifying. That dichotomy was perfectly encapsulated during this year’s commencement exercise at the University of Central Florida. The speaker’s enthusiasm about AI was drowned by a chorus of boos from new graduates who are stepping into uncertainty.

Any talk of AI is necessarily accompanied by discussion about data centers, which the country apparently needs by the thousands, though no one has made a cogent argument as to why that is. The closest thing to an answer is “we have to beat China,” though no one has explained what we’re going to beat them at or why doing so is imperative. What people can see are stories like this, in which a suburban Atlanta facility sucked down 30 million gallons of water without anyone noticing or paying for it until residents complained about the flow into their homes being reduced to a trickle.

If AI represents a viable future, what is being done to prepare people for it? Who is projecting what new jobs will emerge that people should be trained to do? What are the necessary hard and soft skills that must be taught so that people can survive and thrive in this new chapter of societal evolution? What will work itself look like as the true face of AI comes into sharper focus? Very little thought is given to these topics, let alone discussion that goes beyond rhetorical pabulum about improving operations, reducing human error, and quickly analyzing massive data sets.

Natalism – Irrespective of AI, the country has a people problem, as in not enough of them, or at least not enough of a birth rate among the natives to sustain society. Marriage and children alike are no longer viewed as societal benefits by many, raising questions about how to incentivize more of both without being heavy-handed or coercive. And I’m not sure there is a good answer here.

The last thing anyone should want is a bunch of govt mandates and misguided uses of other people’s money, but public officials love few things more than the appearance of a crisis that they can attempt to manage. The problem itself is real; when childbearing and rearing are seen as neither societal benefits nor moral positives, the alternative is the slow-motion course toward cultural suicide that is currently underway.

To be clear, more immigration is not the answer. The country has imported more than enough low-skilled people as it is, and it’s paying the price in higher welfare expenditures. Likewise, expanding the Hi-B program should be a non-starter; what is the point of funneling young adults into college or training programs if they’re going to be shoved aside by foreign-born labor willing to work for less?

The petro dollar and monetary hegemony – Speaking of eye-glazing territory, this topic personifies it, yet it is critically important to the republic’s future. The 1974 agreement mandating that all oil transactions be settled in dollars has expired and already, nations are deviating and using other currencies. Getting out from under the dollar as the global reserve and its impact on global finance is why the BRICS alliance exists.

These changes threaten to raise America’s borrowing costs and weaken the dollar, adding a unique layer to Trump’s talk about attacking, colonizing, or incorporating as new states places like Greenland, Venezuela, Canada, and Iran. These places have something in common. Oil. A lot of oil. And control of those places and/or their production is one avenue of extending the petrodollar’s life and dominance. It is also a means of promoting resource security.

The future of education – The current model is broken. The numbers speak for themselves, as has been documented here time after time. Does anyone in a position to do so intend to address this giant elephant that is making a mess of the entire house, let alone the living room? To be clear, action involves far more than superficial tactics such as vouchers, choice-based programs, homeschooling, or alternatives that deploy the same structure in different settings.

Many have noticed the over-reliance on technology, the erosion of academic and disciplinary standards, and the effect of emphasizing social activism among young people at the expense of competence in basic skills. That’s good. The first step in addressing a problem is noticing that it exists and why.

This extends to higher education as well, where it is long past time for the ivory tower to consider how many low-ROI programs it can sustain in the arts, humanities, and social sciences. The cost of tuition is not going down and there is already a saturation of over-credentialed baristas, Uber drivers, and people toiling in jobs rather than engaged in careers. Trade programs are seeing a resurgence, but there is a ceiling here, too. Not everyone can be a plumber, welder, or electrician, just as not everyone can work in IT or healthcare.

The fallout and part two – Ten years ago, no one was talking about a mushrooming data center construction business. Today, people can’t stop talking about it and its implications, including issues that go well beyond resource usage. We’ll get into some of that time and get into the programmable money, the wall-to-wall surveillance state, and the question for control that are coming, no matter how deep in the sand one’s head is buried. There is also the future of the global security blanket to consider, the ever-expanding welfare state, and how history shows that jolting economic change often manifests in political upheaval.

Real issues demand real solutions. If only there were elected officials up to the task. It would be nice if Congress did something more meaningful than pass non-binding resolutions, rename post offices, or hold show hearings and investigations that lead nowhere. It would also be nice if state lawmakers put as much effort into wisely spending taxpayer money as they do in redrawing electoral maps. None of the topics cited today or to be addressed next week is going to be wished away, and none will be resolved by cable television rants and lectern-pounding speeches.

The issue of race is hardly new. The High Court looking beyond that is a change. The impact is now playing out in multiple states where district maps are being re-examined, not for their social impact as race-baiting pieces like this one would have you believe, but for the malicious truths that cannot be ignored. Chief among those truths is that ideas override skin color, which is as it should be.

Despite my best efforts at restraint, I jumped into the fray of the piece cited above, first noting that in the Tennessee case, the black-majority district is and has been represented by a white guy since 2007. Steve Cohen is this red state’s only Democratic House member in a red state, which is precisely one more than the number of Republicans representing the six New England states in the lower chamber.

The people crying foul about Tennessee or Texas or similar places are strangely silent about Massachusetts or Vermont or Maine. Because to speak up would be to say the quiet part out loud - that it’s all about power. Race is immaterial. The New England states are heavily white but exclusively blue, which should be a statistical impossibility unless district lines are meant to produce a desired result. And let’s be honest about this much - to a large extent, they are meant to do just that. It’s why gerrymandering exists.

Where the race argument fails is that no one would ever suggest that whites vote as a bloc, and if they have electoral agency, why don't blacks? Gubernatorial races in North Carolina and Virginia last year and this year featured black candidates. Black Republican candidates, both of whom lost. Their skin color didn’t matter, I was told. Those outcomes had to do with political priorities, not skin color.

“We vote for candidates that support policies that are popular within our community,” one respondent told me, which sounds a great deal like race being far less important than some want it to be. If a black voter does not support the black candidate, that’s not heresy or self-hatred; it’s a person voting in his/her self-interest and supporting candidates of like mind.

But the more common opinion is one that refuses to see its own contradictions. Another person asked the following two questions: “Do you ever entertain voting for someone who doesn’t have your beliefs and values? Do you ever consider voting for someone of another racial background?” The obvious answers are no and yes, which I humbly suggested makes my point – that race is largely irrelevant and ideas matter more than skin color. Yet the person who asked those questions refuted that conclusion despite having essentially made it by what was asked.

The point of elections is supposed to be about voters deciding on which set of policy prescriptions they prefer, not whose immutable characteristics match theirs. Congress has six Greek-Americans, three from each party. Does their presence harm or benefit me as someone with the same background? Does that mean anything other than a shared heritage? I don’t see how. Politics has a tribal nature but it’s not that granular.

The most telling sign of this fact is how people vote with their feet. Domestic migration patterns are heavily skewed in one direction. Whether the people who move find what they’re looking for is an open question. So is the issue of whether the transplants remember why they moved or create the nightmare scenario of working to turn their new locales into replicas of what they left behind.

Whatever one thinks of gerrymandering, the exercise is motivated by power and nothing else. Maps that privilege a specific demographic are scarcely different from those that seek partisan advantage. When the targeted demographic is virtually guaranteed to elect people of one party, the pious talk about weaponizing race loses its credibility. Society will never be color-blind; there is too much money to be made and power to be wielded in this cause-turned-racket, but anything that makes the country less color-conscious is to be applauded.

Here is the bottom line: if you want to be taken seriously, then you must stop playing the identity game. This extends to every group seeking primacy on the grievance hierarchy. It also confirms the truth behind Thomas Sowell’s saying that when groups are used to preferential treatment, equal treatment looks like discrimination. He also said that civil rights was once about treating everyone the same. In other words, one person, one vote. Immutable factors sold separately.

Some of you have grown frustrated with your fellow Americans who are not demonstrating the proper enthusiasm for the war with Iran. They do not share your passion for the President’s social media bluster or the tallies regarding ships sunk and targets hit. Instead, they are more focused on how a prolonged affair will disrupt their regularly scheduled lives.

What follows is an overview of who these people are, why they are not fixated on this conflict, and some historical context that has all too conveniently been left out of the discussion. There are two primary groups of the disenchanted. One of them can be divided into two sub-sets and I will start there:

· The two-sided section includes people who follow the news, perhaps not as closely as you do, but they follow just the same. They are aware that Iran sponsors terrorism, that a US ally is deeply vested in this conflict, and that global resources hang in the balance. Beyond that, these two camps are markedly different.

o One side opposes anything that Donald Trump says or does simply because Donald Trump is saying or doing it. What is said or done is immaterial. He could rightly say that daily exposure to sunshine is beneficial to public health and a sizable part of this group would accuse the president of promoting skin cancer.

o The other side voted for Trump but is anti-war, barring the US being attacked by an outside force. They expected the Ukraine conflict to have ended by now and they are not on board with new fighting. They question what US national interest is being served, what the cost will be, and what side effects will emerge.

· The second group is people who have heard of Iran but otherwise spend little time thinking about the country or its role in the geopolitical landscape. All they have been told is that “Iran cannot have nukes,” but beyond that, the administration has failed to make the case for why this war is vital. This is not a small matter. These people’s lives do not revolve around daily briefings, cable chat shows, or social media. They want to make a living, enjoy some time with their families, and indulge in activities they enjoy. It will take more than browbeating to reach them.

For you couch commanders, that last part is intensely frustrating. You want them to care; you need them to care. But their biggest concern is how this will impact their lives. Today, it’s the higher cost of a fill-up; tomorrow, it may be something far more dire since a significant chunk of the world’s fertilizer is bottled up inside the Strait of Hormuz. They, like all Americans, enjoy the luxury of warfare being waged “over there,” wherever there is. No one in the US has an ear tuned to sirens that warn of incoming missiles, nor are men in the uniform of another country storming American beaches.

I know you’re irritated that so many do not share your angst over this matter because I’ve read your comments. You see an existential issue; they see a host of domestic priorities being ignored. You take the ayatollah’s apocalyptic rhetoric literally; they may not even take it seriously. You can call them myopic, you can call them ill-informed, you can call them stupid, but those are not strategies nor are they likely to be persuasive. Your priority is not their priority.

By the way, how is your priority working out thus far? We can all agree that the American military is far superior to Iran’s in terms of capability, equipment, and money spent. We should also be able to all agree that wars are not won through air power alone. At some point, winning means the use of ground forces, and the memories of Iraq and Afghanistan are still fresh enough that the people in these groups do not want to go there.

This is another point of frustration, and again, the comments are revealing, whether they mention the Stone Age or parking lots or cheer for the destruction of millennia-old civilization because of who’s been in charge since 1979. Some of you are surprised and get a bit offended when it’s pointed out that history did not begin that year, and how your talking point that “they’ve been at war with us for 47 years” is intellectually dishonest.

You leave out the part where we have been at war with them, too, starting with how Iraq under Saddam Hussein served as our proxy in the 1980s. We helped the Iraqis kill tens of thousands of Iranians, some with poison gas that somehow found its way into Saddam’s arsenal. The ’47 years’ claim also whitewashes how the US and England conspired to overthrow a democratically elected govt in the 1950s, replacing it with our hand-picked puppet, the Shah. Numerous pictures of Tehran in the 60s and 70s show what looks like a modern Western city. None of them shows the Shah’s secret police, because dictators are always going to dictate whether they are friendly to us or not.

There was another development in the 80s that will strike anyone who was not around as the living definition of counterintuitive. It became known as Iran-Contra and involved America selling weapons to the ayatollahs for two reasons. First, the secret arms sales were a tool for gaining the release of American hostages who were being held in Lebanon. Second, the profits from those sales were funneled to the Contras, a Nicaraguan group that was fighting against the communists who ruled the country then…and who still rule it today.

A few of you are irritated that certain questions keep being repeated, mostly because the answers we get change with each iteration. 1) What is the mission? 2) What defines victory? 3) What will the aftermath look like? I’m not a general nor do I play one on TV. I did, however, play the part of an Israeli soldier in the 1967 war in a film some years back, and those three questions were central to the movie and to actual wars. I lived around a very active Army post long enough to understand that sending in forces is not taken lightly.

No one knows when this conflict will end. That means you have time to persuade the skeptics. You might gain converts, you might not. Either way, you will have done what the president and his team have not done – make the case, the broader case, the one that extends beyond nuclear weapons, the one that explains why action is imperative, and what will come of it. A presidency may well hang in the balance.

Warm regards,

Alex

This country has always had its disagreements, be they political, cultural, or social. What we have not had is the blind hatred that readily embraces violence as a viable remedy to disputes. What we have not had is the comfort with which some people call others the most vile names imaginable in attempting to dehumanize their targets. What we have not had is the open desire to see one’s perceived opponents not just lose an election but suffer, if not die.

When you are celebrating the murder of innocents or openly wishing for horrible things to befall other people, then you are a human skid mark, a stain on the national fabric. You are not part of the problem; you personify it. That is not a good look. How ironic that a place that wears “diversity is our strength” like a costume cannot even agree on a common reality, let alone have a good-faith discussion about different approaches to address shared concerns.

Before anyone thinks of going there, the cause is not Donald Trump. He is the result of the dysfunction and the ongoing erosion of public trust and societal cohesion that began long before the real estate guy decided to run for president. If anything, Trump’s campaigns and electoral wins are an indictment of the self-serving DC cabal that engaged in decades of intentional failure, making the likes of Trump possible, if not necessary.

I say ‘intentional failure’ because it is impossible to fathom that the people who are routinely held before us as the best and brightest could be so wrong so often on so many things. From the national debt to the fraud now being uncovered, from the refusal to address immigration to the current quest for other people’s wealth, and from the failed justice system to the equally failed public education system, the rot runs deep.

When a man who has never held even a local office can not only mount a credible run for the presidency, but also win election twice (and some will insist it’s three times), that is a stark warning that the republic has lost its way and is in dire need of course correction. Instead of engaging in the slightest bit of introspection about their roles and public perception, the prevailing response among the elected class and its media enablers has been to oppose the New York vulgarian at every turn, even when he is right.

At the risk of oversimplification, the country is divided into two groups. One group sees govt as its mama, daddy, and lord and protector with a duty to shield members from the discomfort of reality. The other group is people who understand that govt has a role within civil society, but aside from a few basic duties, this side mostly wants to be protected from the first group and otherwise left alone. There are a few outliers within each camp but they are outliers nonetheless, and that only amplifies the dereliction of duty that exists among the elected and the equally useless blob of federal agencies, bureaucracies, and departments.

These people demonstrate who and what they are at any given opportunity. Remember the howling when the ill-fated DOGE program found waste and fraud? More than a year later, federal law enforcement has uncovered….waste and fraud in multiple states, as if Elon’s whiz kids were right all along. Instead of addressing the cavalier use of other people’s money, instead of doing something meaningful on immigration, and instead of cleaning up its own house, Congress continues doing more of what has earned it an approval rate that is slightly above that of fungus.

So, where does the country go? Recognizing an issue is the easy part; doing something about it is another matter. I have long been of the mind that every cause-driven organization has a far greater incentive to perpetuate its particular issue than to solve it, and the same seems true of the federal govt. Outside of hearings that are solely for show, social media rants, and cable television spots, we have 535 employees who would have been fired with cause long ago in a normal business setting.

The idea of “we the people” may sound offbeat 250 years after the republic was founded, but it is as true today as it was then. Sure, conditions have changed since the days of the part-time and impermanent political class; the size and scope of govt alone, combined with the money involved, would send half the Founders into seizures. We, meanwhile, have become immune to it through the slow boil that comes with time.

When this Substack journey began more than three years ago, the maiden post was about an American empire on the brink: “Trust in institutions is at a historic low. Trust in each other is not much higher. The public officials who work for us increasingly believe it’s the other way around.” I shudder to think where the country will be three years hence.

My apologies for the pessimism. It’s typically good form to balance criticism with some constructive ideas, but these people listen to no voices other than their own and those of major donors. Besides, I’ve laid out suggestions before, just as you have proposals of your own. On occasion, something of value happens, but those times are the exceptions. DC seems determined to prove that this thing of ours will continue until it no longer can.

I’m not sure what the point of mindless generational bashing is, but the galaxy brains who work inside some of the nation’s leading publications think it is one worth making. The articles collectively read like a subtle attempt at demonizing and dehumanizing a certain population, taking this inter-generational sniping that has always existed to a different level.

This is a long way from old codgers talking about youthful tastes in music, clothing, and hairstyles. It’s not even on a par with the usual descriptions of young people as lazier, less motivated, and softer than their predecessors. This is a new dynamic. First, the flow of accusations has reversed. Millennials and Gen-Zers are attacking seniors, and second, the commentary comes with a bite and an edge, as if the implied subtext is “hurry up and die already.”

The New York Times opines that “Older Americans are hoarding America’s potential,” as if potential is a tangible commodity that can be controlled by third parties. It is not and it can never be. Potential speaks to undeveloped capacity, promise, and talent; it hints at what can be, making it a strange word to apply to people who are on the back side of their lives. And how anyone can hoard what amounts to possibility is not clear, but perhaps it’s not meant to be. The point is the blame, not the reasoning behind it.

The Wall Street Journal takes a different approach, asking “Did Millennials or Boomers have it harder?” as if both of those groups grew up and lived within the same vacuum under identical conditions. That, of course, is nonsense, but it is a common theme expressed by the younger generations who believe their version of the American Dream has been stolen. Stories like this claim that the thieves are their parents and grandparents.

Finally, The Atlantic weighs in by proclaiming that we live in “An Oligarchy of Old People.” I don’t know when it became confusing that a 70-year-old will have accumulated more wealth than a 20-something due to time and experience, but it is treated like a sociological phenomenon. It isn’t. People who have worked for several decades, perhaps benefitted from an inheritance, and invested a portion of their earnings will, by definition, have more than someone who is just starting or is early into their professional life.

None of us has any power over the time period into which we were born. I have written before about growing up in the idyllic 60s and 70s, when free-range children who explored every corner of their neighborhoods and beyond were the norm. Perhaps it is common to romanticize one’s youth because life is much simpler during childhood. I do lament the freedom that has been lost and the fear and paranoia that have replaced it, neither of which is good for anyone no matter their age. As the saying goes, life’s main constant is change. It is typically for the better in some ways and less so in others. Let’s focus on the former – the better – for a second.

There is a growing fondness for socialism among younger age groups, shaped in large part by a misapplication of the term. For starters, there is no such thing as democratic socialism. Those two terms are violently at odds and cannot be reconciled. Where it applies is to countries with capitalist economies and high levels of taxation that fund a variety of public services. It is an approach of self-governance that is much easier to enact in a culturally homogeneous society than in one where half the population seems to hate the place. But it also leaves out what makes those systems possible, namely how people can create, invent, and trade in (somewhat) free markets.

Putting this into perspective, an American today has easy access to things that the likes of John Rockefeller, the world’s richest man at one point, could not even imagine. He was not able to fly cross-country for a few hundred dollars. He was not able to engage in instant communication with anyone, anywhere, at any time. He didn’t even have air-conditioning. Before we chuck a system that has proven its utility over the generations, let’s take stock of what is real and what is not.

It is true that life today is not like it was 50 years ago, but life in 1976 was not like it had been 50 years prior to that. Every generation has unique challenges and opportunities cast in its path. For the oldest Americans, there are faint memories of the Depression, at this point mostly from stories passed down. For others, World War II was the key milestone, with tales of loss, sacrifice, and grit during a conflict that dominated everything for more than four years. For still others, there is the continuing tech age and its habit of presenting possibilities that are simultaneously exhilarating and terrifying.

It is also true that the price of the average home is substantially higher than it was in the 1970s. But that home today is much larger; it comes with conveniences and gadgets that did not exist 50 years earlier, it has multiple cars in the garage, and it typically houses multiple income earners. I don’t see a huge desire for 1,500 square foot, three-bed, 1.5 bath homes with a single phone, a single television, and formica countertops and avocado appliances. If you know, you know; if you don’t, it’s okay.

Working remotely (which means you can live anywhere), digital entrepreneurialism, and pocket-sized devices provide instant access to information and entertainment, or connect us with other people are the norm. We live in such abundance that obesity is a national health problem. The amount of wasted food amounts to 30-40% of the overall supply, not because people are reckless but because of an almost obscene level of abundance.

People of a certain age will recall being chastised about eating their veggies because children were starving in India. Today, those kids are more likely to be put on weight loss drugs than lectured about clean plates. Where leftovers are routinely tossed out today, the moms of old spooned uneaten food into empty Country Crock or Parkay (does this still exist?) containers, the precursors to Tupperware, to save for later. Things that had utility were simply not thrown away. Contrast that with the queue every time a new generation of iPhone is released.

I have sympathy for young people who grew up with expectations that seem difficult to realize. They are bombarded by talk of how the systems around them are failing, but that argument misses the point. A system works as it is designed to work; it goes awry when people start tinkering with it. Our system has endured many changes; every point in societal evolution has displaced parts of the labor force, and every evolutionary point has created opportunities that were heretofore nonexistent.

Anyone alive today is among the top one percent of all people who have ever lived. Anyone alive today takes for granted the ability to do things that elites of the Gilded Age could not fathom. None of this was voted into existence. None of this was the result of central planning commissions mapping out their next five-year plan. None of it stemmed from distribution. The power to create, to invent, and to produce remains. Blaming a bunch of old folks is not going to change that.

Let’s start with how the cease-fire has not resulted in an agreement. Because it was never intended to. Because not everyone wants the fighting to end. And because two parties cannot work out a deal in a conflict that involves multiple other parties, especially when negotiations consist of each party pushing proposals it knows the other will reject.

This war centers on the US and Iran. It also affects Israel, which gets daily briefings from the Trump team while opening a new front in Lebanon. It affects the Gulf states that are being struck and are questioning their reliance on American protection. It also affects the non-combatant nations whose economies are being strangled as the products they rely on are stuck in transit.

This is becoming yet another case study in how wars, while insanely easy to start, are often very difficult to end. It’s why I keep going back to these three points: what is the mission now, beyond a non-nuclear Iran; how is victory defined; and what will the aftermath look like? The dilemma is that these questions go beyond Washington and Tehran. Each of the other that is affected has its own self-interests, which may or may not align with ours.

What America wants is almost certainly not the same thing as what Israel wants. For all his bluster and Trump being Trump, this president doesn’t want a chaotic and dysfunctional Iran, because that would mean even more instability in the Middle East. The Netanyahu govt, meanwhile, would very much like to see an Iran that mirrors Iraq, Syria, and Libya, existing as one more failed state, too preoccupied with its internal sectarian and tribal issues to notice its neighbors.

This outcome serves neither American nor European interests. Western adventures in the Middle East have a habit of sparking the mass migration of people who have no interest in relocating for the sake of becoming British, French, German, or American. These outcomes are painfully visible in a Europe that is being colonized, its culture being uprooted and changed in real time. The same thing, on a much smaller scale, is happening in parts of the US and Canada. Here and abroad, the people who were once welcomed as refugees appear far more intent on conquest than assimilation.

The potential fallout of an Iran that is destroyed and left to deal with factional infighting has a great deal to do with NATO partners being reluctant to join the battle. They’ve seen the movie before and they know how it ends. Europe is already feeling the economic shock from this conflict. When combined with the continent’s self-inflicted wounds regarding energy policy, farming, national identity, and the irrational desire for war with Russia, it’s not hard to understand why the Euros are not on board.

The nations within NATO have indeed grown spoiled and entitled. That is not just true, it is also the predictable result of creating dependency. The US was content to do the heavy lifting for decades because doing so served American interests. Then came this Trump guy, who first held the Europeans accountable for their promised contributions to NATO, and then threatened to withdraw from the alliance when the asked-for help in this conflict was refused.

The European response is the same thing that happens every time conditions are imposed on aid that was previously given unconditionally. The same thing happened on a different level during Congressional debates about food stamps and the imposition of certain requirements on recipients. As with the Europeans, people who were used to getting something for nothing freaked out upon learning that they were no longer getting money without strings.

The US has long enjoyed the luxury of being separated from the battlefield of the moment by thousands of miles. It is hard to overstate the effect of this on the American psyche. The typical citizen may feel some discomfort over surging gas prices or worry about higher costs on everything else if this continues much longer. But we are not likely to enact rationing as other nations are doing, nor are there sirens going off to warn of incoming missile fire.

Amid the jingoism and watching the world’s most expensive and best-equipped military overwhelm a smaller, weaker opponent, the average citizen is more interested in individual pursuits than in global affairs. The younger ones, in particular, want to know who moved their American dream while an impotent DC duopoly dithers over budgets, what to do about its ethically challenged members, and the continued decoding of the Epstein files.

Eventually, this war will end. What will the region look like when that happens? It’s not a small consideration. There is also an ironic twist that binds the administration and the regime; each has painted itself into a corner with desperately little wiggle room. Trump cannot back down because he’s made too much noise; the regime can’t back down because everyday Iranians might well kill the leadership themselves. Something has to give.

Meanwhile, more US troops are being deployed to the region, and Trump is talking about another possible bombing campaign while Pakistani officials are trying to engineer more talks. I want to believe that Trump’s bravado is a means to a peaceful end, but this implies that any decisions are his and his alone to make and are driven by America’s interests. A regime without nukes is in our interest; an Iran reduced to rubble and internally broken is not.

· Recognize the renaming of the Gulf of Mexico as the Gulf of America

· Require all public schools to display The Ten Commandments

· Mandate that each school day begin with a recitation of The Pledge of Allegiance

No doubt, the combined weight of these measures will result in children who are smarter, stronger, and healthier, along with adults who are better spouses, parents, and employees, and if you disagree, it’s because you want the Marxists to win. Sarcasm aside, it’s not hard to find people who will vocally defend all three of these moves as vital to the state’s progress. I can testify to that, having been assailed by people intent on missing the proverbial forest to fixate on their favorite tree.

The daily Pledge ritual, I’m told, will engender respect among the young, something that “people like you” (meaning me) failed to instill in our children. Right. Presumably, forcing students to take part in a 30-second incantation will arrest years of stagnation. There is nothing inherently wrong with the Pledge. Nor is there anything wrong with having a healthy respect for one’s country, its culture, its traditions, and its history, good and bad, but making kids repeat a bunch of words is not going to accomplish that.

Likewise, the Commandments are a fine set of rules, and many of The Ten have been incorporated into civil and criminal law here and much of the rest of the world, and they are also key tenets of the major religions. I don’t know of any countries that openly sanction murder and theft, for example, and the point about coveting is echoed in the seven deadly sins. That four of the points speak directly to one’s relationship with God, which is not in the system’s purview, is intentionally ignored, but that’s not the hill to die on today.

What the measure about the Gulf has to do with anything is anyone’s guess. I rarely encounter anyone who uses the full name, no matter which version you prefer. It’s usually The Gulf and, occasionally, The Gulf Coast. But these are paid professional politicians, so it is possible I missed something that explains why this topic was worthy of legislators’ time.

The school-related bills are particularly salient as they address a core public service – education. It’s in this state’s constitution as it is in other states, and there is no point bogging down in a philosophical discussion over whether that’s good. It simply is, so it demands addressing, and I don’t mean wasting time on voucher ideas or private schools or other proposed remedies that would not exist if the public perception were that the system is working at full capacity.

For instance, do not let the headline of this article fool you. The ‘gains’ that are highlighted are real, but they belong in context, starting with how they reflect a bounce-back from the Covid lockdowns whose damage lingers. Among fourth graders, math proficiency rose. To 37%. 37%. While not necessarily praiseworthy, it is a sizable leap forward from the 27% proficiency that was recorded in the previous assessment, so consider that a plus with an asterisk beside it. Among eighth graders, however, proficiency is 18%; no asterisk can justify that. Reading, meanwhile, is better across the board, but 55% proficiency as opposed to 53% says there is ample headroom.

In fairness, this issue is not exclusive to my state. As we have covered before, the reading that television commercials of yesteryear told us was fundamental is now barely optional. Test scores nationwide are pathetic, with some jurisdictions reporting that not a single student performs at grade level. Barely literate young people are graduating from high schools, and colleges are increasingly forced to provide remedial coursework for the academically unprepared. Which is why I am harping a bit about legislative priorities.

There is also the matter of the blossoming data center industry, which includes 27 facilities that are either operational or under construction. Love them or hate them, they are coming. At least 11 states have enacted measures that either restrict development or ban it altogether. In this state, to their credit, lawmakers are working to manage the impact and to inject transparency into the process.

That issue came to light over plans for a facility in Bessemer, which generated a tremendous amount of heat that was fueled by the non-disclosure agreements that city officials signed with developers. It is impossible to generate trust in govt when the people a community elects keep secrets from their constituents about projects that will impact their lives to some degree.

Pending bills speak to protecting consumers from spikes in utility rates, as data centers are energy and water hogs, and to limiting the tax breaks offered to developers for businesses that have next to zero impact on job growth. Be honest; if you’re building one of these in a rural corner of any state, you’re not going to hire from the local workforce for anything beyond, maybe, the initial construction. Even then, it is far more likely that a contractor will be brought in to do the work.

This sort of thing matters far more than cosmetic measures to instill citizenship among children who hear a cacophony of voices telling them how horrible their country is and what a sorry lot its founders were. I hate to break this people, but the search for the perfect nation in which to live will never end because there is no perfect. Our system works, to the extent that it works, by featuring the ability to adapt as public sensibilities change. If only the reverse could also be done to break people of the silly habit of seeing the past through the lens of the present. But I digress.

Nothing is easier than second-guessing anything that any public agency at any level of govt does, but that beats apathy by a few light years. If you’re noticing stuff, at least you’re paying attention and nothing will ever change if no one notices issues and suggests ways of correcting them. It is impossible to overstress the latter point – as with second-guessing, complaining is insanely simple; posing potential solutions is much harder, which may be why it tends to be avoided. And maybe it’s why such a small percentage of the population runs for office in the first place.

The number of free ponies being touted is endless – college tuition, child care, expanded Medicare, and other goodies. Never mind that there is no such thing as “free” and never mind the terrible truth of grandiose federal ideas. First, they are permanent and virtually guaranteed to grow every year, regardless of how well or how poorly they work. That means a perpetual need for money that cannot come from billionaires alone. Today, it’s Elon and Jeff Bezos; tomorrow, it’s you.

Second, the cost projections of grand ideas never line up with reality. Let’s use Medicare since expanding it is a favorite among the elected class. When the program began in 1966, it was projected to cost $9 billion by 1990. The actual price tag that year was $63 billion. That’s a 7X difference and this gap applies to virtually every other large-scale govt initiative. And for those who do not know, Medicare is not free.

A monthly premium is deducted from one’s Social Security checks and that’s just for basic Medicare, the part that is for hospitalization. There are also three other parts for prescriptions, outpatient visits and lab work, and extras such as vision and dental coverage, and those are not free, either. In other words, this Congressional fantasy of providing the masses with a host of benefits by squeezing those horrible, terrible, no good, very bad billionaires for just a smidge of their wealth is a lie.

It is a potentially expensive lie told by the people whose mismanagement of your money and mine has already created a national debt that is approaching $40 trillion. This country is spending roughly seven trillion of other people’s money per year, a portion of it borrowed, but not a single dollar that would be gained through this wealth tax scheme would address the shortfall. Instead, it would make the debt even larger and raise it to a figure even more incomprehensible than the current number.

For all the talk of democracy and being a constitutional republic, the US is becoming the worst sort of oligarchy – one ruled by people with an insatiable appetite for our dollars and virtually no governing principle on how to spend them. “But Alex, we have elections. We have a say in these things.” Sure, keep telling yourself that. Have you tried contacting your millionaire representative in Congress? Did you actually reach that person or did some staffer assure you that your inquiry is being taken seriously while you never heard back from anyone?

The politicians pushing this grand scheme are the same ones who turned millions of lives upside down with Covid. They helped engineer the upward wealth transfer they now pretend to decry. They are the people who said nothing while millions of illegals openly walked into the country, where many are housed, fed, and clothed at your expense. They are the people who said nothing during the years of endless money printing that devalued the dollar. And now, they’re suddenly on your side, pushing class warfare and hoping your anger at a few rich people will be greater than your disgust with the people you elected.

Few things in life are easier than criticizing govt. At some point, however, it becomes necessary to confront the person who enables the elected class. That’s the one in the mirror looking back at you. Not one of the 535 members of Congress elected themselves and not one of them can re-elect themselves. They complain about a tax code that they wrote; they complain about the excesses of industries that they subsidize; and they complain about the predictable results of the policies they enact. And we let them do it and get away with it.

You already know this. Nothing here is necessarily new and none of it should be shocking, but here we are. The younger generation has figured out that it has been dealt a difficult hand, but will the people affected do something about it, or will they blame ‘the boomers’ instead? Will they move to become part of the solution and undo some of the mess, or will they sit idle and occasionally complain that nothing changes because nothing changes?

The phrase ‘bread and circuses’ originated during the Roman Empire and was used to describe how a population could be kept docile and compliant as long as there was food and entertainment to distract people from 1) the more serious issues around them and, more importantly, 2) the inability and/or refusal of officials to address those issues. And so, we get the likes of a wealth tax. Because if you cannot trust an organization that has proven itself grossly untrustworthy with your money with even more money, you want the bad guys to win. Or something.

One final point worth raising – the political wish lists almost invariably involve healthcare, which is already among the most regulated segments of the economy and has the increased costs to prove it. Not that long ago, two states – California and Vermont – took a serious look at enacting their own single-payer systems. Both initiatives failed. Because they are ridiculously expensive and because disparate competing interests were driven by their parochial demands rather than by any desire to develop a workable policy. But mostly, it was about money.

The proposed wealth tax is also about money. Someone else’s money that, in the hands of Congress, will yield magical results. Just like the other high-minded initiatives did. Here is a novel idea for the people perpetually on the hunt for more revenue: adequately budget and spend what you already have and do so to a point where none of the budget has to be borrowed. Treat our money as if it were yours. For if there was a real-life, modern-day Robin Hood, he would be looking at you, not the gilded class.

Reich is correct, but not in the way he thinks. If you read the rest of what he wrote, you’ll see a man who refuses to get it, one who chooses political orthodoxy over ideas that work. For Reich and others like him, the issue is never the myriad federal programs whose incentive is perpetuate poverty (and other problems), not fix it. It’s why he pivots to billionaires and wealth inequality, where again, he is partially right while spectacularly missing the point.

He claims, “concentrated wealth is a policy choice,” but speeds right past how the policy was enacted. The uber rich can’t pass laws themselves; the politicians whom the rich rent do that, but Mr. Reich conveniently how not a single member of Congress took an oligarch’s money at gunpoint. So yes, it is a policy choice, but one that he refuses to cll for what it is. Political whores never blame one another, they blame their johns.

Bobby, of course, also leaves out that he, too, is part of the gilded class; he’s among the many who grew fat and wealthy by producing nothing. And his handwringing over poverty contains no mention of the roughly 100 agencies at the federal level alone. There is no inquiry as to which programs work, which don’t, or which duplicate others, and there is even less interest in finding out. Because results are not the goal; the show of doing something is the goal. More programs gives the impression of a stronger committment. Yet, every incentive built into the system makes clear that problem-solving is not in anyone’s interest. Let me explain.

What would happen if, of those hundred programs, maybe 60 were found to be worthwhile? In a sane world, the remaining 40 programs would be eliminated, to the joy of taxpayers who tire of endlessly funding failure. But for the people whose livelihood or political power comes from one of the 40 programs, this is an existential threat. To everyone on those payrolls, their program is the single most important federal expenditure there is. For the political sponsors of each, nothing is more important than maintaining the flow of money, with the expectation that the staff will then vote for those who make it possible. No one involved gives a damn about the poor.

The larger point is that people within Fedzilla have made countless policy choices that are not meant to resolve whatever they were formed to address. It’s a form of publicly-funded activism and follows the same model – give lip service to solutions while working to perpetuate whatever the issue is. Because genuine resolution means the gravy train stops and everyone involved has to find a new grift.

This is why the race hustlers keep acting like it’s 1926, despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary. It’s why the feminists continually invoke The Handmaid’s Tale, blissfully ignorant that Margaret Atwood’s inspiration was not evil white guys or conservatives or Americans at all, but rather, the regime in Iran. And it’s why the alphabet people keep inventing new letters while pretending we’re still in the pre-Stonewall era.

A few months ago, lifetime progressive Jon Stewart committed a type of heresy in challenging Bernie Sanders’ unflinching belief in all things govt. Parts of that interview can be seen here and here. Stewart – and again, credit where it’s due – rightly pointed out how govt’s takeover of the student loan program and providing health insurance subsidies made tuition and the cost of healthcare more expensive, not less. Sanders’ “response” was not really a response; it was more a series of bumper sticker platitudes to assure Stewart that ole Bern was one of the common folk and deeply committed to the cause.

Stewart, like Bill Maher and some others, is astute enough to call bullshit on his own party. This doesn’t mean that either will ever stop being a reliable D vote; there remains quite a gap within partisan congregations in their ability to separate principles from principals. Maher may have enjoyed having dinner with Trump and telling the president what he thinks about topics, but he’s not in danger of being red-pilled. Likewise, Stewart is not convinced that govt intervention is always helpful, but he’s not about to abandon the party of intervention.

The national dialogue is not about policy choices; it’s charitable to even call it a dialogue. Ours has become an environment of opposite worldviews that cannot be reconciled. Reich knows this and so do people like him. They’re not in the solutions business; they’re in the business of normalizing anger, envy, and resentment as distractions so people will be too busy blaming some rich guy while ignoring the lawmaker who has a far greater impact on their lives.

They don’t want you to question the poverty policies that cost more every year but deliver less. They don’t want you to question the homelessness policies that result in more homeless people. They don’t want you to question, as Jon Stewart did, why something becomes more expensive and less efficient when federal hands touch it. They don’t want you to question. Because if you do that, you might also start demanding answers. You might eventually realize that it’s not govt money being misused; it’s your money. And you might start wondering who benefits from policies that are designed to produce the opposite of what their stated intentions, because it’s probably not you.

The answer begins by understanding that Chicago is a sanctuary city within a sanctuary state. The answer concludes by implying that the needs of the illegal are greater than the expectations of the taxpaying citizen. My friend referred to this incident as one among many “isolated failures. They reflect a governing philosophy that deprioritizes enforcement and treats public safety as negotiable.”

Let me present an alternative viewpoint. This murder and other similar incidents are not failures as the word is defined. They are intentional outcomes. I can almost hear the horror and see the pearls being clutched. “Alex, how could you possibly say that?” Because when the usual reasons for why things happen don’t add up, one must consider alternative explanations. And when you strip away the excuses and the lies and the rest, what remains is probably the truth.

The people who run govt at all levels are not stupid. Many are educated at elite institutions and presumably understand both cause and effect, and correlations between actions and likely outcomes. The reality that you may not want to hear is this: There are people within the political and legal systems of this nation who are perfectly okay with a certain number of Americans being murdered by either illegals or by domestic criminals who should have been in prison instead of running loose, terrorizing citizens.

Make no mistake, this is a form of terrorism, one we do not discuss often enough. Terrorism is not just swarthy bearded guys named Ahmed Al-Kaboom wearing suicide vests and motivated by jihad. It’s also guys – and it is mostly men – who refuse to fit into polite society and who have learned that they can do almost anything and face very little chance of even being arrested, let alone convicted and sentenced to long stretches in prison.

This is domestic terrorism and it is not only meant to instill fear, but to also send a message to the law-abiding that their govt cannot and, often, will not take steps to protect them. Whether the victim is a Ukrainian immigrant in Charlotte, a retired professor in Auburn, this college student in Chicago or another in Georgia, the result is the same: innocent people were killed by either career criminals who were released into the public or imported criminals who the system also let set free.

What exactly is the acceptable number of Americans murdered by people from either group? The correct answer is and should be zero, but reality says otherwise and the toll keeps climbing on an almost daily basis. Again, the elected and the appointed officials, and the prosecutors and judges involved are not ignorant people. Why then do they value criminals and illegals over you?

Senseless tragedies are bad enough when there is no possible way to prevent their occurrence. But outcomes that were easily predictable but allowed to happen anyway are another matter. These results do not stem from incompetence, bad policy, poor judgment, or inexperience. They are the product of intent. They arise from political choices. Deliberate, conscious, calculated choices.

Tape this next to your computer screen: foreseeable consequences are never accidental. Your govt, my govt, has put into motion a series of measures that are guaranteed to end with people who are minding their own business being harmed or killed. It may well be the most depressing realization you’ll have all year. It violates every expectation that citizens have of the govt that their taxes fund.

This does not apply to every single person working in every single jurisdiction, but does it have to before the number of victims becomes too big to ignore? Is there such a point, or do we give a pass to the people behind the policies because they represent our team or echo our sentiment regarding immigration or the justice system?

I’ve often thought that the best way for people to change their minds about policy ideas is for them to be personally affected by the results. That’s not something I wish for, but people don’t learn when others suffer. They are far more likely to excuse the result as a case of insufficient funding or improper oversight, or they deviate into psychobabble about root causes as if the criminals involved have no agency. That’s nonsense. The crimes are as deliberate as the policies that enable them, and both will continue as long as the perpetrators do not fear the potential repercussions and the policy-makers do not fear you.

England is an easy target for having imprisoned more people for social media posts than any other country and second place is not even close. You can probably name a few American officials who would like to do the same, and they are not restricted by party. There is a growing surveillance state that will only become more onerous and do not forget the crisis of the moment.

The last war ushered in the Patriot Act and spawned the TSA. Does the presence of either make you feel freer or safer? Ben Franklin warned that any nation which trades liberty for security is likely to wind up with less of both. I’d like to believe that people have not forgotten the ham-fisted Covid period, when govt actively worked to silence inconvenient voices, often with the help of citizens who were eager to turn on their neighbors.

In the past couple of years, govts in multiple European nations have tried to seize productive farmland, because politicians and bureaucrats with barely a callous on their manicured hands know better about efficient land use than people who have worked the soil for generations. Back home, the judicial system is a bad joke, with public safety compromised and law-abiding citizens being murdered because some officials find jailhouse demographics upsetting.

In the past couple of months, three topics have further underscored the point. Majorities of voters in both parties want a strong voter ID law, yet passage of the SAVE Act is anything but certain. A majority also wants the Epstein documents released, and it’s probably safe to say that will never happen. More people oppose the war in Iran than support, and you can see how that’s going.

To be fair, a country cannot govern by referendum; that’s the whole point of representative govt through which elected officials give voice to their constituents’ concerns. But in each of the instances cited above, the message from on high is clear: not only are politicians actively ignoring what the public thinks or wants, but they are also dismissing public concern as irrelevant and perhaps annoying. Just who do you little people think you are, questioning your betters? Despite that, the midterms are approaching, with the usual chorus that voting R or D will magically make things better. Really?

Two things are in play and, uncomfortable as it may be, these are malicious truths you need to understand. First, federal policy-making is not about we the people, not primarily. It is about satisfying major donors, with the expectation that doing so will keep the campaign cash flowing. People do not donate big dollars because they like the cut of a candidate’s jib; they expect a return on their investment. Second, national legislatures in the US and across the West have largely disarmed themselves, ceding more and more power to the executive branch, which is more than willing to take it.

Before going further, this is NOT about Donald J. Trump. Not everything that happens is. In fact, much of life has nothing to do with this president or any other. Trump is the executive of the moment and far from the first to expand the power of his office. His predecessor thought he could unilaterally wipe out student loan debt and treat parents who were unhappy with their local school board as domestic terrorists. Obama bombed at least a half-dozen countries, and most of the people whining today about “Trump’s illegal war” said nothing then.

This is also not a recent phenomenon, just one that has magnified over time. FDR engineered the roundup and internment of American citizens who happened to be of Japanese heritage. Lincoln suspended habeas corpus during the Civil War, and Woodrow Wilson enforced a policy of govt-sanctioned censorship during the first great war that would have put Mao and Stalin to shame. The main difference today is a 24/7 media universe that has turned journalism into combat, making it impossible to hide how each administration builds on what preceded it.

The press never asks, what happened to the deliberative bodies that define Western democracy? And yes, I am aware that this is a constitutional republic. This is not about terms, though they matter; it’s about how govt is supposed to function vs. the way it really works. Ideas are to be debated in good faith, not accepted or rejected based on the sponsor’s party. Again, Covid illustrates how the system does not work for you; it works for the donor class, and the largest upward transfer of wealth in history owes more to political favoritism than corporate greed.

Elected officials, not businessmen, shut down millions of small businesses but declared the big boxes to be essential. Outdoor parks were padlocked and church doors were blocked by cops, while liquor stores and weed shops stayed open. And this was after years of money printing and very low interest rates following the great financial crisis, which mostly degraded the value of your dollars and created the conditions today where young people are not enthused by $1,500 per month rents for a 600 square foot apartment.

This is reality and if you believe that voting red or blue will change everything, how’s that gone so far? The massive national debt that is barely comprehensible did not create itself. That was the work of people we elected, Democrats and Republicans alike. It is the most eye-popping monument to bipartisanship ever conceived. It is also why many refer to DC as the uni-party, where the two sides offer some minor distinctions but few substantive differences.

They both love to spend, just not on the same things. They both work to entrench and enrich themselves. And they both make a lot of noise about working for the ordinary citizen while regarding that person with barely-concealed contempt. No one but the cynical and jaded wants to hear that; it violates their expectations of how elected govt is supposed to act, at least at the federal level. Locally, you might get some things done because city council members cannot hide. They live in town, too; they are far more visible and accessible, and they are much easier to vote out.

There is a reason why this country was founded on the premise of a limited federal presence and a good deal of autonomy delegated to states and communities. The Founders understood what many today do not – that Iowa is not interchangeable with California, Wyoming is not New York, and what makes sense in one place is ridiculous if applied in another.

I hear people claim to “vote the person, not the party,” but few walk that talk. It may be time to start. Whose ideas would expand your freedom? Whose ideas make you less dependent on other people’s money? Whose ideas weaken the stranglehold of bureaucracy and regulations that affect everything from housing availability to quality schools to public services that deliver genuine value? Never forget that they work for you, not the other way around.

Collecting revenue is just the most visible aspect, disguising the less obvious coercive effects on human behavior and how people engage with their money. Their money. Not someone else’s. Why bring this up? Because at every level of govt, from the municipal to the state to the federal, there are moves to further expand govt power over individuals’ assets. It’s not about income any longer; it’s about wealth, it’s about assets, and if history is a guide, how it will start is not how it will end.

Elected officials like nothing more than ready-made villains who can be blamed for every societal ill. Today, those villains are billionaires, the new Emmanuel Goldsteins who are the focus of the ritual two minutes of hate described in the book, 1984. Having villains is a necessary cover for schemes that involve robbing Peter to give to Paul, plans that Paul will always support, especially when there are far more of him than there are Peters.

The federal proposal involves a 5% levy on assets exceeding $1 billion. Assets. Not income. This can mean homes, stocks, and other holdings. It’s being sold as a means of ensuring that those dastardly billionaires pay their “fair share,” even though every single study ever done on who pays taxes says the same thing – the top 1% pays roughly 40% of all federal income taxes collected, the top 10% clocks in about 70%, and roughly have the population has no federal liability at all. It’s an insipid talking point that persists because ginning up fear and envy is not very hard to do. It also disguises an ugly reality.

The sponsors of these bills are professional politicians who never met a nickel of someone else’s money that they couldn’t squander spend on some program or other. The national debt has not grown to what it is because these people are faithful stewards of the public purse; it has grown because they spend without consequence, they spend without accountability, they spend because they can and because they know you are going to re-elect most of them anyway. It’s the ultimate FYTW.

Among its predictable poster children is Bernie Sanders, the guy who used to rail about “the millionaires and billionaires” who were allegedly raping the country, but he no longer mentions the former group. Because he’s part of it. He and his three houses. But this man who has never worked a regular job one day in his life is looking out for the average American. Sure, he is. This is like the people who remind folks that the top tax rate in the 1950s was 91%. They leave out the part that no one paid that percentage. That rate gave rise to an occupational specialty of tax accountants and lawyers, while ushering in a form of legalized bribery. Let me explain with Bernie as the foil.

Look at this man’s list of donors. His contributors are not necessarily different from those of any of his 534 colleagues in Congress. The list is just more hypocritical since he’s the one constantly attacking billionaires, while pocketing campaign cash from the likes of Google, Amazon, and Apple. The fact is that Bernie is not the exception in Congress; he is the rule. He and others blame the uber wealthy for tax laws that public officials write, doing the wealthy’s bidding much as they carry water for Big Pharma or Big Anything Else.

Officials are not forced at gunpoint to tinker with the tax code; it’s part of doing business. No large amount is donated to a campaign or official purely for love of the individual recipient. It’s a quid pro quo. Anyone who gives millions to any campaign expects something in return. The issue is not the high-dollar donors; it’s the public officials who allegedly serve in our name while being openly rented. Aware voters would stop electing and re-electing those officials. But that doesn’t happen.

Incumbents have historically been re-elected at a rate of about 90%, so they have every incentive to do their donors’ bidding and almost none to tend to your priorities. So, they throw you a bone about economic unfairness and how your struggles are the fault of Jeff Bezos or Elon Musk, and if only more of their wealth could be seized, your life would improve. Rich people, however, do not stay rich by leaving their assets unguarded. That much they have in common with everyone else. None of us pays more in income taxes than legally required, and none of us pushes for our property to be assessed at a higher rate so we can pay a bigger tax bill.

The art of this scam lies in you either forgetting about or ignoring the past. If this idea becomes law, it would apply to billionaires. For now. The mission creep that is a govt staple will inevitably follow. Can anyone think of five govt programs that have been terminated? And by that, I mean shuttered completely; not having their name changed or being put under a different agency’s umbrella. It’s like Ronald Reagan once said – the closest thing to eternal life is a govt program.

Every initiative is engineered to grow; every initiative has a payroll that openly lobbies for growth. Since there is no dollar amount that Congress cannot spend - not even the collective wealth of the billionaire class - this obscenity will also expand over time. Today, it’s billionaires; tomorrow, it’s millionaires; next week, it’s everyone else. And what are you going to do then, when the bill comes for any stocks or bonds that you hold, all the real estate you own, that nice boat at the lakehouse and the lakehouse itself, or the various other assets you have that are not income-generating but are classified as wealth?

These people are not working for your interests or mine; at the risk of being repetitive, they work for their donors and use distractions like a wealth tax because the tactic works. They have convinced too many that the problem is always one of too little revenue and never about too much spending. The public has, over time, been conditioned to believe that every concern, issue, problem, or question requires more of other people’s money. How’s that working?