Return to the Rule of Men (and Women)
In the 18th century, we the people of the fledgling United States were fodder for the voracious tax appetite of Parliament. We were also subject to the capricious will of a sovereign monarch who was not constrained either by precedent or the Rule of Law. Then we had a revolution, followed by almost 290 years of a democratically-elected representative republic anchored by a seemingly bullet-proof Constitution.
Gradually at first, and then with accelerating force, an erosion of citizen freedoms began to corrode this hard-won republic. Our people began to stagger under the weight of a set of regulations and mandates, each part of which seemed to be a good and proper construct at the time it was forged. No one realized that together they would so alter the State/Federal balance so as to breathe life into a multi-headed monster accountable to no one, and for which no one would claim responsibility. Initially geographically isolated, the monster today has become a pandemic vectored by the mass media and supported by propaganda techniques against which our people have no defense.
It took nearly 300 years, but we are again being decimated by taxes and further insulted by inflation sponsored by the U.S. Congress and the Wisconsin State Legislature. We have created a new aristocracy that once again is not concerned with obeying that old nuisance the Rule of Law, and we are continually reworking history to conform to new definitions of personal responsibility. It is as if we are watching a grotesque masquerade dance where black is white, lies are truth, and political proclivities seem to be economic necessity. Terrifyingly, in the middle of it all, the monster continues to grow larger and hungrier.
Our new aristocratic class uses economic trickery, sideshow shell games, disingenuous instances of “fairness”, and secret-lawmaking-in-the-dark as flim-flam tools to lavish themselves and their supporters with jobs, benefits and privileges not available to the rest of us. They brush away inconvenient language in the Constitution as “irrelevant” to the environment today, and invent distracting bogeymen to frighten us into allowing them to extend their tendrils deeply into our private businesses and affairs. They have created a completely new language that mixes connotation with denotation, literally making “wrong thinking” a crime.
Today, this “Ministry of Truth” wields the levers of power, exposing the “wrong thinkers” so they do not receive grants, jobs, or other examples of government largess. Conformance is re-cast in limbic “feel good” terms that trump logic and common sense. Between direct intervention and business mandates, government at all levels now account for over 82% of the economic activity in this country. To put this in context, Zorro led the revolution to overthrow the Mexican government of California when the overall tax rate there climbed to 20% (one bottle of wine for every five).
So what are we to do, fellow citizens? Our rotting body politic, if not dead, is certainly in its last twitches, leaving us heading pell-mell toward the poisonous kingdom of Animal Farm. Where are our protectors? Can no one help us?
Without access, the only thing we can do is drink our one remaining partial bottle of wine to wash away any stubborn notions of creativity; we will then toast the demise of the old reward-for-effort economy where the lazy and quarrelsome sank to the bottom. We will say goodbye to our fantastic visions of what might have been if only we were a little smarter, a little more vigilant, and our representatives were a little more 18th-century.
And we will say:
“Four legs good, two legs better.”