Politicians are the Referees of America, Not Its Rulers
This year, let's celebrate Independence Day by demanding more of it
Imagine you have tickets to your team’s most important football game in years. You pack up the family and head to the stadium, ready to root to your team to victory. On the very first play, your team pulls off a 30-yard pass play! The crowd goes crazy! But wait! There’s a flag on the play! It’s coming back! No!
Undaunted, the team rips off a 20-yard run, seemingly earning another first down. The crowd erupts a second time! But yet again, a flag brings the play back. Then it happens again. And again. And again. Soon, the crowd doesn’t even react to the play on the field because what matters is what happens after the play is over — the referee informing the crowd about fouls committed on the play.
No matter what the outcome of the game is, you’re likely to leave feeling incredibly disappointed. You paid to see the best athletes in the sport compete with one another, not to watch the referee show.
The fact is, when referees are doing their jobs well, you hardly notice they’re there at all — often it’s only when they screw up that you notice them. The same exact thing is true of government — which is supposed to be the ‘referee’ of America, ensuring that all citizens are free of governmental (or other) violations of their rights. When things are going well, the politicians sort of fade into the background and we don’t notice them. When things are going poorly, we notice how badly they are screwing everything up.
The greatest thing about individual freedom is that it allows every citizen to ascertain their own unique circumstances and make decisions based on that information — information nobody else in the world has. When government makes decisions, they not only lack the necessary information to make the best decision for your circumstances, in most cases they’re not even considering your circumstances at all, because political bodies make decisions for political reasons, not practical ones.
The last couple years of covid rules are perhaps the perfect example of the folly of top-down decision-making. Covid restrictions were never based on actual science or data, but (shockingly) were based on POLITICAL reasoning. When the politics demanded that New York ‘reject’ the Trump Vaccine, the politicians were adamant that’s what they would do. Now that the political winds have shifted and the Democrats are in control, the politics demands that New York mandates the vaccine for normal life, even children going to school. (You’ll note that politicians in Europe have different political pressures and come to different conclusions about jabbing the kids)
Mask mandates are another covid-related example. They never worked, they never made sense (why would recovered people need to mask?), and even so they were removed due to political concerns, not practical ones. It didn’t matter how many facts and figures Team Reality brought to the table, because the goal was never public health — it was the expansion of political power.
In a sane world, mankind uses its reasoning to quickly determine what works and what doesn’t, and we shift our approach based on that information. In a political world, we collude to smear the people who actually have the correct approach. We fire nurses who don’t want to get a shot that doesn’t stop transmission as well as doctors who dare suggest that anything but the vaccine might help. And even though all of the data screams against it, idiot politicians are STILL mandating boosters.
And as sure as night follows day, these political decisions break the ‘market’ of people making their own decisions. If the damage is bad enough, government then spends its time trying to re-approximate the market they just destroyed with terrible regulation.
Take the energy industry as an example. For years Biden claimed he was going to ‘end fossil fuels’.
The obvious result of this would be a drastic increase in the price of energy. Sometimes they even admitted it. But now that the increases are hitting angry Americans right in the pocketbook, it’s time for the politicians to scramble and blame somebody else — ANYBODY else — for the predictable (and predicted) consequences of their actions.
Notice how Biden (or whoever’s behind his Twitter account) speaks as if he is the King of America, ruling by decree and promising harsh repercussion if you dare defy him. Of course, long-time readers will recall numerous rants about how Biden claims to be defending democracy but is actually ignoring the rules of the Republic.
But even here Biden is undermined by his own actions. If he was actually worried about how high energy prices were affecting Americans, he would reverse the terrible course he’s set us on. Instead, he tells us that high prices will continue ‘as long as it takes’ to defeat Russia.
When asked to clarify, Biden’s aides admit that high prices are simply the cost of the Liberal World Order. (After all, ‘greater good’ doesn’t mean greater for everybody)
This is a political body making decisions for political reasons. Your well-being isn’t a consideration — only what scores political points. If you have to pay higher prices to fulfill the political wishes of the elite, that’s what you will do. If you have to eat the bugs to fulfill the political wishes of the elite, that’s what you will do. If you have to own nothing to fulfill the political wishes of the elite, that’s what you will do.
Sometimes political bodies have multiple, conflicting political goals. When that happens you end up with the strange situation in California: Gas prices are up, so the state government is sending ‘gas rebate’ checks while also increasing gas taxes in the state. How much money is California wasting so they can send Californians money that they will immediately hand back to the government?
And as government grows and consumes more and more of American life, the consequences for being wrong also increase. The Constitution states that only gold and silver shall be money — to prevent the bankers and politicians from printing the wealth out from under us. We now ignore that part of the Constitution, with predictable consequences:
During the forum, Powell stated, "The U.S. economy is actually in pretty good shape."
Powell said that growth is exceeding what the central bank had predicted and that it is raising interest rates to "slow growth down so that supply will have a chance to catch up."
It’s difficult not to fall out of my chair laughing at this. Anybody who goes shopping can see the economy is in terrible shape. But the POLITICAL pressure is to say that the economy is SO GOOD that it’s OVERHEATED! Surely if we just SLOW DOWN GROWTH, things will improve! People just have so much money they’re bidding up products! Yeah, that’s it!
Never forget these were the exact same people telling you inflation was nothing to worry about just a year or so ago. (All emphasis mine)
Feb 2021 “That is what I think is the big concern right now, the unanchoring of inflation expectations. An important element in inflation are wages and people getting higher wages during a time of still very high unemployment and still a lot of slack in the economy,” he told CNBC’s “Squawk Box Europe” on Wednesday.
“That would be a sign that an inflation process has begun, but we see no indication of that whatsoever. What we see is the perception of inflation being fueled by energy prices.”
April 2021
“We remain positive but once we get to the end of this year and early next year, and we’ve worked through the supply chain bottlenecks and demand has normalized, as the economy opened up, we don’t think it’s a sustained source of inflation over the medium term,” said Blerina Uruci, senior U.S. economist at Barclays.
Uruci expects core inflation to reach 2.3% by May but then it could be below 2% in the second half of the year.
May 2021 “I don’t believe that inflation will be an issue. But if it becomes an issue, we have tools to address it,” Yellen, the former Federal Reserve chair, said Sunday on NBC’s “Meet the Press.” “It’s spread out quite evenly over eight to 10 years. So, the boost to demand is moderate,” she said of the proposed spending.
And when this ill-advised approach to tackling inflation fails spectacularly, it’s nearly certain the ‘leaders’ will double down on the same policies that already didn’t work. (Once again, see covid as a perfect example) That failure will certainly spark a triple-down, on and on until current leadership is gone.
The good news is that the same political pressures that cause our ‘leaders’ to lie to us are useful once the political winds shift and it’s politically advantageous to attack those ‘leaders’. Gato predicts that soon the ‘leaders’ will turn on Big Pharma, and I agree with that prediction. My larger hope is that once the dust settles, we’ll realize that politicians are not our rulers, and we’ll demand they resume their role as referees instead.
Great post. There's one amendment I'd make, because I think it's so important that it may be the way out of all this. The Constitution forbids STATES from coining money, issuing bills or making anything but gold and silver into a payment for debts. The Constitution was a coup by merchants and bankers to make sure the States didn't take back the power they had as colonies (pre-British Currency Act) to enable domestic trade with their own currency.
According to Ben Franklin, the Revolution was fought over this, because colonial scrip had ended poverty and enabled every person to take responsibility for their own subsistence. Gold and silver specie was exactly what they were against because it wanted to migrate back to England and destroyed the self-reliance of the States.
Shay's Rebellion tried to bring back State-issued scrip because farms were being repossessed for taxes while veterans weren't paid for their service because of a lack of specie. An intercepted message and banker-funded militia defeated them and they were given amnesty if they never ran for office or voted again. Then the merchant-bankers did the secret Annapolis meeting and decided to scrap the crowd-sourced Articles of Confederation and replace it with One Nation Under Gold.
I write a section about this in my book, and how "coin money" was taken literally so that the Federal Gov't can only make change while the cartel of bankers called the Fed (stealing the name along with the most essential function) creates the money.
https://www.amazon.com/How-Dismantle-Empire-2020-Vision/dp/1733347607/
Great read!