Liberals Ruin Everything

May 16, 2012
By Christopher Chantrill

American Thinker:

When friends suggest that the election in November will be close, I half-agree, with a twinkle. Because I don't think it will be close.

That's because this lot, as the Brits say, don't have it sorted -- unlike Bill Clinton in the 1990s, who knew how to seduce the middle class. It's a point of pride among urban liberals around the president not to understand the ordinary American. It's been this way ever since John Kenneth Galbraith's bestsellers like The Affluent Society taught liberals how to sneer at the ordinary middle class rather than understand it.

Of course, you can be a governing elite and be wrong about everything and still not wreck everything. That's because, as Adam Smith said, there is always a great deal of ruin in a nation, even at the best of times. But when a political dynasty has been getting things wrong for the best part of a century, then the ruin can get to be pretty serious. And that is what is agitating the average white guys of the nation like Ray Guy: the specter of ruin, economic, moral, and personal.

Let us rehearse four big things that liberals have got wrong again and again and that are increasing the amount of ruin in the nation.

First of all, there is government money. For over a century, the money in the U.S. was metallic. Governments messed around with it, from the stupidities of the United States Bank wars to the inflationism of Free Silver. But it took liberals to create the Federal Reserve System, staff it with political hacks (and now economist hacks), and reduce the value of the dollar by 95 percent in a century.

Monetary stupidity seems to come up every generation under the Fed, with the 1929 Crash, the 1970s inflation, and the 2000s Fannie-Freddie credit bubble. Every time, the politicians blame the bankers for the mess. It's more accurate to say that every time, the politicians ruin the bankers. But they bail them out, because they need bankers to buy their debt.

Then there are government entitlements. We know now what happens with government entitlements. They run out of money, and the dependents start to tear the place up like a bunch of unpaid soldiers. This makes complete sense, because every government is an armed minority, a band of pirates with good PR. Every government must keep its supporters paid, or they will start to mutiny, just like they are mutinying in Europe right now.

But there is more. We've always known that entitlements ruin a nation's willingness to save. Now we learn that they ruin a nation's birth rate to the point of national extinction.

Let's not forget government education. Everyone agrees with the Jesuits that if you "give me the boy ... I will give you the man." But in the U.S., we are supposed to have a separation between church and state. That means a separation between the political power and the moral/cultural power. Liberals think this means that government money shouldn't be spent on church schools. I'd say that it means that the political elite should be banned from legislating about childhood education and that government should be forbidden from confining children in a government child custodial facility without a court order.

Whatever else may be wrong with it, the venal nature of government education particularly ruins the education of the children of the poor. In the third world, the government education is so bad that many among the poor pay for private education.

Finally, there is government morality. Governments have not always peddled morality. Homer's political leaders merely squabbled over women when they were done raping and pillaging, just like their gods. But by Plato's time, the idea of divine judgment had reared its head, and political leaders began to pose as the representatives of divine justice on earth. Eventually, our modern disestablished churches began the process of separating government and morality, and the old liberals helped with clichés about "legislating morality."

But now things are different. When it's a question of inequality, racism, hate speech, diversity, gay marriage, dietary fat, climate change, or fairness, today's liberal legislates morality with the ferocity of a Savonarola. Their legislation certainly hasn't done much to improve morality -- or government. More likely it has ruined both.

This rising tide of ruin may not may not combine into the Perfect Flood by this November, but it witnesses daily that the Dynasty of the Educated Elite has lost the mandate of heaven. It witnesses also to the truth that when the people have control of their money, their savings, and their children's education, and when they promote morality through their churches, we can call the result civil society. When they lose it, bit by bit, we call it the road to serfdom, a road that ends in totalitarianism.