Season Ticket On A One-Way Ride

In the 2009 movie Law Abiding Citizen, Gerard Butler played Clyde Shelton, an ex-CIA "brain" who was gifted at thinking up creative ways of killing people. In one scene, another agent described how Shelton came up with a ratcheting Kevlar thread, which was sewn into a necktie, which was gotten to the target, which led to the target being strangled to death by weaponized haberdashery.

There are times when it feels our government is doing exactly that to us. Growing ever-bigger, demanding ever-more compliance and obeisance from us, spending ever-more money that we don't have, and responding to every bit of push-back, no matter how grounded in principle or logic or law or the Constitution, as a dire affront with broadly fatal consequences. Every new law becomes bedrock, every new rule becomes canon, and any attempt to reverse anything becomes cataclysm. Dare suggest that a government power is excessive, or a law counterproductive, or that a rule does more harm than good today, and you'll be denounced, denigrated, and possibly cancelled.

In all this we are, ironically, overseen by a Congress that has largely abandoned its job to the bureaucracies of the executive branch. When a slap-down of this excess emerged from the Court, the usual suspects did their usual dance of the infinite sky-screams.

Not just sky-screams, but misleading or outright false assertions about what the Court actually wrote, as with the recent West Virginia v EPA ruling.

The Court said, in essence, that the EPA exceeded the authority granted to it by Congress. A simple reading of that ruling would conclude that the EPA (i.e. the Administration) could resume its course of action by asking Congress to grant it new authority. That this may be difficult - that is, that there may not be enough votes for such legislation - isn't relevant to the Court's job, nor is it any sort of justification for what ensued.

We are supposed to be living under a representative system of government. We vote for Congresspersons, Senators, and a President that we believe best represent our political wants and priorities. That Congress isn't stacked in a fashion that would produce a law that'd allow the agency's activities that are at issue in West Virgina v EPA tells us that the voters may not be on board with those activities.

That doesn't seem to matter to those who support those activities, because we continue to witness how they have little use for the notion of representative government when it doesn't produce their desired outcomes.

Many moons ago, I encountered a comment by some Internet ninny that read, "Bow to your capitalist overlords."

You know the punch line. Said ninny got it exactly backward. Capitalism is about cooperation, about voluntary interaction. It is big government, with its coercive take on everything wherein the overlords reside.

Economist Herbert Stein once said something totally obvious yet totally ignored by our political classes.

The nation is on an unsustainable path, and the irony that this path is paved with "sustainable" policies does not go unnoticed. Fiscal policy, social policy, energy policy, the regulatory state, and the abandonment of "representation" in favor of "management" not only stand contrary to the nation's core premises of "life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, they will eventually bankrupt our economy and break our social order. Left unchecked, all this will stop only when the whole thing breaks down. Some see this as a desirable outcome, by the way.

The only brakes I see on this run-amok are being applied by the "conservative" Justices on the Supreme Court. The only off-ramps I see are the states that have embraced smaller-government, more-liberty policies. The only motormen I see waiting in the wings are a couple governors, current or former, of states that lean right, with presidential aspirations (and an Untethered Orange Id standing in their way).

Some of you will recognize the title of this article. It's a reference to the Highway to Hell upon which we are being dragged, kicking and screaming.

We haven't reached the end of the line yet, fortunately, and the off ramp is always just an election away.

Bon Scott and the Young brothers intended Highway to Hell as an ode to liberty.

Living easy, lovin' free
Season ticket on a one way ride
Asking nothing, leave me be
Taking everythin' in my stride
Don't need reason, don't need rhyme
Ain't nothing I’d rather do
Goin' down, party time
My friends are gonna be there too, yeah.

The hell our political leaders and life-managers are bringing us to is, unfortunately, one of no liberty, no independence, no hope... and no fun.

It’s not enough that we are being crushed economically and socially, we can’t even laugh or enjoy ourselves any more unless the source of that merriment has passed the woke-scolds’ tests, advances social justice, and is “responsible” toward the myriad issues they require us to care about. In other words, never. Progressives don’t like fun, and don’t want you to have any either. They are the new Puritans, people that H.L. Mencken warned us about.

It’s not AC/DC’s hell, it’s Dante’s.

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Years back, a good friend was fond of pointing out the “fun police” / “fun enforcers” among us, who took it upon themselves to suck the joy out of everything. If they didn’t find something funny or entertaining, neither should you, and if you nevertheless did, they were obligated to deny you further access while denouncing your transgression. Such objective absolutism is odd, coming from people who embrace relativism in so many ways, but there you have it.

How prescient he was. The power of the no-fun horde grew ever stronger across the ensuing years. But, we may have reached its apotheosis, as comedians and companies are finally saying “no mas.”

Corporate America went along with this for a while, until someone woke up (see what I did there?) to the possibility that there was more money in standing up to the woke-scolds than in capitulating to them. Dave Chappelle and some other brave or uncancellable comics have done us all a huge favor.

This all came to mind as I read Walter Kirn’s recent essay at Common Sense. I highly recommend both the article and the page.

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Yours in liberty,

Peter.