The Bigger Drunk

Lo and behold! Inflation remains stubbornly high, despite the best efforts of the Federal Reserve to rein it in.

Why, oh, why, can't poor Uncle Joe catch a break? After all, he's done his part - he's scolded Big Business for shrinkflating your bag of Doritos and otherwise pointing the finger of blame across the landscape.

But, never at himself, oh no. Not even a whiff of acknowledgment that his massive spending bills are at the heart of the inflation that has sapped 20% of your dollar's buying power since he took office.

That is the hard reality that neither Biden nor the Democratic Party nor the mainstream media nor the plethora of progressive pundits dare admit. Instead, they concoct all sorts of other excuses, many of which require contortions that would make a Cirque du Soleil gymnast envious.

So, why aren't Republicans hammering Biden harder on spending?

Perhaps it's because doing so would expose them as hypocrites. After all, before Biden, Trump pointed a firehose of fiat money at the nation as part of his pandemic response, and that firehose was its own contributor to the inflation we have endured.

It's hard to accuse the other guy of spending like a drunken sailor when your guy was also a sot.

It's also hard to make a "drunken sailor" argument stick when most of the nation enjoys the rivers of green hooch.

Some of you have encountered a version of this quote:

A democracy is always temporary in nature; it simply cannot exist as a permanent form of government. A democracy will continue to exist up until the time that voters discover that they can vote themselves generous gifts from the public treasury. From that moment on, the majority always votes for the candidates who promise the most benefits from the public treasury, with the result that every democracy will finally collapse due to loose fiscal policy, which is always followed by a dictatorship.

It is attributed to Alexander Tytler, a Scottish historian. Whether the attribution is correct is secondary to the quote's accuracy, and I fear it is indeed coming true in America.

Tytler ideated a "cycle" for democratic societies, as discussed here.

The author of the linked article, which was written in 2015, posited that America was at the "apathy" stage. This was before Trump, of course, and it's quite arguable that the Untethered Orange Id's election and the election's wake were a refutation of apathy. That refutation didn't break the cycle, however - all it did was reinforce the "history often rhymes" aphorism.

We are clearly in the dependence, aka "gifts from the public treasury," point in the life cycle, with vast swathes of the populace embracing dependence on government in one form or another. This goes beyond direct money transfers from taxpayers to favored constituencies, and includes government protectionism of various sorts, government using its power to quash or squash the disfavored, and government being called on to intervene in more and more aspects of our lives. These are non-monetary equivalents of "gifts from the public treasury," since they "take" liberties from other citizens for the benefit of those who voted for the politicians who dispense them.

This is a bipartisan phenomenon. The Right hasn't offered much in opposition to any of this apart from rhetoric when it isn't in power. Even supposed conservatives resist tooth and claw the message that spending has to be cut when it comes to spending they like, and the GOP's track record when it holds the reins of power is nothing to applaud. About all you can say is that the Right is slightly less of a drunk than the Left. Faint praise, indeed.

Is there a way to break the Tytler cycle? It forecasts a descent into dictatorship, and given how Congress has mostly abdicated its role to the executive branch, and the ratcheting up of executive-order power-wielding with every presidency of this century, it seems we are well on our way.

About the only thing standing in the way at this point is the Supreme Court. Much maligned by the Left, in no small part because it has been opposing dictatorship authoritarianism, the Court has the ability to undermine the endless rapacity for power over others that too many of our fellow citizens have. Several major cases are pending, and by the end of June, we might have a few glimmers of hope that we can detour from the descent into dictatorship.

Then, of course, there's this fall's elections. The Democrats have made it clear what they want to do should they be given the keys to the kingdom for the next couple years. Their loudly vocal fears about Dictator Donald are, in my view, more projection than anything else - they would welcome a dictator, as long as it's their dictator.

I don't know if there's an exit from this cycle. I'm not fatalistic, nor am I deterministic, but the glee I witness in people voting themselves (or their preferred beneficiaries) Other People's Money scares me. It is a product of dehumanizing your fellow humans. That dehumanization destroys the Enlightenment principles that turned thousands of years of stagnation and subsistence living into an incredibly rapid positive evolution in living standards and human happiness.

Can we avoid the collapse? Only if we stop believing that we can solve problems by taking from others. If we can "get sober" and reject the "drunk" model of governance. That's a tall order, one that gets taller every year.