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Tell me: Who Knows Best
Job One, according to Sun Tzu, is to know your enemy, because if you know your enemy and your enemy doesn’t know you — well, you know the answer.
So it was fascinating to read Fred Fleitz’s experience at the Chatham House in Britland. The first take is from a US academic:
On border security, she claimed that the real goal of last year’s U.S. National Security Strategy and President Trump’s efforts to stop illegal immigration is to promote Christian white nationalism.
When told that it the strategy document didn’t say that, she insisted that that’s what it “really” means.
OK. My understanding — which may just be propaganda — is that the Trump immigration policy is to stop illegal immigration and deport illegal immigrants. No doubt the official immigration quotas favor white Christian countries. But then there is the H1B program which seems to favor Indian and Chinese tech immigrants.
Then there was another panel.
A panelist made an equally absurd claim at a second closed Chatham House panel, held under the Chatham House Rule, asserting that Europe is far freer and offers a much higher quality of life than America, with far more opportunities for young people….
The panelist later explained that Europe is better because of all the “free stuff”—free health care, free college, generous social benefits, government pensions, and so on.
I guess the panelist wasn’t following Freddy the German soccer fan on his trip to the US for the 2026 FIFA World Cup. It was pretty obvious that, before Freddy’s trip, he had no idea what ordinary day-to-day life was like in the US.
And, of course, the recent unpleasantness in France was allegedly all about overcrowded schools.
If you look at global GDP numbers on my Great Enrichment page here using a log scale,
you will see that the US is #2 on per capita GDP, just behind Singapore(!), and significantly ahead of France, Germany, and the UK. And, of course, government spending as percent of GDP is higher in Europe than in the US.
Fleitz ends his article with this comment:
What these elites refuse to admit is that Europe is in deep trouble because socialist and globalist policies are destroying European civilization—and that radical change is needed to save it.
Obviously, for the educated and globalist elite, they know what is best, and what Fred Fleitz ran into, at Chatham House, was the culture and the faith that sustains their ruling ideology. Their faith is that “free health care, free college, generous social benefits, government pensions, and so on” is a good thing.
Or maybe not. But if not, how would we know? For instance, I believe that free health care is a problem because health care needs to be responsive to the expressed needs of health care consumers. I believe that free college is a problem because it means that the nature of college education is completely determined by the political elite and other interested parties. Was that a good thing 50 years ago? If college education is not doing its job today, how would we know, and how would “society” go about fixing it?
And that’s the point. All these programs seemed like a good idea 50 or 100 years ago. But have we had a serious review of it — all friendly like — in view of experience? Not really. It all goes back to a couple of interviews I saw years ago. A older man said that you’d better not mess with his Social Security, because he’d paid into it all his life. An older woman said you’d better not mess with her Medicare. Because.
Clearly, the educated and global elite think that they are the best people to plan the structure of health care, college, social benefits and pensions. Maybe they are, but how would we know?
Clearly the educated and global elite are opposed to the idea of President Trump setting the agenda for all these programs. Why? Because that’s their job.
But Mises wrote that unless the process is driven by the price system with consumers accepting or rejecting the offers of the producers, it ain’t gonna work. And Hayek wrote that government administrators just don’t have the knowledge or the “bandwidth” to deliver government programs. and Stigler wrote that the problem with delivering government programs through corporations is that the corporations twist the program with “regulatory capture” of the administrators.
Clearly, at Chatham House, the experts have no notion of such things.
But the whole point of human society other than a dictatorship is that all things are negotiable. And for some reason humans have stumbled upon a notion we call “the price system” — and other societal arrangement like charity and mutual aid — which enables them to negotiate their different needs and desires with each other. It’s in the nature of governments and elites to ignore all that and think that they know best.
And it is in the nature of governments and elites to panic when the natives are restless and to do what our ruling class is proposing to do: expand the Supreme Court, abolish the Senate, and add new states; to make sure that they stay in power.
| Fri, 30 Oct 2026 22:35:12 GMT |
Cos-playing Rebellion
Ever since encountering Björn Merker’s Perishing Promise I have been pondering his notion of the “partisans of overthrow”. What does it mean? What are the people that imagine themselves as revolutionaries really thinking? What are they really trying to do? Do they really have a clue what they are really trying to do?
See, I believe that when you truly overthrow your current rulers, you are risking the end of life as we know it.
Jolly good fun to overthrow the Bourbon king, Frenchies, but really, what has France amounted to since then?
Jolly good fun to overthow the Czar, Vlad, but whatabout the tens of millions that died in famine, purges, and war, and the pathetic poverty of the USSR?
Jolly good fun, Adolf, to dump the social democratic regime, but whatabout the poor bloody Germany that you wrecked?
Jolly good fun to win the Chinese civil war, Mao, but whatabout the famines and the purges?
Jolly good fun to rage against the machine, 60s lefties, but what was the point, again?
Jolly good fun to rage against the patriarchs, but what does liberation mean when you insist on the state providing “safety” for liberated feminists?
Jolly good fun to Occupy Wall Street. To what end, exactly?
Jolly good fun to fight climate change, but what is the point in making life unaffordable for generations yet unborn?
Jolly good fun to abolish ICE, lefties, but whatabout ordinary people whose lives are damaged by “undocumented migrants”?
I think there is a natural instinct, especially in young men, to rage against the machine, but it is pretty obvious to me that the whole purpose of culture, religion, and politics is to put a brake on rebellion. Whatever is wrong with the world, the show must go on: staying alive, creating a new generation, keeping the train on the tracks.
There’s a piece out today at Compact discussing four generations of rebels in the US through four examples:
The Baby Boomer that “approached political contestation through cultural experimentation and an attempt to unsettle the relationship between truth and knowledge”
The Gen-Xer, “typically associated with ironic detachment and bored irreverence”
The “millennial political theorist, embodies a more earnest effort to recover substantive political alternatives after the disappointments of Bernie Sanders and Occupy”
The Gen-Zer, “former socialist turned Trump supporter, shows us [his generation’s] transgressive, ironic, overly online political rebellion”
But really, what’s the point? Go ahead and review all those bullet points, and ask yourself whether any of them made a blind bit of difference, except to Make Things Worse? The first group was about real revolutions that mostly killed hundreds of millions of humans. The second group was about rich kids cos-playing revolution.
Let’s face it, anyone that tells us that they have a plan to transform the world with politics is not a “partisan of overthrow”, but a saboteur and a wrecker.
Because all politics is nothing but the sabotage and wrecking of peaceable human society, don’t you agree, Joey von Stalin?
| Thu, 29 Oct 2026 21:58:19 GMT |
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Christopher Chantrill
He runs usgovernmentspending.com, the go-to resource for government finance data, and is a frequent contributor to the American Thinker. He lives in Seattle, Washington. Click for more.
“I love this guy.” — Steve Ballmer
A Commoner Manifesto
Commoners have nothing to lose but their shame
Three Tribes: The tribe of the educated Gentry is the educated class of the entire world; the tribe of the Commoners is the nation; the tribe of the Subordinates is the ethnic group, or clan, or village.
There is no expert without an idiot.
The simplest way to understand human society is as Three Layers such as Nobles, Yeomen, and Serfs.
My take on Three Layers is my Three Peoples Theory of Creatives, Responsibles, and Subordinates.
I believe that we moderns live in Three Worlds: the War World of politics, the Market World of the economy, and the Life World of family and neighborhood.
And the trouble with politics is that it reduces human society to a war against the enemy, as determined by Nazi jurist Carl Schmitt.
The world that we all live in today is the one created by the German Turn in philosophy, psychology, science, and meaning.
But our modern elite, the educated elite, has taken, I believe, a Wrong Turn and has imposed a cultural Great Reaction on the world, a lurch back to the primitive. This manifests in the elite’s conceited Activism Culture and its patronage of Subordinate people as its Little Darlings.
The principal reason for the elite’s Wrong Turn has been that it does not understand and does not want to understand how the Three Peoples’ Religions are necessarily different.
The root of the educated elite’s Wrong Turn is its conceit that it knows what the world needs. I think there is a better way; I call it “A Good Life Better than the Left”.
ABC of Politics – Activism Culture – “Anatomy of Revolution” – Allyism – Critical Theory – Downstream-ism – Dutch Finance – German Turn – Good Life – Great Reaction – Little Darlings – Perfect Plan – Women in the Public Square – Ruling Class – Three Layers – Three Peoples – Three Peoples Religion – Tribalism – Two Cultures – Wrong Turn
Today’s topic: Deirdre McCloskey and her Bourgeois Era books
