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Think “Affordability” Means More Free Stuff?
I assumed that the Democratic message on “affordability” was all about curbing inflation and making the economy work for working people.
But now, from the X-posts from my beloved Rep. Jayapal (D-WA) and Sen. Murray (D-WA), I see it is really all about more free stuff as in Medicare for All and more childcare.
Based on my understanding of The Science, I’d say that the Democrats are on course to make life less affordable overall rather than more affordable.
Why? Well let's just make things Real Simple. Government spending amounts to a tax on everyone. If government spending in the US is 40 percent of GDP, then think of everything as having a tax of 40 percent attached. Unless you have an In with the rulers, like Big Pharma and Big Bureaucrat and Big NGO and Big Education and the politicians in the pockets of the oligarchs and billionaires of which you’ve heard tell. Yes, don’t forget the Somali fraudsters.
If you keep going then you get to France with government spending at 57 percent of GDP and riots in the streets. Yum!
Now, as I read all the experts analyzing the midterms they all seem to think that Trump has totally botched it on the economy.
You got any better ideas, politicians, experts, and all the ships at sea? I thought not. What Trump has been doing is ending all the subsidies for the US Post-WWII Empire and telling our former tributary states: you are on your own. And by the way, Iran, no soup nukes for you.
But here is another worry. It’s about all the women politicians and judges getting elected on the Democratic ticket all across the nation.
See, it’s my belief that women, 97% of them, believe what they have been carefully taught. And the fact is that what they have been carefully taught is mostly a lie. The only way to get out of here — the administrative and welfare and regulatory state of the last century — is by trashing the conventional wisdom that has elected Democrats by handing out free stuff and trying to get back to a market economy. Good luck with that from the naive young women that have been elected all over the place.
Actually, most of the men in politics are just as ignorant.
Look, this is not that hard. Any regime — OK, every regime — wants the plebs to believe the regime narrative and version of reality that helps keep the regime in power. Our regime has the narrative that it fights for the oppressed — take your pick — against the oppressor — take your pick. It’s a lie, of course. Our regime, like every regime, just wants to stay in power and it will lie and bribe and cheat and threaten anyone and everyone to do that. There is only one oppressor: the regime and its functionaries. Nobody else has the power to oppress.
The Trump administration has been trying to thread the needle of reducing the weight of government a little and growing the economy a lot. You could say that the results are mixed at best.
But, guess what: our Democratic friends, next time they are in power, are just going to crank up the free stuff to the max. And that is going to impoverish the millions of Americans that haven’t paid their way to become more regime-adjacent than the next guy or gal.
Guess what: the only way to “affordability” is to take the government out of our lives as much as possible. It is government that has made life unaffordable. And if you don’t understand that I have a bridge to sell you.
| Thu, 12 Nov 2026 23:34:37 GMT |
Creative Warriors vs. Status-quo Courtiers
A while back on the Yellow Brick Road I came up with a way to divide up the humans in modern society. I called it “Three Peoples”.
The idea is that there are three kinds of people.
There are “People of the Subordinate Self. Call them slaves, serfs, workers, clients, marginalized, oppressed: these are people that do not experience ‘agency.’”
There are “People of the Responsible Self. Call them commoners, citizens, middling sorts, “deplorables”… These are people that follow the rules, go to work, and obey the law.”
Then there are “People of the Creative Self. These are people that want to live a creative life, maybe as a writer, an artist, a videographer, an activist, a revolutionary.”
But now I want to divide the People of the .Creative Self into two parts. This is because I think that creative people come in two kinds: real creatives risking everything to create something new, and fake creatives, cosplaying creativity.
Let us call the true creatives: Warriors; and let us call the fake creatives: Courtiers.
Now, in the good old days, the Warriors were really warriors, leaders of armies and conquests: Alexander the Great, that led his Macedonians into Persia and western India. The Courtiers, especially in the courts of the absolute monarchs, wore silk breeches and conspired with and against each other for place and position in the Court of the King.
Today? I think the Warriors are best understood as living and working in the business and especially the tech start-up culture. The Courtiers are best understood as living and working in the administrative state: outside the market economy, in bureaucracy, administration, regulation, education, and the vast Grant Industrial Complex that lives off government grants. Or they are cosplaying as artists or revolutionaries.
The Warriors are men in the arena, trying out new ideas that may change the world. The Courtiers are people in the system working to keep the regime going and prevent change although they tell us that they want Hope and Change.
This really crystallized for me when reading about Marc Andreessen’s visit to the Biden White House in 2024 to discuss AI. The Biden people had a Plan. They said:
We are going to make sure that A.I. is going to be a function of two or three large companies. We will directly regulate and control those companies. There will be no start-ups.
That’s when the tech lords, previously aligning Democrat, realized: “Yep, we’re for Trump.”
You see, in today’s Warrior culture you know that a new technological revolution cannot be “two or three large companies” directed by political regulation and control. For the tech lords that is not how the world works. But for the Courtier set, control and stability (for them) is the name of the game, and they know no other.
Exactly: ships passing in the night.
And AI is the new battlefront between the two cultures: start-up vs. stability. On the one hand you have Elon Musk talking about data centers in space. On the other hand you have local communities — and our environmentalist friends — rising up against the disruption of a data center in their community.
This is nothing new. Back in the late 18th century it was hand-loom weavers — machine wreckers — rising up against the disruption of machine textile industry. Then it was the Duke of Wellington worrying about the disruption of railways encouraging the poor to move about. Then it was workers rebelling against the steel industry in the late 19th century. Did you know that steel magnate Andrew Carnegie’s dad was a hand loom weaver? Then it was buggy-whip makers losing their jobs to the auto industry. Then it was auto workers losing their jobs to the computerized factory. And now, probably, it is bureaucrats and administrators losing their jobs to AI.
Notice how AI is the complete realization of the startup culture. You have a good idea; you tell AI to make you an app; and you are in business next week.
The point is that, every time, the partisans of stability get overwhelmed by the new technology. And by the way, in the process of The Great Enrichment of the last 200 years, real per-capita income has increased by 20 times. That’s 3,000 percent! In two centuries. There’s never been anything like it.
Six technological revolutions in 300 years. There’s never been anything like it. And maybe, in the AI revolution or the next-but-one, we will blow the place up. Now do you see why Elon Musk wants to make humans interplanetary?
The story of the last 300 years is the story of business Warriors reinventing the world every generation. And the story of the last 300 years is the story of Courtiers trying to control the political process to get or maintain power and maintain stability.
I’m with the Warriors.
| Thu, 12 Nov 2026 03:46:03 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.
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A Commoner Manifesto
Commoners have nothing to lose but their shame
A racist is absolutely anyone who’s pissed off a lefty — Glenn Reynolds
Nietzsche: I philosophize with a hammer. Me: No, Fritzi; you philosophize with the one-liner.
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: Four Laws: The Limits of Government in the Economy
