Find all blog entries at A Commoner Manifesto Substack.
Speaker Emerita Sgt. Schultz
I know. Isn’t she special! Nancy Pelosi on C-SPAN:
A flustered Nancy Pelosi denies that Democrats knew what Swalwell was doing and turned a blind eye:
Pelosi: “Absolutely not true.”
Interviewer: “You had no idea?”
Pelosi: “None whatsoever.”
Yess. I am sure that Nancy Pelosi, like the rest of us, was a devoted fan of Hogan’s Heroes. And I am sure, as a special fan, she has dozens of GIFs at home of Sgt. Schultz saying: “I know Nothing!”
I was reading someone who suggested that maybe our Democratic friends like to have their rank-and-file House Members compromised. Because then they are easy to manipulate, according to the ancient creed: “nice little job you got there; pity if something should happen to it.”
Isn’t that how spy operations work? Wasn’t that the whole point of the Chinese setting Rep. Swalwell (D-CA) up with Fang Fang?
I wonder where it goes from here. My instinct is that the Dems and the Progs are losing and they know it. But what do you do when you are about to collapse in defeat? You put on a brave face and tell your troops “once more unto the breach.” Maybe you even tell them that it is a noble thing to die for your country/party.
Meanwhile the rest of us are trying to figure out what comes next.
I suppose it’s a lot easier if President Trump manages to checkmate Iran and Israel manages to neuter Hezbollah in Lebanon and the whole world lines up to load up on oil in American ports.
Oh, and hey, Cuba, why not just give it up and join the real world? We Yanks would just love to start visiting Cuba again and make Cuba into the jewel of the Caribbean again.
But I fear that our Democratic friends won’t just give up the ship. I fear that they will do something stupid that will have a butcher’s bill attached to it. If you look back to 2010 and the operation against the Tea Party, and the operation against Mitt Romney in 2012, and the operations against Trump starting in 2015, and the curious case of the mail-in ballots in 2020, and Jan 6, and lawfare and Dem District Court judges, you can understand that our Democratic friends probably have a number of stupid tricks they haven’t tried yet.
And they will tell us, again and again: “I know nothing!”
| Tue, 14 Apr 2026 22:37:21 GMT |
The Problem with Educated Class Supremacy
We all know that, with the passage of the Pendleton Act in 1882, everyone knew that the world would change because of the end of the “spoils system.” In the future, the federal government would be administered by educated, credentialed administrators rather than corrupt rapscallions.
So, the fact that today’s government, from federal to local, is wracked with “fraud” is, to the educated class, “inconceivable.”
I’ve understood the narrative about the Pendleton Act and joked and sneered about it for a while.
But only recently have I come to understand the back story.
Of course, it is obvious that an educated class would naturally believe that the world should be ruled by educated people. Bless their hearts. The beginning of wisdom, dear liberal friends, is to recognize that nobody really has a clue. Including “experts.”
But now I am re-reading The Mind and the Market by Jerry Z. Muller, and I am learing things. For instance, I wrote a couple of weeks ago about “Hegel Was Wrong about the Civil Service.” Hegel wrote in The Philosophy of Right in 1820 that he thought that a civil service provided an “essential counterweight and complement to the forces of the market.”
Another way of saying this is that bureaucracy and regulation are excellent allies for anyone screaming “stop the world, I want to get off.”
Now I am reading Muller talking about Matthew Arnold, the guy who argued in 1869 in Culture and Anarchy for “the best that has been thought and said.” That meant, of course, an intellectual aristocracy “to articulate the rational basis of shared authority in order to provide the social cohesions once offered by religious belief.” One of the ways of doing this was to expand the universities and the range of subjects taught and thereby elevate the thinking of the commercial middle class and its mechanical understanding of the world. Arnold also advocated in Schools and Universities on the Continent for compulsory government-prescribed education.
In England, he regretted, government policy was made without taking into account the opinion of those most knowledgeable about education.
Against which, I reckon, we need to remember Lord Salisbury and “never trust experts” in 1877.
No lesson seems to be so deeply inculcated by the experience of life as that you should never trust experts. If you believe the doctors, nothing is wholesome: if you believe the theologians, nothing is innocent: if you believe the soldiers, nothing is safe. They all require to have their strong wine diluted by a very large admixture of common sense.
He was writing about 50 years after Hegel’s push for government by experts.
The point is that it seems like a good idea that all children should receive an education, that all civil servants should get a university education in the “greats” of philosophy history and literature.
But once you have got the whole structure up and running, then what? You run into Chantrill’s Law:
Government programs cannot work because you can never reform them.
We may not know the meaning of “life, the universe, everything” but we certainly know that the way to deal with “life, the universe, everything” is to adapt.
And I mean that when you realize that you made a mistake you need to learn from the experience and don’t do it again.
The problem with all the ideas and programs and philosophies implemented since, shall be say, Hegel’s argument for civil service supervision in 1820, is that it is almost impossible to fix anything that breaks when government is involved.
That, of course, is the point of Hayek’s critique of administrative government. Says Grok:
The Knowledge Problem: Hayek’s core insight is the dispersed nature of knowledge in society.
Arbitrary Power and the Erosion of the Rule of Law: Administrative government means “Specific orders or discretionary decisions by officials” rather than “General, abstract, prospective rules that apply equally to all, creating a framework for spontaneous order[.]”
The Political Slippery Slope: From Administration to Coercion and Serfdom
The thing about the market is that it is a “spontaneous order” and most people just don’t believe that an order can work without someone giving orders. It’s in the jeans.
But, as Hayek writes:
the power which a millionaire... has over me is very much less than that which the smallest bureaucrat possesses.
When you think about it, that makes complete sense. But politicians still get mileage from “make billionaires pay their fair share.”
My take is from Karl Popper, that “knowledge begins with a problem.” And then continues, as each bite of knowledge solves one problem and creates another.
We make a change because we have a problem. We get out the toolbox and start fixin’ things.
But governments and hierarchies and bureaucrats don’t like to fix things. They just want to keep on keeping on and collect that pension after 30 years of service.
The problem with “let the civil service do it” is that life is not a single problem to be solved but a continuing process of breaking things and fixing things. And as soon as you set up your administrative system you discover that you forgot something. But because you are a bureaucrat you don’t want to change things. And since you keep getting your paycheck whether or not you fix things, the sensible thing to do is not to change anything.
| Mon, 13 Apr 2026 22:57:26 GMT |
Switch to Substack for more blog posts
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
Anyone that calls another a hater is a racist/sexist etc.
Anyone that calls another a hater is a racist/sexist etc.
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: Analysis of Prophecy
