Christopher Chantrill - Writer, conservative, government spending taxes debt deficit

Christopher Chantrill

Welcome!

WELCOME. I am Christopher Chantrill @chrischantrill, writer and conservative. You can see my work at the following sites:

Road to the Middle Class contains the eponymous book and my daily blog. It investigates and celebrates the cultural artefacts that ordinary people appropriate as they struggle to adapt from country ways to the demands of life in the city. Start here.

An American Manifesto is the site for my book and blog. I am writing this book about "life after liberalism" and blogging about it as I go. All are invited to comment. Start here.

USgovernmentspending.com is a resource on government spending in the United States. It presents tables and charts on federal, state, and local government expenditure in the United States from 1902 to the present. Spending data are sourced from US budget data and US Census reports. Start here.

US Spending 101 is a “university” of government spending. It features several walks through the pages of the usgovernmentspending.com suite of websites. And the learning never stops. But it is not a real university, nor does it offer credits for courses completed. Start here.

USgovernmentrevenue.com is a resource on government taxes and receipts in the United States. It presents tables and charts on federal, state, and local government taxes, charges, use fees, and business revenue in the United States from 1902 to the present. Revenue data are sourced from US budget data and US Census reports. Start here.

UKpublicspending.co.uk is a resource on public spending in the United Kingdom. It presents tables and charts on public expenditure by central government, local authorities, and public corporations in the United Kingdom from 1900 to the present. Spending data is sourced from UK government Public Expenditure Statistical Analyses, the UK National Statistics “Blue Book,” and academic studies. Start here.

UKpublicrevenue.co.uk is a resource on public revenue in the United Kingdom. It presents tables and charts on public revenues by central government, and local authorities in the United Kingdom from 1900 to the present. Revenue data is sourced from UK Office for Budget Responsibility, the UK National Statistics and academic studies. Start here.

American Thinker publishes my op-eds most weeks. Click here.

US Stuck on Stupid analyzes the perfect storm of political bungling in the years from 1929 to 1939 that plunged the American people into untold misery during the Great Depression. Start here.

US Presidential Elections tabulates the results of presidential elections going back to 1788. Start here.

US Midterm Elections tabulates the history of midterm elections for the US Senate and the US House of Representatives going back to 1790. You can sort the elections by year, by party strength, and by party gains and losses. Start here.

Biography

I AM CHRISTOPHER CHANTRILL, a member of the international capitalist conspiracy. Both my grandfathers owned and operated import/export businesses in the early twentieth century, one in St. Petersburg, Russia, where my father was born, and the other in Kobe, Japan, where my mother was born.

I was born in India and raised and educated in England. I immigrated to the United States in 1968 and worked for many years designing and implementing utility control systems and software in Seattle.

Soon after moving to Seattle, I instinctively revolted against the suffocating left-coast culture of the Soviet of Washington, and soon came to revere the four great Germans who helped inspire the Reagan revolution: Ludwig von Mises, F.A. Hayek, Leo Strauss, and Eric Voegelin. Since then I have broadened my appreciation of “The German Turn” that has transformed the world over the last 200 years.

I have written for Liberty, FrontPageMag.com, and The American Thinker. My book Road to the Middle Class celebrates the self-governing culture of the United States in which enthusiastic Christianity, education, mutual aid, and living under law have taught generations of immigrants to rise from indigence in the countryside to a life of competence and prosperity in the city. My book An American Manifesto: Life after Liberalism tries to imagine what America would look like after the end of left-wing politics and big government.

Disclaimer and Transparency

WE make no respresentation about the accuracy of the data presented in these websites. Nor does Christopher Chantrill represent himself to possess any formal qualifications to select, evaluate or present the information. Users are urged to check all data against the published data sources and to report any errors or inconsistencies.

The websites have no relationship with any government institution, or any other institution. They are supported solely by advertising and by the life, fortune, and sacred honor of Christopher Chantrill.

Daily Blogging

WE BLOG DAILY, Monday to Friday, chiefly on national US politics, religion, education, mutual aid, and law. We also look at our junior partners in the global Anglospheric hegemony, the British. It is hard to say why, but very often our blogging zeroes in like a laser on liberal hypocrisies, monopolies, and sinecures. Of course, we love our liberal friends to bits, but we do not take them quite as seriously as they do. If we get too pompous and serious, please get in touch and tell us to lighten up.

We love to get email from our readers. And you can follow on Twitter .

Enjoy.

LATEST BLOG

The Socialist Kiddies Don't Know Nuttin'

This came up on my X-feed. A socialist student telling Ben Shapiro how a pencil factory wouldn’t be nothing without the workers.

Capital need labor infinitely more than labor needs capital.

Not the case, says Ben Shapiro. Because “millions of people” are willing to work for wages.

Actually, I’d say that everything needs everything else. A pencil factory owner needs “wood, paint, graphite, rubber and aluminum,” as the student asserts. But he also needs a factory and a market and wholesalers to buy his pencils, and on and on. And he needs the prices for labor and materials and energy and money to add up to a profit. Because if the sums don’t add up there are no pencils, no jobs, no profits, no nothing.

And do you know how that all comes together? In the market and its prices, including prices for workers, equipment, money, real estate, and on and on.

If you do not understand that, dear socialist friend, you know nothing, and you certainly should not be pontificating in public, or running for office, or conducting peaceful protests, or administering the pencil industry from a government bureaucracy.

But the bigger issue is that it does not matter if you know nothing and do not understand capitalism and markets and prices. You can know nothing and still survive and thrive in a market economy.

All you need to do is show up at the supermarket with money and pay the price for the groceries you buy. You don’t have to know about butchering cows, or bottling milk, or making butter. That all happens off stage, and is the result of it all is the price the supermarket wants you to pay. If you don’t like the prices or the products you can go somewhere else.

All you need to do is apply for a job and decide whether the wage offered is good enough for you to take the job. If you work at a job for six months and you don’t get a raise, you can always quit and go find a job somewhere else.

All you need to do to get a roof over your head is find a house to rent. You do not have to have the skills to build your own house, only to demonstrate that you can make the rent.

Maybe the true miracle of the market economy is that you don’t need to know nuttin’ about it. The people that created the market economy knew nuttin’ about it. The rulers that allowed cities to create local market economies knew nuttin’ as to how the market works. Workers migrated from rural serfdom to wage labor in the cities without knowing a thing about how to live and work in an industrial city. We live in houses filled with gadgets that we know nothing about, except how to use them — sorta.

And yet it works. And yet it has visited unimaginable wealth on all of us.

And in every generation some dumb kid thinks he knows better than the millions of minds and lives that created the life he lives and takes for granted and complains about.

Remember the song:

I’ve danced with a man, who’s danced with a girl, who’s danced with the Prince of Wales

You never know what might be going on a couple of connections away from your own little life.

What a world!

| Fri, 07 Aug 2026 21:51:32 GMT |

Nothing Has Changed Since 1000

We wise moderns all know that there’s been nothing like the Commies of the 20th century and their kissing cousins the Woke Faithful. And don’t get me started on Literally Hitler.

But Bjorn Merker in Perishing Promise tells us that the Catholic Church had the whole thing down pat starting at the turn of the First Millennium.

He tells the story through the growth of the Latin Church. See, after the Fall of Rome the Church knew if was “in danger of sharing its fate.” The whole point of Augustine’s City of God therefore was to dissociate the City of God from the Earthly City of the deceased and fallen Roman Empire. So the Church pushed into northern Europe and went to work on Christianizing the Germanic tribes.

But, of course, the Christianizing of the Germanic pagans didn’t just involve religious conversion.

In the process Christian doctrines, values and institutions were impressed upon societies undergoing the far-reaching changes attendant on the transition from an essentially preliterate tribal culture to a literate civilization.

The point is that the conversion was both religious and political.

This fusion of tribal and ecclesiastical power… [was] characterized by an absence of a principled distinction between worldly and spiritual authority and power[.]

And it didn’t hurt that the Church “engaged in large-scale land clearance effort, introduced efficient management techniques, and improved agricultural methods.”

But what happened after the conversion was complete — even extending to Iceland? Perfectly simple. It was time for “activism.”

Professing Christians could easily be shown to violate their own ideal in practice,, handing activists the lever of shame in pursuing their goals.

Sound familiar doesn’t it.

[T]hat lever and logic is a constant fixture of activist movements, whether religious or secular, [as we shall see.]

And they even had a Peace Movement, the “Peace of God.”

In due course came Pope Gregory VII, born Hildebrand of Soana, and he declared in Dictatus Papae in 1075 that the pope had the power to depose emperors. Yes, so Holy Roman Emperor Henry IV had to take the Road to Canossa.

Then the Church invented the Crusade.

The nature and scope of papal aspirations were reflected… in the Holy War or Crusade, directed against external enemies, and the Inquisition directed against internal dissent (heresy).

The point to understand is that the Crusades were not just fought against the Muslims, but also against Byzantium, Jews, and “non-Latin Christians such as the Copts.”

Internally, within the boundaries of papal authority, there was what we now call totalitarianism. If you were not a baptized Christian you were excluded from society.

Thus, the Fourth Lateran Council (1215) prohibited Jews from owning land and from all civil and military functions.

And woe to those outside the gates.

[T]he heretics, even if innocent of any other crime, were considered fit to be killed, and were in fact killed.

You can see what Bjorn Merker is setting up here. He is telling the history of the last millennium as though it were the first draft of our own totalitarian age, where religious and political leaders are ever tending towards enforcing a one true faith under one great leader.

As we say now: it’s in the jeans.

More to come.

| Fri, 07 Aug 2026 02:12:53 GMT |

Chris Chantrill

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US GOVERNMENT EXPENDITURE

At usgovernmentspending.com we have assembled a record of government spending in the United States for the last century. You can view government spending, federal, state, and local, for every year from 1902 to the present. And you can generate charts of that spending. more>>

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US GOVERNMENT RECEIPTS

At usgovernmentrevenue.com we have assembled a record of government revenue in the United States for the last century. You can view government receipts, federal, state, and local, for every year from 1902 to the present. And you can generate charts of that revenue. more>>

UK PUBLIC EXPENDITURE

At ukpublicspending.co.uk we have assembled a record of public spending in the United Kingdom for the last century. You can view British public spending, central government and local authority, for every year from 1983 to the present. And you can generate charts of that spending. more>>

ROAD TO THE MIDDLE CLASS

The Road to the Middle Class is a journey from a world of power to a world of trust and love. In religion, it is a journey from power gods that respond to sacrifice and augury to the God who makes a covenant with mankind. In education, it is a journey from the world of the spoken word to the world of the written word. In community, it is the journey from dependence on blood kin and upon clientage under a great lord to the mutual aid and the rules of the self-governing fraternal association. In law it is the journey from the violence of force and feud to the king’s peace, the law of contract, and private property.

Road to the Middle Class: The Book

Contents

Chapter One

>>more>>

AN AMERICAN MANIFESTO

With the failure of the welfare state, it is time to consider what comes next. In "An American Manifesto: Life After Liberalism" I develop a narrative about where we are and where we should go to redeem the American experiment.

An American Manifesto: The Book

Contents

Chapter One

>>more>>