"Mission Creeps"
by Bill Bonner
"We want a revolution,
And we want it now."
- The persecution and assassination of Jean-Paul Marat as performed by
the inmates of the asylum at Charenton and directed by the Marquis de Sade.
Youghal, Ireland - "Yesterday we peeked ahead at what wickedness this way comes. Today we lift our heads to take in a broader view. The notion is plain enough. The one feat Donald Trump genuinely brought off - the only one, some would grumble - was to enlarge, vastly and lastingly, the sum of mischief a President may get away with. And now the next regime, be it Republican or Democrat, will lay its hands upon that swollen new power.
We saw yesterday how the Democrats, like Madame Defarge knitting the names of the doomed into her endless wool, are already drawing up their lists: of those to be prosecuted, of those to be cashiered, of bureaus to be raised from the dead or buried, of budgets and taxes to be heaped higher, and of free this and free that.
It is not beyond all possibility that such authority might fall to an American Javier Milei, the Argentine, who is actually balancing his books and paring down the bulk of the state. But one would be a fool to wager on it. Nations cast off their parasitic elites only when they have no choice - that is, when they are whipped in war or have run out of money. Far likelier, the Democrats, the Republicans, the Deep Staters, and the whole grinning regiment of opportunists and world improvers will go on making a bad business worse. How so? And why?
Here is our hypothesis. As the federal machine spends more, squanders more, hatches more agencies, and scribbles more rules, the economy bends under the load. The United States, saddled with nearly $40 trillion of public debt, can scarcely drag itself forward. At present rates it shells out close to $1.6 trillion a year in interest alone; ten years hence the tribute will likely run to $3 trillion a year. The military budget already blubbers toward a trillion and a half. Reckon the guns and the butter together and you have better than $3 trillion - near a tenth of the whole GDP - torn each year out of the real, productive economy.
That drag is the spawn of political self-aggrandizement - mission creep - wedded to a counterfeit-money system that makes the whole swindle possible. It is the foundational fraud of modern government: the solemn pretense that the citizen grows better off as the feds boss him around and spend more of his money.
We have shown before that it is actually a sort of Ponzi scheme - or a Cantillon Effect - wherein the first generations empty their glasses from debt-financed partying and the generations following are handed the bill. We are now well into the “generations following.” And with the sins of the fathers piled upon their backs, it grows ever harder for ordinary people to wring what they want out of the government, or out of the economy itself.
Discontent swells. And as it swells, the people go casting about for more “radical” champions. The old mumbly-fumbly will no longer work. Right and left alike, they bawl for action. They behold a china shop; they clamor for a bull.
That is the meaning of the late elections in New York City, where all three congressional candidates blessed by Mayor Mamdani came home winners, dealing the establishment Democrats a thumping. More mainstream aspirants, such as young Jack Schlossberg, grandson of the martyred Kennedy clan, were sent home.
“New Yorkers are hungry for a new kind of politics,” quoth Mamdani. And so, it appears, are the Californians - and the voters of Louisiana, of Maryland, of Maine. From the corn belt to the shrimp boats, the moderate, the temperate, the middle-of-the-roader is being shouldered off the highway into the ditch.
The people crave change. They feel the malaise in their bones but cannot name its cause. They want a revolution. So, they turn to the Big Man and the radical, mistaking brassy manners and bold fronts for genuine understanding and a settled plan.
The Democratic slate in New York - Mamdani at its head - has neither the faintest grasp of what ails the city nor any serious elixir to cure it. In place of both, it peddles nostrums tried a hundred times before and failed every time: a four-year freeze on the rents of a million stabilized flats; free childcare from the age of six weeks; buses without fare; a $30/hour minimum wage by 2030; municipal grocery stores hawking produce at wholesale; and a brand-new Department of Community Safety at a tidy $1.1 billion a year. To foot this banquet, Mamdani would lay a fresh two percent tax upon every New Yorker earning above a million, and hoist the city’s corporate levy besides.
Whether the sheep will sit meekly still for the shearing remains to be seen. Already, we read, Goldman Sachs is shifting yet more of its New York flock to Dallas. In the cities of America, you can still vote with your feet. It will not be half so easy when the “new kind of politics” has got its grip upon the whole country."
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