"Desperate Actions by a Desperate Regime"
by Jeffrey Tucker
"It doesn’t get better, or really more painful, than this: The Biden administration apparently considered sending cards to millions of American households that would be filled with money and allow people to buy gas and groceries, supposedly helping people deal with inflation. But the plan was foiled, and why? Because there aren’t enough chips on the market to meet the need! So they backed off, and good thing too. But think about this.
When the central planners themselves cannot find enough resources around to enact their own plans, we’ve reached some kind of new low. But it even gets better. As everyone knows, the Biden administration is in a panic to deal with inflation because… well, because everyone and their cats and dogs are red-hot mad about inflation.
The roots of the problem are deep but the evidence dates almost exactly from the day of Biden’s inauguration in 2021. So yes, he gets all the blame. It doesn’t help that we have reels of video of Biden himself promising to end fossil fuel. The first great act of these fanatics was to cancel the Keystone pipeline. Goading Russia into war over its border with Ukraine didn’t help either. But all that aside, gas and oil prices are responding to the overall devaluation of the dollar that was inevitable in any case.
And now, acting on the assumption that the American people and press are all as dumb as earthworms, the Biden administration claims to be for bringing down prices. So it has sent a threatening letter to all major energy companies to demand that they “work with the administration” to supply the markets or else face “emergency measures.”
Good grief! These people have chutzpah! Fortunately, the energy companies are fighting back. Exxon, for example, points out that the administration could allow exceptions to the Jones Act, which restricts shipping and reduces supplies. Of course, that won’t happen because the Biden administration is in the pay of the labor unions that keep that preposterous law in place.
As for allowing more drilling and refineries, forget it. Even today, if there really was a change of heart from the top, no one would really believe it. The industry needs certitude to make long-term investments, not just a temporary and mostly cosmetic policy change. The sheer quantity of oil and gas available on the markets has hit new lows, and it is hard to say that this is completely disconnected from government action. This is precisely what they were going for.
The entire administration is united in the view that we should all be living off the “wind and sun” rather than digging around in the dirt for our energy needs. Sadly, that rules out 84% of U.S. energy consumption. In other words, these people are not only cray cray; they are also despotic. Even when the despotic regime faces massive revolt from the angry masses, they cannot do anything due to their ideological commitments and the powerful special interests to which they are beholden. This is how societies fall apart. This is how civilizations collapse.
This administration came to power with the belief that Trump would go down in history as the worst president of all time. Now they’re looking at something more remarkable: The label of worst actually belongs to the current regime. Biden is even less popular than Carter!
This is my worry: They’re cornered rats, hissing and biting. At some point, angry regimes have no options left but to use their power to attack their enemies, even to the point of turning them over to the police in some cases. That seems to be exactly what is going on right now. They’re marching through the list: the Jan. 6 protesters, the “anti-vaxxers,” the dissidents in the war against Russia, the seditionists and unpatriotic executives in the oil and car companies who are not complying with the demand to make more.
Who do these people think they are? The more they fail, the angrier they get. In the book "Atlas Shrugged," the central plans fail because even the elites cannot gain access to the resources to enact them. They instead turn to diktat and nothing more. Make more stuff! Lower prices! Just go back to the way things used to be! It becomes comical at some point except that civilization itself is collapsing. There is no way really to understand our times except by reference to dystopian fiction. Below, I show you how the administrative state, the permanent bureaucracy, has become unleashed upon the American people. Read on."
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"The Administrative State, Unleashed"
By Jeffrey Tucker
"Daily, the White House tells us that all our suffering is in our heads. We are actually doing really well - at least as compared with last year. Oh, there’s inflation but that’s only an opportunity to transition to relying on the “wind and the sun.” So stop your kvetching. What’s your problem? Don’t you want a green revolution? Don’t you want to own nothing and be happy? You consume too much as it is. There is a higher joy that comes with deprivation, so shake off the blues and learn to love the new way. Enjoy your wind and sun.
It’s becoming very apparent that this administration and the party it represents are probably toast. It’s just a matter of waiting for the next election. And then the next one. Two and half years from now, there will be a chance to start fresh and cut it out with all the insanity in which a bunch of woke Ivies impose their nutty visions on the rest of us. Just wait it out.
Thank goodness for democracy, right? The right question to ask is whether it will change anything. You are not cynical if you doubt that much will change. The problem is baked into the structure of government today, which is NOTHING like what the Constitution’s framers imagined it to be.
The idea of democracy is that the people are in charge through their elected representatives. The opposite would be, for example, a vast and permanent class of administrative bureaucrats, who paid no attention at all to public opinion, elections or elected leaders and their appointments. Sad to say, but that is exactly the system we have in place today.
Your Real Rulers: The last two years have given us a chilling lesson in who really runs the country. It’s executive-level agencies that are utterly unresponsive to anything or anyone, except perhaps the private-sector forces of power that have revolving doors back and forth. The political appointees tapped to head agencies such as the CDC or HHS or whatever are basically irrelevant clowns about whom the career bureaucrats laugh if they pay any attention to them at all.
Years ago, I lived in some condominiums near the D.C. Beltway and all my neighbors were career workers for federal agencies. You name it: Transportation, Labor, Agriculture, Housing, whatever. They were lifers and they knew it. Their salaries depended on paper credentials and longevity. There was no way they could ever be fired, short of something impossibly egregious.
Naively, I early on tried to talk about issues of politics. They would stare at me with blank faces. I thought at the time that they must have had strong opinions but were somehow prevented from talking about it. Later, I came to realize something more chilling: They didn’t care in the slightest bit. Talking to them about politics was like talking to me about hockey teams in Finland. It’s not a subject that affects my life. That’s how it is with these people: They are utterly and completely unaffected by any political shifts. They know it. They take pride in it.
Pictures on the Wall: For odd reasons, I found myself spending several weeks in the offices of the Department of Housing and Urban Development. I was doing research and had full access to all records, back when something like that was actually possible for a regular citizen. It was a time when the old politically appointed director of HUD was on his way out and a new one was on his way in.
I was quietly working when I heard a series of loud crashes of glass in the hallway. I stuck my head out and watched. A guy was walking along, flicking pictures of the old guy off the wall and letting them crash down to the ground. About an hour later, a guy came along with a broom and swept up the mess. An hour after that, a guy came along and hung new pictures of the new guy on the wall.
During the entire noisy ordeal, not one other employee of the agency showed the slightest curiosity about what was happening. They had seen this dozens of times and just didn’t care. Looking back, it’s pretty obvious that this scene sums it up. The permanent bureaucracy is completely unaffected by any of the cosmetic changes in politics.
My estimate is that 2 million people occupy the permanent bureaucratic state, excluding things like military and postal employees. The political appointments are about 4,000 and they come and go. Politics is mortal; the bureaucracy is immortal.
How Did This Happen? In September 1881, only four months into the first term of James A. Garfield, an angry man named Charles J. Guiteau shot the president. Guiteau was angry because he thought that Garfield had promised him a job in the new administration. But none was forthcoming. It was a shocking thing, and Congress immediately got to work figuring out how to prevent the next assassination. They had the theory that they needed to end the system of patronage in government so that way people wouldn’t get mad and shoot the president. The Pendleton Act created a permanent civil service. The new president, Chester Arthur, signed the bill.
It was done: The administrative state was born. It wasn’t so bad at first but then came the Fed, the income tax and World War I. The bureaucracy expanded in scope and power. Each decade, things got worse. The Cold War entrenched the military-industrial complex, and the Great Society built a massive civilian-controlling welfare state. So on it went until today when it is not even clear that elected politicians matter much at all.
To be sure, the Republicans could do something about this problem but will they? Nearly every elected leader has something to hide. If they don’t, the media can always make something up. This is how the deep state keeps the political class in line as we saw during the Trump years.
My point: Let’s not be naive about the prospects for change. It is going to require far more than merely electing a new class of supposed rulers. The real rulers are too smart to subject themselves to the business of elections. Those are designed to keep our minds busy with the belief that democracy still survives. Until the public figures this out, genuine change will still be a very long time away. Meanwhile, the emerging economic crisis is going to unleash the administrative state as never before."
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