Roots of constitutional government (2)

This is a follow-on to the first post on Roots of constitutional government.

Prior to the reign of Henry I there was a written limit to the sovereign of Engla-land, later called England, which came from Anglo-Saxon roots.  With the Angles and Saxons having come from central Denmark and northern Germany (on our modern map) these people were influenced by their cultural heritage that passed through the Norse and Germanic traditions.  In moving to the Roman province of Britannia in the 5th century AD, the newcomers found a that parts of the old Roman law system had survived, but that much of the local law was done via more traditional means.  The Anglo-Saxons came with a tradition of the Thing, which are the annual or biannual gatherings of local lawgivers that dispensed the King's justice and then heard the complaints of the people to be passed upwards to higher levels to be addressed.  Trials were by jury of locals under the oversight of a lawgiver or deputy, so that justice could be seen as something that was locally held.  This basic understanding is put down in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle after Ethelred II found himself on the losing end of the onslaughts of Danes and Vikings, to the point where the local nobility insisted that they would get a say in such government as was necessary, particularly in taxation.

Although the actual series of battles ended in defeat for Ethelred II, the final winner was King Canute (picking up where his father, King Sweyn had left off) and became the last true Viking King.  He did so by cementing his place amongst the Anglo-Saxons by agreeing to the limitations placed upon Ethelred II, and marrying his widow.  Although the heir to the throne after Canute would be Ethelred II's son, Edward, the idea of there being a positive assertion of past fealty to become King had started to take hold.  The rivalry between Harold and Tostig (Tosty as I used previously) would finally end in 1066 with the invasion of Vikings in the north near York (Jorvik) which would be beaten back. The second the Norman invasion of William who had been designated by Edward as he was related to his mother, Emma.  Harold had even agreed with this when he was shipwrecked in Normandy and going back on that agreement left William the only option of asserting rule by force of arms.  If Harold's army had not been weary and wounded from the first battles in the north, then things might have turned out differently with the Norman invasion.  Instead it was William the Conqueror who prevailed who offered that those who had not been struck down at Hastings would be seen as continuing to rule if they gave their agreement to have William as their King.  A few of the Earls would take him up on that, while most of the others would not help in securing the throne for William and for those he set about getting rid of much of the resistance to his rule by force.

What followed was the execution, assassination and running down of lesser nobles, their families and, in the case of the Northumberland, pretty much every person in that north central section of England.  The imposed system would invest in castles that were not fortified trade towns but seats of power, which were under the control of the Dukes that William brought in. Then came the rise of the accountant as King William wanted an exact detailing of all the land, all the people, all the property of England for tax purposes.  A Domesday Book is just that and it accounted for everything down to the last person, the last horse, the last cow and the last pig, and the areas that had been under the Harrying of the North had entire towns missing as there was no one to live in them.  The Revolt of the Earls and Danish invasion would mark troubled times during his reign as he had lands on the continent to deal with as well as England, which meant moving around to deal with problems from as far north as Scotland to Maine just to the south of Normandy in France.

The ducal system of Norman nobles to replace the Anglo-Saxon petty nobles and aristocrats, altered the political landscape of England so as to raise the knights and soldiery necessary to secure the country and provide for the William's army.  With this system comes the system of chivalry and moderation in warfare which was part and parcel of the mainland European system of ruling.  William did not attempt to unify his lands under a single law domain, however, so that England had a different law system than the holding in Normandy where fealty was owed to the French King.  What did happen was that forested land was set aside for the King for his pleasure, and violation of the King's forests had penalties that were not previously seen under the Anglo-Saxon system.  All of this was overlaid on the existing shire system, however, with its existing divisions and subdivisions within each shire to help in administration of law for orderly government.  This system was co-opted by William so as to appoint officials known as sheriffs who were dispensers of royal justice and also the tax man.  If you are starting to see the outlines of where the Robin Hood stories would come from, then you now have the context that created it: Norman ducal system overlaid on pre-existing Anglo-Saxon system but with appointees running those offices.

If the seeds for that realm of stories is founded with William, then the overlay of that system is directly seen in the other realm of stories represented by the Arthurian mythos.  That realm where the land and the King are an entity, where the sovereign rules as first amongst equals which is the basis for the Knights of the Round Table, then the actual system of knights and chivalry come not from the Anglo-Saxon line but the French and mainland European strain of government.  It is the excesses and flaws in the ducal system that show up in more egalitarian England during wars as the imposed administration of law by the sheriff is one that is not found in that representative Anglo-Saxon system and is thus an imposition of rule from the top-down.  This meant that a Kingdom required a strong personality at its top to be secure, and a constant struggle to retain control against unrest and uprisings.  Also the tradition in Normandy had no set succession, and that was left to the King's wishes usually stated on his death bed, although written documents could secure such things unless the heir that had been named had died between the writing and the death.

William's eldest son, William Rufus, was a strong leader and continued the building projects that his father had started for fortifications, castles and churches, and to fund this William II went beyond the prior taxation system that was an amalgam of the ducal system and English system, and started to tax the Church, itself, and kept the goods of Bishops and Arch-Bishops after their deaths by not appointing successors.  This, along with never having married, never fathered a child and keeping a male companion close to him meant that William II was not endearing himself to the Church on either financial nor moral grounds.  To be a Christian Monarch one must act in the ways of a Christian and it was those lacks, and utilizing secular authority over the Church that becomes the beginning of the negative example to the American Framers of what happens when the State has oversight and appointment control over the Church.  During the reign of William II between 1087 and 1100, the problems of this control were beginning to show through the post-Roman Monarchial system which would begin to plague the mainland of Europe after Luther.  In England the idea of the local Church being controlled by the Crown would come up in a very different manner and lead to different ends.  The problems of having an irreligious sovereign power in control of religious institutions is not recent and the reasons to separate out this control first shows up under William II.

Under William II the expansion of the forests under control of the Crown increased in extent and punishments were raised, as well.  At one point the Crown owned approximately 25% of all the land under Forest Law.  In our modern times we can see the expansion of power under the US government for the National Park Service, National Fish and Wildlife Service and Bureau of Land Management as the exact equal to Forest Law under William II.  Again the Framers of the Constitution had this set of abuses to look at and gave the federal government just 10 square miles of land that was to be the capitol, and put harsh restrictions in expanding this requiring the assent of State Legislatures on a  parcel by parcel basis.  The US Constitution is not just the assertion of well known traditions via the Amendments, but restrictions are built into the very framework of the Constitution itself.  If the separation of National power over religion is stated clearly and directly, the passive voice of what little the government is allowed to have is a far greater restriction than any active voice assertion.  We unwisely bypass these at our peril by putting the sovereign government in virtual control of large portions of the Nation which it is restricted from doing not by a 'thou shall not' but by 'thou art allowed only this'.

With William II death due to a hunting accident, his younger brother Henry quickly moved to bury his brother and take the throne.  As their elder brother, Robert Duke of Normandy, was away on crusade, Henry sought to consolidate his position in England by an approach that Canute would approve of: Henry agreed to the English law and had published, in Anglo-Saxon, his agreement to uphold the rights of the free English folk in 1106.  This coronation charter was widely distributed so that all the people in the land would know that this King, unlike his predecessors, respected them, their system of laws and their rights. The Charter of Liberties of Henry I thus becomes the next in line of statements of support for the rights of the people as expressed via their common government system.  This Charter of Liberties serves as a template for the later Magna Carta and begins putting into place that those who have been relieved of their lands unlawfully are due for lawful relief.  It allows for return or re-purchase of taken land and it guarantees the right of inheritance of property for the nobles and aristocrats, so that the Crown will no longer have say over who gets such lands on the death of the land holder.  The seignorage, the difference between the value of a metal in the coin and the cost to produce it, was reinstated to that of Edward I so that there was no 'stealth tax' for when gold or silver is given over for certificate or coinage, which puts a stable system of weights and measures in for coins and their content.

What The Charter of Liberties does is reset the English legal system back to its prior state, by and large, and shifts the governmental entities back to the ones that had been more widely understood prior to William I.  Laws are moved back to the local level for the nobles and aristocrats as it was under Edward the Confessor, which puts accountability down to the local level for ordinary laws and even the King's laws are administered at that level, as well.  The Forestry Laws are repealed back to the level of William I, which were bad, yes, but as part of the political negotiations going on to get the English nobles and aristocrats to back him, can be seen as getting rid of the excesses of that law system.  Also enclosed within are benefits to the nobles who are sick, enfeebled and to widows and orphans of same, beyond guarantee of inheritance, which are positive carrots and representing a form of Christian morality.  In all this is one of the main roots of the constitutional system and the lessons learned from the monarchy system are also learned in its excesses.  If William had thought to overlay a permanent Normandy ducal system on England then Henry I seeks to repeal major portions of it to allow for freedom at the lowest levels and hold those responsible for maintaining the system at that level.  What is restored, then, is not a republic but a system that had federalist outlines prior to William I and those representative and accountable sub-systems necessary for a federalist form of system are returned.  Without being expressly federalist, Henry I puts back in place the traditional accountability system that had been noted in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle and reinforces it with some exactitude.

First thoughts

On the SCOTUS decision today I only have a few thoughts.   The decision is here, and I did a quick scan of it to see what the actual decision was... again this was a comment at Hot Air and for now that is it.  I'm seeing what others have to say, of course, and take my own council not that of fear.

With no other fanfare -

= = =

From p.32 of the decision:

Under the mandate, if an individual does not maintain health insurance, the only consequence is that he must make an additional payment to the IRS when he pays his taxes. See §5000A(b). That, according to the Government,means the mandate can be regarded as establishing a condition—not owning health insurance—that triggers a tax—the required payment to the IRS. Under that theory, the mandate is not a legal command to buy insurance.Rather, it makes going without insurance just another thing the Government taxes, like buying gasoline or earning income. And if the mandate is in effect just a tax hike on certain taxpayers who do not have health insurance, it may be within Congress’s constitutional power to tax.

It MAY be within Congress’s power. MAY?

Oh, and you must take a positive action to purchase said goods he uses as examples. You do not pay a penalty for not purchasing gasoline, or for earning no income. Although if he is making THAT connection then welcome to the mandated penalty for gasoline purchase and to the penalty for not earning income. Won’t those be swell brand, spanking new taxes in the future?

And then this following:

The question is not whether that is the most natural interpretation of the mandate, but only whether it is a “fairly possible” one. Crowell v. Benson, 285 U. S. 22, 62 (1932). As we have explained, “every reasonable construction must be resorted to, in order to save a statute from unconstitutionality.” Hooper v. California, 155 U. S. 648, 657 (1895). The Government asks us to interpret the mandate as imposing a tax, if it would otherwise violate the Constitution. Granting the Act the full measure of deference owed to federal statutes, it can be so read, for the reasons set forth below.

Roberts then repeats this pattern at each instance showing that there is a similarity between a power to tax purchases and the power to tax inactivity.

He looks at the Child Labor Collection Tax which is a tax on those using child labor. An activity. For licensing taxes that is a fee given to those asking for the license to do certain regulated business. It is an activity. Nuclear waste surcharges is for an activity of shipping nuclear waste.

He then goes on to those tax incentives used to encourage conduct, and yet there is a stark difference between conducting such conduct to get a tax break, and not doing something and getting penalized for it. In the former if you do not purchase a home you are not penalized for it, you just do not get the incentives… but I’m sure that under some future Congress not owning a home can be assessed as a tax, so all you renters out there can look forward to that in the future. He also cites taxes on cigarettes, but you pay no taxes on them if you do not purchase them, so I guess we can all start to pony up for cigarettes we don’t buy as future Congress can do that, as well. Won’t that be swell?

By p. 40 we come to this lovely passage looking at the arguments against the tax:

A tax on going without health insurance does not fall within any recognized category of direct tax. It is not a capitation. Capitations are taxes paid by every person, “without regard to property, profession, or any other circumstance.” Hylton, supra, at 175 (opinion of Chase, J.) (emphasis altered). The whole point of the shared responsibility payment is that it is triggered by specific circumstances—earning a certain amount of income but not obtaining health insurance. The payment is also plainly not a tax on the ownership of land or personal property. The shared responsibility payment is thus not a direct tax that must be apportioned among the several States.
There may, however, be a more fundamental objection to a tax on those who lack health insurance. Even if only a tax, the payment under §5000A(b) remains a burden that the Federal Government imposes for an omission, not an act. If it is troubling to interpret the Commerce Clause as authorizing Congress to regulate those who abstain from commerce, perhaps it should be similarly troubling to permit Congress to impose a tax for not doing something.

And now you want to know WHY Congress can do this? This follows the above:

Three considerations allay this concern. First, and most importantly, it is abundantly clear the Constitution does not guarantee that individuals may avoid taxation through inactivity. A capitation, after all, is a tax that everyone must pay simply for existing, and capitations are expressly contemplated by the Constitution. The Court today holds that our Constitution protects us from federal regulation under the Commerce Clause so long as we abstain from the regulated activity. But from its creation, the Constitution has made no such promise with respect to taxes. See Letter from Benjamin Franklin to M. Le Roy (Nov. 13, 1789) (“Our new Constitution is now established . . . but in this world nothing can be said to be certain,except death and taxes”).

Is this a direct power GRANTED to the United States government by its people? If not it is in Amendments IX and X. Nice job on forgetting that little bit of the Constitution while doing contortions on tax powers to let Congress tax an inactivity that the Chief Justice cannot find a precedent for. Not one thing he cites is a tax power over inactivity and there is no cost for inactivity in any other tax by the federal government.

Don’t let that stop you from inventing one.

ajacksonian on June 28, 2012 at 12:03 PM

= = =

So limiting the Commerce Clause and the  Necessary and Proper Clause.

What was put in its place is the wide-open field of giving Congress the ability to tax ANYTHING YOU DO including doing NOTHING.

Don't earn any income?  They can tax you for that.

Don't have a Volt? They can tax you for that.

No home? They can tax you for that.

Say! No firearms?  They can tax you for that.

This is the power of tyrannical, compulsory taxation and this decision just gave the green light for that.

The three factions of the Republican Party today

I'm using my prior break-out of the factions within the Republican Party from back in 2008 to look at where things stand today with the candidates in the field.  I will be doing some re-posting of material from that and not going into the over-view of them within the current atmosphere of the pre-election cycle.

As they have broken out these three groups stand out, and they do have sub-groups within them but gain factional affiliation by their positions as sub-groups.

I)  First is the SecCons or Security Conservatives.  The strong position of the US to wage war in her defense was a vital concern during the Cold War and this faction was in ascendance then.  By putting military concerns first they were able to back a strong and final build-up against the USSR that covered decades and put the Soviet system which was always on the ropes down and out for the count.  These were the backers that won the equivalent of a World War without bringing on true nuclear conflict.  Their problems are in the realms of Fiscal, Social and Domestic policy outside of the military realm and with the draw-down from Iraq, the ongoing relatively low-level conflict against the Talibe in AFPAK and helping out a few other Nations in COIN (Philippines, Colombia, Kenya, Yemen) they are losing a strong position within the Republican Party.  While some of the candidates will support a continued level of military affairs, this faction has no backer who is first and foremost for the military.  Without the Soviets and with China now having its economy implode in bad debt, the lower threat of terrorism going nuclear is not one that pushes people to actively support the old style military structure.  The military, for its part, understands this and is adapting to the modern world, but it is a world with a lower need for capital intensive defense systems and without a large economic need the SecCons are being marginalized.

Part of the marginalization is the comfort to social moderates and liberals, plus a willingness to spend heaven and earth for the latest equipment.  Our times are no longer ones that allow for such extravagance and socially the pendulum that started swinging in the 1890's with Progressivism has, apparently, reached as far as it can go on the other end of the cycle.

II)  Second are the FiCons or Fiscal Conservatives.  This part of the Republican Party has been part and parcel of the 'Rockefeller Republican' brand for decades.  It is this section of the party that is now breaking up due to the Tea Party movement that hadn't even been thought of in 2008.  Today there are two branches within the FiCons and they are currently the ones on the internal battle-lines for the party, itself.  Thus I will go into a bit of detail here.

1) Rockefeller Republicans - These are the 'Establishment Republicans', the guys with the money and many of the reigns via the control of the party leadership and their influence has withstood the Reagan Revolution with its SoCon underpinnings.  These are generally seen as the Big Business supporters for earmarks, subsidies, tax breaks and so on via budgetary work in DC.  It is this segment that overwhelming benefits from the K Street lobbyists who use their outside money and revolving door connections to get inside influence on the federal budget.  This is mirrored in the Democratic Party, to be sure, but in the Republican Party when anyone spoke of 'fiscal conservative' between 1950 and 1980, it was this cohort that was being referenced.  Do note that they are FOR tax breaks but not FOR cutting the size of government, therefore any short-term gain in political advantage from tax breaks is off-set by further erosion of personal liberty of the individual due to larger and more officious government.  While it was this faction that called out the problem of SSA and M&Ms, they are also the ones most notable for being unable or unwilling to get these programs reduced or on a road to being abolished as fiscally unsound.  At least two of the current candidates come from this faction (Mitt Romney and Newt Gingrich) or are affiliated with it via their business and political outlooks, and while they are (apparently) at odds with each other on the campaign trail, they are both unwilling to do any wholesale revision of the US government.  Abolishing programs still leaves the apparatus to regenerate them in place, thus removing 'welfare' has allowed for other programs to flourish where there was once that single program and done at higher cost and less accountability.  No one who believes that individual liberty is the basis for society, the Nation, government and the State would ever espouse 'mandates' for anything upon individuals in the name of fiscal conservatism.

2) Tea Party FiCons - The largest faction of the Tea Party is in this sub-group within the FiCons.  Unlike the older cohort, this cohort sees small business and smaller government as the course to go for fiscal conservatism.  The argument that government is doing things it was never designed nor meant to do and not doing those things well or efficiently for the citizenry and, in fact, is infringing on individual fiscal concerns is one that is a 'Fusion' concept, of which I will talk more about later.  Unlike the RR-FiCons, the TP-FiCons are building a fundamental ECONOMIC case for the power of personal liberty to guide the economy that is not a RR-FiCon one.  Where the RR-FiCons are inherently Hamiltonian or Progressive in their outlook, the TP-FiCons are inherently Jacksonian and Traditionalist in their positions.  The inherent nature of an economy being made up of individual transactions at the lowest level seeking the most efficient means to enable such transactions and then allowing for a larger emergent phenomena  to take root based on those transactions is one that is immediately identifiable to TP-FiCons: it is not just Hayek but the nature of human liberty and its source that argues for this and argues against the intermediation of government in any meaningful positive (that is to say in the realm of positive liberty) way and only that it needs to exercise its negative powers granted by the people to safeguard the economy from aberrant actors who will not play by the set of rules for economic exchanges.  Government cannot make such low level decisions without huge negative impact on the overall economy and, no matter what other 'good' is generated, the lost value of human liberty to fully flourish is something that impoverishes rich and poor alike and makes it harder for the poor to advance.  This sub-group is aiming to remove the Establishment RR-FiCon death grip on the party via campaign donations: members directly donate to individuals running for office, not to the party.  This has only been going on, in a real sense, for less than 2 years and due to the economic times we are in and the failure of government to adapt to them (indeed it continues being the problem to the Nation, economically) the more the TP-FiCons will shift the RR-FiCons out of control of the party funds and the party system.

III) Social Conservatives -  In the prior work I broke this category up into the Christian Conservatives and the Traditionalist Conservatives, each with their own outlook on society and the role of government and the church in people's lives.  While not at logger-heads, they have not always marched to the same tune and it was only for a few short years under Ronald Reagan that both sub-groups had time together in-step and in-formation.  Today these two sub-groups are now getting a new blend via a third group made up of parts of each of them and the TP-FiCons: the Fusionists.

1) Christian Conservatives - Here the prior break-out of religious observation and moral law guidance that was the bastion of the Christian Conservatives is now finding that it can make an economic case, as well, which is uncharted waters for many Christian Conservatives.  Moral Law guidance is, itself, only secondarily economic and primarily about the duty of man to god and society to make both moral so as to get good government.  Thus, until the last 2-3 years, the idea that government could be used to promote a moral 'good' was an idea taken up by some candidates (Mike Huckabee in 2008, Newt Gingrich in this go around).  Yet this is fundamentally against moral teachings as government is the last, least and worst place to receive any moral teachings.  Anything that gets between you and God should be disdained, and yet the Progressive Era had slowly shifted Christian Conservative SoCons into this idea that government is the last refuge for the poor and needy to go... not to the actual people who make up the Nation as caring for the poor and needy is a directive to individuals, not to States nor Nations.  The idea that government can tell you when you can work, how long you can work, if you are worthy of 'retirement' benefits, and on and on have been a slow and steady erosion of the moral fiber of the Nation by assaulting the moral fiber of individuals inside and, increasingly, outside the realm of religiously observant Americans.  The moral line in the sand against abortion was the first sign that this erosion had gone too far, but that Christian Conservatives could only do this small portion of the work of protecting society and could not grasp the larger threat to the entire society on a moral basis that government was pushing.  The awakening of Christian Conservatives to the much, much deeper teaching of our rights being vested in us took over three decades to finally filter into this sub-group of SoCons, and the re-identification of not just Life but Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness being prime movers granted by God is now spreading amongst the Christian Conservative SoCons who used to just stick to their faction knitting but now find a way to express a much deeper moral and religious belief for society via economics.  Being conservative it is a slow to move group, but once in motion little will stop it, and if the line in the sand is but a starting line for repeal of the Progressive Era, then it will be the individual who couple God, Faith, Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness as a continuous whole that will be the major part of the Fusionist sub-group.

2) Traditional Conservatives - These are the followers of Federalism, a society that treats its fellow citizens with respect, the builders of hearth and home (not just those who purchase one) and while religious to a large extent, it is the religion of conviction at home by the fireside with one's children and the role of man to build a good society for not just himself but for his fellow man, as well, as a great good and duty of man.  While this is the quietest faction of the SoCons they have been a part of the party since Lincoln, and have always understood respecting government but questioning its extent and growth.  For Traditionalists there is always an economic point to be made and it is centered on the family check book and how one spends money for oneself.  These are the individuals who uphold thrift, of neither a borrow nor lender be, paying back one's debts not just promptly but ending them as soon as possible, and for supporting the notion that a man cannot be free if he is in debt to any other man or institution via his finances.  This sub-group may be the first to fully Fuse with the TP FiCons as there are direct parallels (indeed very deep parallels) between household accounting and government accounting, and that if you owe someone then you are in their power due to your debt.  The case that man who is in debt is living on borrowed time and that his works are prone to failure and collapse (no matter if they last) is one that is understood deeply within the Traditionalist Community.   It is this community that is closest to the old Democratic Jacsksonian community (that left the Democrats in the late 1960's) and the amount of cross-over between the old trail blazers (Jacksonians) and the old first settlers (Traditionalists) have always made them able to get along on a social level.

IV) Fusionist Conservatives - Fiscal Conservatism has deep roots in not only societal good but the teachings from the Judeo-Christian heritage about duty to God and one's fellow man.  Unlike libertarians the Fusionists recognize that not all of man's liberties and rights are positive, as Nature gives us both equally (although not in equal amounts), so that the necessity of society to generate organs to watch over and stop the exercise of negative liberties and rights within society requires government.  Man is not wholly good nor evil, but has positive and negative rights and liberties which we can bias via moral teachings to curb the negative rights and liberties and enshrine the positive ones worthy of protection.  Government is to recognize that these positive liberties and rights are to be protected, not infringed upon, and the case for this comes not from legal proceedings but from moral teachings, upholding society, and holding government accountable for the negative powers we grant it to safeguard society and the individual.  This is a deeply libertarian approach, yes, but it is not made by modern libertarian channels but through ones of religious observance, religious teachings and understanding man's duty to God and his fellow man.  Fusionist Conservatism is, at once, deeply conservative and extremely expansive in this day and age as it is the naturally recognized antidote to tyrannical or despotic government.  When Barack Obama chided the people of Pennsylvania as grasping on to their guns, god and bible, he was mocking the very basis of what is the enemy of Progressivism and Socialism in all its forms.  These three, together, give the basis for personal liberty (guns), the originator of our liberty (God) and the written moral teachings of God (the Holy Bible) all in one swoop.  Throw in Gold and you have the result of protected personal liberty able to prosper with obedience to God and upholding moral teachings.  Gold is a result of these things, not a cause of them, and it is garnered through liberty ONLY.  Unwittingly Barack Obama named the Fusionist Awakening in these concepts and knows not the history of a debauched, debased and decadent society that adheres as leeches to government is dissolved by a devout people willing to undergo martyrdom for eternal salvation.  One laughs at these things at their peril, and in speaking of them the seeds that were already planted over decades were given final fertilizer and water to grow again.

At the rate of change for the Republican Party and Conservatism as a whole, the next decade is one that will be fraught with danger and great promise.

Government will need to climb down from its Himalayan Mountain Range of debt.  It can be tossed off, with great social turmoil, or it can climb down by jettisoning the infringement of positive liberties and rights in the way of retirement, medical aid and the million and one other things done in the name of 'good' from environment to energy to agriculture to 'the humanities' to education, either via slow phase-out or wholesale cut-off.  Government so large, so officious and, at the same time, so incompetent creates a Law of Rules in which any person is probably in violation of some rule or regulation at any given moment in the day.  The Rule of Law is simple and easy to understand laws that are clearly defined and enforced without favor nor fervor, while the Law of Rules is all about favoritism and payoffs.  To do this requires and understanding of our fellow citizens that we, as man, have been living over the margin and near the edge of the abyss waiting for one ill moment to topple us into despotism or worse.  To get back from that edge the argument that our personal liberties, rights and freedom are our own salvation in this life and the next, and that passing them off to others (which is so very easy) means that we, as individuals, become cold and cruel to our fellow man because we refuse to recognize his circumstances and help him out of them.  Government cannot do that, indeed it MUST NOT do that as that is not its place as a part of society.  It is just an organ of society, and one that processes the identified problems and waste material and gets rid of them... which is not the brain, in case this has been missed.  No better argument for chasing appetites to constipation of debt can be rendered than is shown by our current government which has been eating so much in the way of the positive it can no longer accomplish its duties to us, as citizens, via its negative powers and responsibilities.

This is a hard argument to make as the Deadly Sin of Sloth is one that guides this age as no other.  Yet the problems of our fellow man are not for someone else to attend to, but for us, as individuals, to ameliorate.  One cannot sit back and let others take care of things, because becoming glued to one's sofa soon means that you can no longer remember how to move from it and become the very sort of problem you were unwilling to deal with in the first place.  The heart of charity is not taxation, which is the negative liberty of theft who's power we lend for government in a limited area of commerce, but in the heart of man who is willing to give time, effort, though, a helping hand and last and least is cash to his fellow man to create a better society.  To get a more cohesive society (albeit with stark and fun differences for that is the essence of liberty on the positive side) we cannot entrust government as a caretaker or the builder of a safety net as it is not only prone to corruption but inefficient and will seek to grant favor to the few via funds that are not available, so as to expand power over the many.  Government granted positive outlook is tyrannical at its core because it can couple the whip with the reward and break man to it.  To stop that require accountability on the fiscal side, first, so as to get rid of the unnecessary appendages of government that threaten liberty in the first place.  When there is no safety net, no tax breaks, no subsidies, we are then left to our own devices to find a good way to live without the costly help of tyranny.

The current field of candidates reflects those trying to grasp on to the old, and dying, those trying to muddle through and a few trying to chart a path to a better future with smaller government and enhanced liberty for man.

Four years will not alter the fundamentals changing America.  We may crash off the mountains into debt, but that is not oblivion as we then get to the end state in a few days, and with next to no government, to boot.

The trends cannot be changed.

What can be altered is the outlook of individual to embrace what is coming and help soften it and explain it, so that we can get to a better place as a society and a nation.

If you dare to, that is.

The top 5 current threats to the United States

Over my years of blogging... damn, I never thought I would be able to say that as I never intended to blog for years... a few weeks or a month or two, maybe... I have covered a wide array of threat types to the United States.  Be it terrorism, organized crime or geophysics, I've gotten a good look at some of the nastier things that can be unleashed at a moment's notice that will leave you next to no time to prepare.  The fact that my top 5 geophysics disasters that will happen to the North American continent, sooner or later, are not being prepared for tells me much about how we, as a society, prepare to deal with just about anything.  I like geophysics as it is reliable, cyclic and gives warning via the periodicity of events over time.  If you don't heed the warnings then it is you who will pay the price.  The planet will go on its stately way with or without us, which is why I am always advocating that the best place for industry is not in a biosphere but in the clean vacuum of space.  Once we get off this rock and into our solar system with a sustainable population base that doesn't rely on Earth, then we will be very, very hard to extinguish as a species.

We aren't there, yet.

Outside of those 'known unknowns' of geophysics there are the other 'known unknowns' of terrorism, socialism/communism/fascism/anarchism, and pure old asinine political meddling in culture and economics.  These latter are all inter-related, however, as old revolutionaries tend to hide who they are and become sanctified by their cronies and enter the system. When a guy like the terrorist Bill Ayers can be blessed by the MFM without any hint at repentance for his past misdeeds, indeed he said he hadn't done enough as a terrorist, gets into the position of helping to draft the very history books that is used in school districts, and no one raises a fuss, then one can say that the 'elite' structure is in bed with the radicals.  This has a corrosive and corrupting influence on society, as a whole and as individuals, as actual history gets slanted towards viewpoints that remain unexpressed until they fester long enough to pop up like zits in OWS.  These people don't need to breathe together to share the same hookah, and if their ideas have spread globally it is because those who would normally defend the standard culture of various Nations have been complacent or asleep at the wheel.  This is the wet dream of Progressives: to dictate to society what individuals should think, eat, breathe and how they should live and die at the behest of government.

It is the dream of despotism and tyranny.

So for this remix I'm going to shuffle in the other sociological problems that these nefarious actors have put in place while we have all been hitting the snooze button.  A fun treat it isn't because I will also be mixing in military threats of the 'known unknown' variety, which ought to scare the pants off just about anyone.  Some of these I see as near-dead certainties.  You can still search this blog under the DIY category and get some ideas of what it means to prepare, now, before they happen.

So here we go.

#5 - Good-bye to the EU - After WWII the US extended its nuclear umbrella and troops into Western Europe to defend it.  The various leftists and social do-gooders realized that they didn't have to spend more than a paltry 1% or thereabouts on defense and the US expanded its defense budget to 6-8%+ to cover for that.  With all that lovely non-spending doing on did the European Nations of the West: 1) cut back on all other forms of government to get thriving, world beating economies, 2) pay off all government debt to make their currencies sound and stabilize the world, 3) decide that after two world wars that they really, and for true, weren't going to solve their problems either militarily or via diplomacy (causes for both world wars) and settle into a generally neutral stance towards each other and attempt to keep the lid on both military and diplomatic adventurism or, 4) the opposite of all that.

If you chose #4 for the expansive welfare state, increasing regulations, attempts to 'integrate' highly different populations that didn't have a great history with each other, spend like drunken sailors who can't pass out, get perennial unemployment over 8%, go into debt that none of them or all of them could repay, see a declining demography because of the growth of the state into all areas of life, have to invite in foreigners who made it a point not to assimilate, and the only real economy left was then asked to support all the ne'er-do-well spendthrifts, all the while finding out that being weak militarily at home meant no real feeling of patriotism or even a need to continue the culture, then you have a Weiner!  Ah... sorry... Winner!

Given a great protective umbrella the entire continent went towards socialism even before the commies disappeared and started calling themselves socialists, too.  Now Europe is in a permanent demographic slide unlike any other seen since the Roman Empire hit the skids, has a debt problem about to sink all the Nations in Europe separately and collectively, has foreign populations now starting to not see themselves as Europeans and wanting to change the Nations into something different... and an elite class who feels that the general public is too stupid to recognize this as a good thing!  Can Europe pull out of this tailspin?

No.

Parts of it might abandon ship in the next few months and then the jig is up.  All of the 'social safety nets' will fall and all the 'collective' help will go away as it can't be paid for as the increasing debt load year on year should have clued them into.  In giving a large umbrella over Europe the US, apparently, removed the cluebats.  The answer by the Euro-Elites (be they Kings, Emperors, Princes, Dukes, Ministers, Members of Parliament, or the local Mayor and city council) in such circumstances is clear: war.  With unrest in Europe comes war.  The French Revolution was cleared up by a Corporal, a 'whiff of grapeshot' and then the great economy booster of foreign war.  When the anarchists had been shooting down political leaders the world over for a few decades it was to get only one Arch-Duke that would trigger a global conflict.  The rise of communists in Russia and the expansion of the prior socialist parties in Europe to deal with problems, particularly in Italy and Germany, grew out of the unrest of the post-war era and turned it into the inter-war era by yet another great war building spree that led to, yes, war.  The nasty Cold War stalemate was won by the West when everyone who had red stars on in Russia changed their philosophy from communism to socialism.  The red stars were kept around to adorn party functions, however.  Needless to say getting in bed with organized crime is a mixed blessing in Russia.  Western Europe spending itself into oblivion will lead to great numbers of unemployed and the state, having only one major way to help, will authorize military spending to 'boost' the economy.  China, too, is facing this by propping up the price of copper by building vast, uninhabited cities and seeing its industrial cost rise to the point that people are being automated out of jobs or they are going, with delicious irony, to the next low wage destination of Vietnam.  Needless to say the US was wise enough to see this folly and stopped going down that road...

Oh, wait.

We didn't.

The Collapse of the EU is the symbolic collapse of Western Socialism (socialism, communism, leftism, progressivism, and big government anarchists which are a delicious stab in the back to traditional anarchists) and it isn't going to be pretty.

 

#4 - The Next World War- I can now name some major governments undergoing economic decline from which military spending may be the only hope of keeping people employed: Greece, Italy, Spain, Portugal, France, Russia, China, Japan, Mexico (more on that later) and the UK. Even better is that a few of them have historical militarism that their elites can fall back on and resurrect.  Greece has the Spartans, Italy has the Roman Empire, Spain and Portugal were once world colonial powers, France had Napoleon, Russia had Stalin, China had a slew of guys from the Yellow Emperor on to Mao, Japan had the military class and god emperor, the UK has a great history to work with like that Nelson fella, and even Mexico has patriots in their history of various stripes.

Pick three of those and say they take that path, even the worst off and most minor.  Throw in a bit of 'expansionism for resources' to help get economies going again.  Now put a large power into that mix doing that.  Within 5 years that will be about the only option left as it will be the ONLY way to get out of collectivism as NO ELITE will say that it is a FAILURE.  Internationalism just isn't a rallying point, and all the lovely bankers with their manipulation of world currencies will face a hard problem when a few enterprising countries realize that they can go it alone with just a few more resources under their belt.  They will shear off debt, see their currencies disappear, put in a scrip, open military based systems using scrip and have no need for a social safety net.

The first Nation to clear out its 'social safety net' will be the new 'leader'.

And it doesn't matter how small your population is, either, as modern technology will allow the leveraging of some very elite tactical units to perform deeds that entire armies couldn't accomplish just 60 years ago.  Technology is becoming a deadly equalizer between the large and small, and while quantity has a quality all its own, if you are stuck a couple of cycles back on the technology parade, you aren't going to make it.

No matter how chaotic and moribund economies and societies appear now, the simple solution for the worst off of cutting out the old currency, making a new scrip, torching the social safety net, killing off the radicals (always a crowd pleaser, that) and putting a military style order in place is a demonstrable winner throughout history.  And it always, without fail, ends badly.

This is the know nothing Elites we are talking about doing this and their failure to understand history and become entranced with power always allows this to happen.

We gotta get off that merry-go-round.

 

#3 - EMP the Great Equalizer - One EMP burst from a low yield nuclear device over Kansas will destroy the electronics of nearly 80% of the US that aren't hardened or shielded.  No modern commerce, no trucks, no planes, no cars (unless you got a pre-electronic one available... if you got points and plugs you have something that might survive), no industry, no farming,  no hospitals, pharmaceuticals left to what is on hand...

Remember that technology is a great equalizer against even the US.

We haven't hardened our power generation infrastructure nor our consumer commodity infrastructure.

And you may not even need a nuke to do this, but you will need a missile.

Or very high floating balloons.

Who could do this the old fashioned way with a nuke and a primitive missile?  There is a short list of supsects: the US, Russia, China, India, Pakistan, France, UK, Israel, North Korea, and Iran.  If you throw in a small technical group working with a different way to generate the pulse and balloons, then you can expand that list down to any Nation with factories producing electronics.  Gotta love that, huh?

Mind you this can also be done to China and Russia (probably requiring two devices each), all of Europe, Africa (about two devices), South America (two devices), all of North America (two devices), India, Australia, Japan if you have to get them separately, and maybe another six devices to cover all of the Pacific and three more for the Atlantic.  And one more to get all of North America.  That is N. Am. - 2, S. Am. - 2, Eurasia - 3,  India - 1, Australia - 1, Africa - 2, Pacific - 6, Atlantic -3.  Call it 25 total devices.  If they are high tech and balloon delivered you can use GPS to make them go off (isn't that sweet?) as they are shielded by not being in the EMP zones.  Missiles with AQ Khan style bombs might be a bit harder to do, but 25 is still a pretty magic number.

Hardened military equipment would survive, yes, but without a production system to produce more you are in a 'come as you are' war.

And if an eco-terrorist group did this with a bit of savvy on their part, or a death cult like the old AUM Shinrikyo?  In one year the global population would be about 1 billion people.

Now replace all the EMP devices with a major solar storm putting out highly energetic particles just in front of the Earth as it passes through it for, say, 3 days.  Same effect.

Bad enough the US and the fact that if we disappeared from the world economy most of the rest of the world would go into chaos once the big food supplier went away.  Those asshats bemoaning hunger in Africa should be wanting a hardened electronics system in the US so that if a major solar storm did hit the planet there would be SOMEONE left to still grow food on a scale large enough to supply 2-3 billion people.  That would require forethought, seeing how nasty a place the Earth and our fellow man can get, and then saying: 'You know it doesn't do us much good to have a social safety net if it all collapses due to one bad act'.

Damn I'm not even to #2 yet!

Wasn't the Cold War so nice?  All you had to deal with was vaporization due to nukes!

Even better: you can prepare for these!  Build some Faraday Cages for equipment (basically wrapping them in conductive mesh or foil that isn't in contact with the electronics, and ground the mesh/foil) and once the EMP is done, you can haul out your generator and equipment and get to the business of rebuilding society.  Everything with a transistor and a lot of stuff with vacuum tubes are toast if they aren't protected.  That laptop you tucked into the microwave will ride it out (it does have a mesh to protect stuff outside form the internal microwave effects) but that lovely desktop system is gone.  Got batteries stored away?  How about an inverter and solar panel array? Means to get clean water?  Sanitary considerations need to be given top priority.  Yup this is full, 'no grid exists' living.  No medical supplies coming around, either, so what you got is what you got.  Ditto groceries.

Global Nuclear War never looked so good!

 

#2 - La Palma landslide and tsunami - I'm not going to reprise my geophysics article, but this one remains at #2.  Why?  Here is the idea: name every city that is within 25 miles of the Atlantic coast or half of that in the Gulf of Mexico, all north of the equator.  And that 25 miles is a pure, wild-ass guess.

Now make them go away with only 6-12 hours of warning time.

Simple, huh?

Entire islands will be washed over.  Florida might not be around as we know it.  London might survive, maybe.  Paris will.  The Netherlands, not so much.  Nice knowing you, Denmark.  Ireland's coast along the south just gone.  Boston, Hartford, NYC, all of Long Island, Philadelphia, Newark, Baltimore, DC, Miami...  New Orleans, Galveston... maybe the highlands of Cuba left... I shudder to think about coastal Africa and some of the waves will get to the South Atlantic, too.  Maybe dislodge some polar material north and south, perhaps shift the northern polar ice cap a bit, or just break it up for a year.

Wouldn't that be fun?

There is zip you can do about it.  No diplomacy will stop it.  Nukes might trigger it.  All the concrete on the planet would make it worse, not better.  There is no 'bedrock' to stabilize, just a trillion tons and more of waterlogged dirt and weathered volcanic rock.  It is waiting for one earthquake or volcanic event on an island with an active volcano.  And most likely the other half of the island goes with it, too, due to subsidence, and the inrushing seawater once the mass slides in.

Would the current 'global community' pull together?

Or fall apart?

This will remove some of the largest transport hubs on the planet from the map, as well as killing hundreds of thousands to millions (or more) directly, and then the collapse of systems afterwards will ripple out economically.

And there will be no escaping this tsunami by going up as it will go over the top of the Empire State Building.  Hell it will get channeled all the way up to Albany by the Hudson River at the Palisades. Places that normally couldn't be reached by any tsunami will feel the wrath of this one in the Atlantic.  Gibraltar might go on wave one (the other side of the island going) and then a larger mass move into the Med to give the entire place a nice 20-30' tsunami like in Japan.  Wonder what will happen to the Panama and Suez canals when they are over-topped and washed out?

You can prepare for this one, too.  And while it doesn't, necessarily, take out things in the way a solar flare or committed global EMP attack would, it is more likely to happen.

 

#1 - Yellowstone - Megavolcano.  Overdue.  Last time its cousin went, the human race got put down to a few tens of thousands of individuals from diverse populations in the millions.  Toba is smaller than Yellowstone.  Yellowstone has been rising, steadily, for decades.  It might not erupt for 100,000 years.  Or a something might touch it off so soon that nothing could be done to even analyze it, much less prepare for it.  The dust cloud will encircle the planet and while not every place will be uninhabitable, the growing seasons for the next decade might not be what one would call, uh, there.

Even if you don't get caught in the major dust cloud and have your lungs shredded by fine particulates, you will get a massive global cooling effect due to the reflected sunlight caused by the high floating particulates.  They will come down via Stokes Law, and the finest will be last.  Great for pretty sunrises and sunsets, horrible for storms and growing seasons.

Due to size and severity, and being that we are now in the zone for cyclic repetition, this tops it all as threats to the US.

There are lots of other things that can happen to us, here on Rock 3 from the star Sol, even such things as a gamma ray burst from a star that is likely to have one that is pointed like a search beacon in our direction, soft of like a gun barrel deal.  A major boloid could come sailing in from out of nowhere and make a bad time for life here, too, as the dinosaurs found out.  Really, that would suck worse than Yellowstone.  Ditto the gamma ray burst, although you wind up dead within a few minutes for that, as compared to a few hours for a boloid and up to a couple of years for Yellowstone outside of its blast radius.  These are 'known unknowns' but with a non-cyclic or non-determinative factor to them, which makes them drop far down the list.

Of those things that can be done by man, a few do raise up to the major threat level region, with the collapse of the Western Way of Life coming in at #5, and that only for the socialist, not capitalist variant of it.  Capitalism actually works, it is this 'social control of capital' deal that doesn't no matter which way you cut it.  The folks who are grey are not those pushing forward individual liberty and reward for same, no it is those pushing 'everyone gets a prize' folks.  These are grey as they show no love of human ingenuity, fortitude and the rewards due the blessings of liberty.  They prefer the despotism of reduced choices to impoverish all mankind, rather than achievement to enrich mankind.  Those grey folks in various forms of red, green and black are about to go.

And it won't be pretty.

Lets try to keep things down to #5, and make some preparations for #2-4 and get off this planet so #1 won't get us.

I'm the optimistic guy in the long run.

The short run is always pessimistic, as I can only be pleasantly surprised.

Recent Arrivals - One day

It is one day later and a lot was accomplished yesterday.  I started off with a few pictures today and if they are awful... well I am no photographer.

First all the metal parts got removed cleaned.

The bolt and takedown tools got an ultrasonic cleaning in the small ultrasonic machine I picked up a year ago, and I used some specially made cleaning solution mixed 11:1 of water to solution.  I made sure to get the bolt thoroughly immersed so that water was all inside it and then turned it a few times during the process to get rid of any bubble build-up.  That was a fascinating process to watch as the cosmoline was coming off as white strands as surface cavitation was getting bubbles into it so as to lift it up from the metal surface.  I confirmed that after a five minute cleaning by feeling one of the strands and it was a greasy light mix showing its origins to be the cosmoline.  The solution was milky white and since the formula is safe for disposal it went away, being all biodegradable and stuff.

I applied WD-40 to parts that would take a few minutes for me to get to while I disassembled the bolt.  There were some milky white pieces to get off the interior, but they were no longer adhering to the metal, just sitting on it.  The bolt was in fine shape with no pitting or other marks on it, smooth to the touch and thus needing some Militec-1.  A drop or two spread around via a rag is all it takes and then another drop or two via pipe cleaners to get at the hard to reach parts, a dot of the Militec-1 grease (that I have in these lovely syringes able to get a tiny dot of grease out of the end) was put on the threads going into the bolt or any other high wear areas.  A bit of struggling to get the bolt reassembled, due to the spring more than anything else, and that was that.  Next was the drop of magic metal protector on each of the take-down pieces and cleaning pieces and I was ready to go after the buttplate, magazine and receiver.

Now with all of that stuff spread out before me I started using some of the all-natural, won't harm a natural finish on wood and will clean metal antique restorer sparingly on everything.  By sparingly I mean a clean rag folded over four times and you slowly wipe over the surface of the wood or metal, flipping to damp clean surface as the one you are using gets junk built up on it.

The left rag is a small projects rag that started out about half-dirty, the one on the right was a clean-up rag that started out pretty clean.  These have both gotten the quick one-minute hand washing with gentle dishwashing liquid then rinsing and drying.  Any first application of this stuff will pick up all sorts of surface grime and generally get dirty quickly.  That left rag was initial wipe down of practically everything from the inside of the stock (particularly the  magazine area where cosmoline will find a way to build up and get into the chamber if you don't get it very clean) then the exterior, then across all the metal on the exterior of the receiver, screws, magazine, butt plate... if it has cosmoline on it, it gets wiped.  And you don't use much of this stuff, either.  I used the blemish remover on the butt plate and wood there as the cosmoline was caked in and just awful.  That sucking sound getting the butt plate loose was cosmoline unwilling to release its hold.

By the time you get everything dampened its about 5 minutes and time to wipe over all the areas you just hit with a clean dry rag.  That is the right hand rag and the stuff that came off with it was not nice, particularly where there was some carbon build-up in the cleaning rod channel.  I actually did a re-application there as chunks of carbon came off to reveal the finish and wood underneath...

During this process the first rag, the one I wetted down a few times, was getting that lovely orange to yellow-orange color of cosmoline on it.  So was the dry rag.  The photos were taken before I used a dry rag on the stock today, and it was getting that light coating of cosmoline on it, too.

All of the metal got the Militec-1 wipe-down after I did the stock wipe-off.

Total time to get things where they were in the photos was about 2.5 hours, not counting camera time.

From that I got to see some areas of wear that were covered over yesterday.

One of the benefits of the antique restoring liquid is that on metal it starts to break the cosmoline down, beyond lifting it off the surface, meaning that my standard cleaner/de-greaser KG-3 can get rid of it.  Normally I can't do that to cosmoline all that well with that stuff, but after one wipe of restorer, one wipe to remove it and one spray and wipe of KG-3 I am down to metal finish.

Today was stock wipe-down #2, putting all the fabric goods into a batch of liquid de-greaser and then rinsing it, and doing a cleaning of the bore starting with the antique restoring fluid, KG-3 and then Militec-1.  Nice, shiny bore!

The next few days will be restorer wipe-down/wipe-on/wipe-off until there is zero cosmoline on any of the rags.  As the restorer adds some oils into the wood surface to help close up the pores, it will take some days to finally get the cosmoline out, but well worth it.

The Distractocrats

A Distractocrat is any individual involved in utilizing misdirection to distract as many people as possible from examining issues that demonstrate problems in their ideology.  The process can vary from 'throwing someone under the bus' to try and convince people that you now have nothing to do with a divisive figure or someone who has become politically inconvenient to the playing of one of the various cards (i.e. race, class, gender, money, etc.) in an attempt to make an individual pointing out a problem go into a defensive mode to answer spurious charges (ex. In one instance, Spencer Ackerman of the Washington Independent urged his colleagues to deflect attention from Obama’s relationship with Wright by changing the subject. Pick one of Obama’s conservative critics, Ackerman wrote, “Fred Barnes, Karl Rove, who cares — and call them racists.” . . . ).  Distractocrats try to be the masters of distractions and ace character assassins, and they enjoy demeaning, belittling, castigating, and falsely accusing anyone who points out the vacuity, corruptness, or lack of ethics that Distractocrats support.

Distractocrats come in two versions:

1) Leftists - Those who attack the Right, conservatives, Tea Partiers and, basically, anyone who objects to Big Government, high taxes, rampant regulations that can't be figured out, and huge schemes to redistribute wealth from the wealthy to the Distractocrats card carriers.  Often while taking the middle-man's cut in doing so.

2) Rightists - These are actually those who castigate anyone on the Right for protesting against the Leftist Distractocrats, thus enabling the corrosive influence of those Distractocrats and adding their own venom to the mix while purportedly being on the Right.  In actuality they are Leftists claiming to be on the Right for political convenience of a platform to attack the Right.

Thus there are only Leftists Distractocrats.  They support Democrats.  Not all Democrats are Distractocrats, but all Distractocrats support Democrats... save for the few Loony Tunes of the Conspiracy Theorists who enjoy playing their own Alternate Reality version of being a Distractocrat.

Scratch a Distractocrat and you find a Leftist or someone unmoored from reality.

But I repeat myself.

If one attempts to point out the insanity of policy decisions made by a member of the Obama Administration or the cost of Obamacare as drafted by Harry Reid and then burdened with extra-special pork with the House, you are labeled a 'racist'.  That is the current favorite card of the Distractocrats, because everyone has an obvious skin color, thus you don't need to think about who you can label with that term.  This is also played with 'Comprehensive Immigration Reform' save that when it comes to Hispanics one can't point to a 'race', so that card falls flat.  Even the organization of radical hispanics have this problem of not being able to recognize that their concept of race doesn't apply to hispanics who are of multi-ethnic backgrounds from Spain, Portugal, France, UK, Germany and Native Amerinds (North and South).  Thus they live in an Alternate Reality, already, and neither logic nor reason can point out the inanity of calling that general locale designator derived from the European settlers as a 'race'.

To a Distractocrat all racists are white.

Any black person who disagrees with them is an 'Uncle Tom'.

Any hispanic who disagrees with them is told to 'shut up'.

The simplicity is infallible.  The effect on public discourse utterly destructive as it is meant to be, so that it can enable authoritarian and tyrannical laws forced on the majority by the minority who will always tell you they are so much smarter than you and then can't tell you the 'race' of hispanic individuals with multi-ethnic backgrounds.  Mind you, the US is pretty multi-ethnic with inter-marriages between 'races' because we are all equal and love knows no bounds of race, color or creed.

Unless you are a Distractocrat, of course, who are the ones who make up disparaging remarks about those who marry across racial boundaries to upset their notion of what 'race' is.  Thus they are racial purists.  They see everything through a prism of race.

That is the definition of a 'racist': an individual who sees everything through the prism of race.

Distractocrats are racists.

Not all racists are Distractocrats as insanity on race knows no bounds within humanity.  But all Distractocrats are racist.  They love playing the 'race' card to divide people along racial lines so as to divide up culture and keep things simplistic for their limited outlook of their superior mentality.  They 'know better' about what to do and how to find 'code words' that are the new 'racial slurs'.

'Small government' is a racist statement.  'Fiscal responsibility' is a racist concept. 'Not spending the Nation into bankruptcy' is utter racism... to a Distractocrat.  The reverse of all of those will perfect man by enslaving him to government so the Distractocrats can rule them.  Save that some Distractocrats are more equal than others, and those who bring their friends to power usually find themselves at the short end of the stick, first.  Ask the SA about that.  Or the Red Guard.  Or the enemies of Josef Stalin who got to learn, first hand, what 'defenestration' was all about, even when they lust to do it to others (ex. SPENCER ACKERMAN: Let’s just throw Ledeen against a wall. Or, pace Dr. Alterman, throw him through a plate glass window. I’ll bet a little spot of violence would shut him right the fuck up, as with most bullies.)  It is easy to spot the first candidates for defenestration: they openly state they would love to do it to their political enemies, thus giving their political 'friends' the bright idea to try it on the one who proposed it, first.

Distractocrats have no decency, no shame, no morals, no ethics, and a great fear of guns.  Not all gun-grabbers are Distractocrats but all Distractocrats are gun-grabbers.  They can't understand differences between semi-automatic, fully automatic, burst fire, rapid fire, sustained fire, and being on fire... they just don't want to be fired upon.  And for all of the intelligence espoused by Distractocrats, getting armed people angry at you isn't so smart. One really shouldn't  insult the intelligence of individuals who do know the difference between a revolver and a revolving door.

They claim to be mortal harbingers of the ever present and beneficent god State, hate guns and want to grab the gold... inverted Imperialists who still want to achieve Empire, in other words, but don't have the honesty to say so.  They claim that 'experts' can solve all problems and wish to remove your 'amateur' choices for yourself you lead a life dictated by bureaucratic 'experts' which just happen to be the elite political class of Distractocrats.  They obviously see a problem in your life of too much choice and wish to narrow that to their own ends.  They also see that you aren't fit to figure out your inalienable rights and wish to alienate them from you by soothing words and high taxes, followed by the bureaucratic boot to your face.  Their utopia is where you are enslaved by the State, they are your bosses and your entire life is spent in service to them to the good ends they dictate to you.

Don't mind the oceans of blood spilled wherever such enlightened elites try this.

It always comes to blood.

Which is why they don't want you to think, for one moment, that you have the right to defend yourself against them.  They claim their opponents to be uncivilized barbarians who want to return us to the state of Nature, while, instead, that is their main goal and they wish to distract you from it by the use of 'code words', hype, belittling, denunciation of the innocent, and turning the other way when their thugs attack the common man.  That is all to the 'greater good' and the ends justify the means.  That is the Distractocrat credo: their 'good ends' justify any means to get them.

Remember that the next time you hear any accusation of 'racism' being thrown around.  It is the Distractocrats call to arms.  The 'race card' however, is losing its value and is coming apart and delaminating from such frequent playing in every hand in politics.  Don't you worry, they'll have a new card to play, epithets to hurl, people to attack unjustly, demeaning and belittling insults, and the ever present threat of the god State to push at you. 

Their aim is to enslave you to that State. 

To rule you by fear.

Because they are deathly afraid of the concept that all men are created equal and deserving of respect, kindness and that we must set aside some of our personal biases to help each other become a better people.  Distractocrats prefer the lash when lies do not serve.  Speak to them sweetly in reasonable tones and they will ignore you, despise you, hate you, belittle you and generally demonstrate how small they are on the inside because they cannot, for one instant, consider a society of equal citizens.

I do not fear them.

I pity them for their inhumanity towards their fellow man.

I will start no fight with them.

But given one I sure, as hell, will end it.

Brought to you by A Citizen of the Republic

Technobabble, Bureauratese and Elitism

When reading Angelo M. Codevilla's piece on America's Ruling Class -- And the Perils of Revolution at the American Spectator (JUL-AUG 2010 issue) I got to thinking about some concepts that had been present in my past work with other aspects of society: the science-fiction, science and technical communities.  One of the main aspects of them deals with words, jargon and how they dove-tail in creating communities.

From Wikipedia, YMMV:

Technobabble (a portmanteau of technology and babble), also called technospeak^[1], is a form of prose using jargon, buzzwords and highly esoteric language to give an impression of plausibility through mystification, misdirection, and obfuscation. Someone who does not understand a technical description that necessarily contains many technical terms may describe it as technobabble,^[2] but it also can describe prose intentionally made obscure through gratuitous technical terms and technical slang.

From Merriam-Webster online:

bu·reau·crat·ese

Pronunciation: \ˌbyu̇r-ə-(ˌ)kra-ˈtēz, -ˈtēs, ˌbyər-\

Function: noun

Date: 1949

: a style of language held to be characteristic of bureaucrats and marked by abstractions, jargon, euphemisms, and circumlocutions

I've had to partake of both of those worlds of jargon-speak, plus a number of other venues in the science fiction and fantasy realms that feature such word use and creation (like Treknobabble).  The use and utility of words in the english language means that new words formed by the importation of words from other languages and the contraction or compounding of older words or the creation of acronyms (like RADAR) allow for the language to be highly fluid and adaptable to new situations.  While the French try to keep their language 'pure' via an official government committee, those who speak english in a varieties of dialects, pidgins and other culturally derived forms (ex. Spanglish) means that speakers of english can call a CD-ROM as a 'CD' and think nothing of it, while the official French language (as opposed to common, everyday, on the ground spoken french) does not allow 'le CD'.  English, as a language, picked up traits from other languages (like the propensity of German words to just add in entire other words until you have to contract them down to something you can say in a single breath) and the use of linguistic short-hand allows for the entire richness of english to have humor types that aren't even conceived of in other languages ('time flies like an arrow, fruit flies like a banana').

The massive downside of that is in the realm of specialization, and it doesn't matter if it is scientific, religious, political, or the type of wine or beer you like, the jargon of any specialized field can sound very authoritative and important to an outside, while being relatively innocuous for those who are 'in the know'.  Thus 'Anthropogenic Global Warming' sounds very important but is, in actuality, a hypothesis that the tiny amount of carbon dioxide increase seen during the span of man on the planet means we are all going to die as everything is flooded out and choked to death by poison.  Don't mind the fact that the planet has had far more carbon dioxide in its atmosphere in the past and that this has never happened (because we are here to talk about it), and that such things as solar radiance, cloud cover, and the relatively shallow ocean basins and lack of circumglobal oceanic currents from the creation of the Isthmus of Panama have put us into a cyclic and somewhat chaotic glaciation cycle that won't abate no matter if we burn every last hydrocarbon on the planet.  The technobabble and very important looking graphs with misleading scales and representation standards make it all sound very convincing because, you know, a scientist said it.  And scientists were taken in by Piltdown Man and created a lovely, and utterly backwards system of science in the USSR called Lysenkoism because it catered to politicians, not due to it having any basis in science, at all.  Carbon dioxide is used by plants to grow, a necessary inert gas that helps us breathe and relatively innocuous (unlike that evil dihydrogen monoxide).

Technobabble serves as an 'in-group' identifier, a means to show you actually are part of some group and hold similar beliefs to it by being able to talk in its jargon.  Speak the lingo in a passable fashion and you get accepted.  Nodding your head in agreement helps bunches, too.

Because it is an 'in-group' linguistic system it can also be used to stonewall those outside the 'in-group' by claiming that they 'don't understand what they are talking about'.  To learn the jargon you must accept the premises of such groups so as to understand what they are getting at, even if the jargon is nonsensical as created and applied.  That is how AGW, Piltdown Man and Lysenkoism actually got anywhere: they purported to show certain findings and correlations while, in fact, they were doing no such thing and yet utilized a variant of existing jargon to give some foundation to their outlooks.  Of course scientific fraud has a relatively short shelf-life as it requires repeatability to it, that is you can repeat the exact, same experiment with the exact, same conditions and come up with the exact, same results (+/- 10% due to measurement error).  Lysenkoism fell apart when Communist Genetics proved not to work in any way that was meaningful, for which we are all deeply thankful.  Piltdown Man went down under analysis of the actual bones to show they were not only not of the same individual, not of the same species but not of the same time period.  AGW is coming apart as the very basic concept of 'being able to show one's base data without any corrections done to it' cannot be met, and entire global datasets now have to be rebuilt from scratch due to the non-diligence and obfuscation of the researchers in the field.

While Lysenkoism only side-tracked Soviet genetic research, AGW is aimed directly at the heart of the industrial system to deny it energy production that isn't 'sustainable'.  Don't ever ask what 'sustainable' actually means, or the time frame of it, because there is no, zero answer to that.  When the answers vary from 'now, immediately! if not sooner!!!' to 'over the next thousand years or so', you know you are no longer talking about science, technology, economics, nor any other aspect of meaningful lingo.  'Sustainable' is a feel-good term that is too fluid to mean much of anything when applied to economics, science or technology.  If using fossil fuels, mining for ore and doing anything other than growing plants, and then only 'sustainable plants' is an objective, then the entire planet was absolutely sustainable in the late Neolithic period.  Save for all that wood burning, of course, we would have to drop that and get to mankind before the taming of fire.  That was perfectly 'sustainable'.  Miserable in the extreme with short life spans, rampant disease, high infant mortality rates, and so on and on.

Blending alarmism into technobabble gets you emotionally laden terms that mean very little.  This has happened in religion where personal salvation, standing before your creator after you die to account for your life, is replaced by group-think or collective salvation where everyone must think alike, act alike and be controlled alike to be saved...too bad accountability is on a retail, not wholesale business level, huh?  Collectivism is a creation of not only religious groups but of followers of Marx who believe in some 'will of the collective' to guide society.  Using such concepts creates an 'in-group' that then talk about all sorts of lovely things to be done to 'save' the 'poor' by depriving ordinary citizens of the fruits of their labors so that the poor can be 'uplifted' from poverty.  You know, steal a fish from one man to make him go hungry so you can feed another to keep him indebted to you, so the two of you can gang up on the first man to enslave him?  That sort of thing.  This only works by the importation of emotionally laden terms of 'wealth' and 'rich' and 'wealthy' that most people don't believe applies to them, yet those wishing to do the stealing tell you its on the upper X% of society.  That X factor is always, without fail, no matter what is said, 49.  Basically if the lowest 1/8th of the wealthiest (that 49%) can be convinced that they aren't 'wealthy' then the scam is on.  And when the top 3-5% join in as they have so much that losing 15% more won't matter to them, you then have a 'majority' to steal from those able to create wealth to give to the poor who can't.  Thus everyone gets poorer as those able to create wealth stop doing so because there is no pay-off in it for them, which then leaves the top 3-5% with any left-over wealth which which to rule everyone else as they beg for scraps.

But you meant to 'save the poor' and 'create a sustainable economy'!  And you did!  When 97% of the population is poor and the economy is ruled by a handful, that is sustainable for, oh, a decade or two, unless you have an beholden servant class and dedicated military class to keep the masses down.  That worked for thousands of years for Hydraulic Empires (Egypt, Babylon, China and other Nations having a major waterway) and can even be semi-benign due to the crushing poverty involved.  As technology goes up the sustainability of such societies must shift to the technocrats and military classes, so that Modern China revolves around the leadership, the crony capitalists beholden to the technocrats administering State guidance, and the ever present threat of military crackdown if you happen to think freedom is a neat idea.  That sort of thing aptly describes: Libya, Cuba, North Korea, Syria and Zimbabwe.  The proportions between adhering bureaucrats and technocrats to military varies, but they are, in sum total, higher than in feudal States of Europe (where 1 in 100 were in the nobility and aristocracy).  This gets closer to the Japanese culture when they closed off their contact with other cultures due to the higher percentage of their elite (1 in 10 for feudal Japan until Admiral Perry came along and even that didn't change things much until WWII).

The concept of being able to dictate from the Nation State level down to its population to get an adoring, or at least obedient or subservient people, is a common one across all cultures.  It is always presented as a 'solution' to social ills, and the programs used to mask it vary from the Kulturkampf against Roman Catholics to Gramsci's concepts of cultural hegemony that seeks to make 'common sense' not based on what one sees but on one's culture and a rising of 'class consciousness' to political consciousness which, instead of putting forward that all people are equal, puts forward that there are repressive groups in society and those that are repressed by them.  Each of these puts forward that there is an 'evil' in society (Roman Catholicism, capitalism and capitalism... yes the last two are depressingly the same thing) and that the only way to go after these 'evils' are via State based power.  By being able to put forward that there is a minority that 'controls' society to its own benefit and that a cultural reaction that seeks to put down that minority so as to gain 'authentic' majority control is then put forward with those doing so being the political class (or elite class) seeking to gain more power via villainization of a segment of society.  If you would just reject the minority and give more power to the rulers of the 'majority' then all will be well!  The White Knight, the One True Leader of the movement will then lead you into a land without repression and with lots of love, peace and prosperity!

Don't mind the repression from the military and police set up by these 'winners', their crushing laws applied to everyone and the poverty that ensues as the State seeks to subsume private wealth for the 'public good'.  Tens of millions have died following this fruitless dream that more power to the State yields a better life, peace and prosperity.  They are usually the ones elected to office and who seek to rig and game the system so as to never get challenged in their beliefs by marginalizing segments of populations via things like limiting representation and gerrymandering districts.  Why we never see THAT going on in the good old US of A, right?  Politicians who see their elected seat as THEIRS and not that of the people... who see fit to found political dynasties built upon the public coffers and handing out goodies to selected portions of the population instead of looking after the good of everyone.  Couldn't happen here, right?

That is what Mr. Codevilla is getting after: it is a cultural imperative of the elite class (usually self-defined as we don't cotton on to warlords and such these days) who then need to convince you that they are smarter/better/more worthy than the average Joe to sit in the seats of power.  They can cite lovely scholars, whip up graphs to show that more taxation leads to prosperity and back 'science' that then empowers them to tell you just how awful you are to lovely Mother Earth and that you really need to be punished for being healthy and wealthy.  That has worked as an ongoing meme for over a century, now, and what is on the horizon is what comes to any Nation that puts bureaucrats ahead of good sense and thinking that you can regulate your way to prosperity: special police, adherent political militants, political crimes, and repression of those who disagree that those who rule are, actually, unfit to rule.  Yup, bureaucrats, technocrats, police and military all set up by those in charge to make sure that they get what you make and you are enslaved because they are so much smarter than you... though far, far less competent in anything but grabbing power.

Flipping the side from the Ruling or Elite Class gets you Mr. Codevilla's Country Class.

This Country Class is not associated with 'populism', as 'populism' is a form of cultural political movement to address some 'evil' of society... in other words it is a ruse used to demonize some group/problem/ill by the Elite to get some popular fervor so as to pass laws and changes that invest more power to a centralized government, after which the fervor dies down as the laws 'changed things'.  Until, of course, the next big 'problem' arises that the new laws didn't address, which is the reason why we hear that the answer to failed regulations is: more regulation!  Perhaps what was regulated was not suitable to regulation in the first place?  How rare we ever hear that little question.  So the Country Class does not rely on nor descend from 'populism' or 'populist' movements, although members of it may join such things they do not consider such movements self-defining.  So just who is in the Country Class?

The description Mr. Codevilla gives is one that is very similar to others I've presented (bolding mine, throughout):

Describing America's country class is problematic because it is so heterogeneous. It has no privileged podiums, and speaks with many voices, often inharmonious. It shares above all the desire to be rid of rulers it regards inept and haughty. It defines itself practically in terms of reflexive reaction against the rulers' defining ideas and proclivities -- e.g., ever higher taxes and expanding government, subsidizing political favorites, social engineering, approval of abortion, etc. Many want to restore a way of life largely superseded. Demographically, the country class is the other side of the ruling class's coin: its most distinguishing characteristics are marriage, children, and religious practice. While the country class, like the ruling class, includes the professionally accomplished and the mediocre, geniuses and dolts, it is different because of its non-orientation to government and its members' yearning to rule themselves rather than be ruled by others.

Even when members of the country class happen to be government officials or officers of major corporations, their concerns are essentially private; in their view, government owes to its people equal treatment rather than action to correct what anyone perceives as imbalance or grievance. Hence they tend to oppose special treatment, whether for corporations or for social categories. Rather than gaming government regulations, they try to stay as far from them as possible. Thus the Supreme Court's 2005 decision in Kelo, which allows the private property of some to be taken by others with better connections to government, reminded the country class that government is not its friend.

It is a class that believes, then, that the best government is that which provides equal treatment under the law for all citizens and tries to not correct the wrongs that come about due to discrepancies in talent and capability.  When government attempts to do so it then moves from equality of treatment to seeking some form of 'justice' in outcome, thusly government becomes an institutionalized affliction for a certain group or class based on temporary problems.

What else is seen as defining?  Meritocracy, not bureaucracy:

Members of the country class who want to rise in their profession through sheer competence try at once to avoid the ruling class's rituals while guarding against infringing its prejudices. Averse to wheedling, they tend to think that exams should play a major role in getting or advancing in jobs, that records of performance -- including academic ones -- should be matters of public record, and that professional disputes should be settled by open argument. For such people, the Supreme Court's 2009 decision in Ricci, upholding the right of firefighters to be promoted according to the results of a professional exam, revived the hope that competence may sometimes still trump political connections.

It is, culturally, a standpoint that to do right one must do good and that doing good requires not only the want of doing good, which is supported by the Elite in all they do, but that one must understand what they are doing and do it well so that something is done right.  Doing something right by oneself to one's own liberty is upholding the greater rightness of society where we advance through capability, not adhering to Elitist word games and socialist equivalence.  When each is according to their ability and need, and the absolute minimal needs of survival in society are few, then applying one's ability falters to a lowest common denominator: whatever it takes to get by.  That is seen as a social inversion of doing right by doing good, and by creating a system in which there is no difference in mankind's efforts from beginning to end then mankind cannot advance nor self-improve as only base needs are met no matter what the effort.  Promotion by skill and merit requires application of skills and ability and working at them to hone them and improve them, and the reward is fruits of one's liberties in better pay, advancement and recognition of the worth of the skills and the character necessary to get them.  It takes character to build skills and society, and when character is removed through a grand equivalence of everyone, that all work is equal and therefore meaningless, then society falls backwards and humans no longer care about the maintenance of it through doing good work.  From that meritocracy and rewarding good work because it is good work is paramount not only to improve the character of others but to show that good, hard and skillful work is its own reward.

The country class actually believes that America's ways are superior to the rest of the world's, and regards most of mankind as less free, less prosperous, and less virtuous. Thus while it delights in croissants and thinks Toyota's factory methods are worth imitating, it dislikes the idea of adhering to "world standards." This class also takes part in the U.S. armed forces body and soul: nearly all the enlisted, non-commissioned officers and officers under flag rank belong to this class in every measurable way. Few vote for the Democratic Party. You do not doubt that you are amidst the country class rather than with the ruling class when the American flag passes by or "God Bless America" is sung after seven innings of baseball, and most people show reverence. The same people wince at the National Football League's plaintive renditions of the "Star Spangled Banner."

Unlike the ruling class, the country class does not share a single intellectual orthodoxy, set of tastes, or ideal lifestyle. Its different sectors draw their notions of human equality from different sources: Christians and Jews believe it is God's law. Libertarians assert it from Hobbesian and Darwinist bases. Many consider equality the foundation of Americanism. Others just hate snobs. Some parts of the country class now follow the stars and the music out of Nashville, Tennessee, and Branson, Missouri -- entertainment complexes larger than Hollywood's -- because since the 1970s most of Hollywood's products have appealed more to the mores of the ruling class and its underclass clients than to those of large percentages of Americans. The same goes for "popular music" and television. For some in the country class Christian radio and TV are the lodestone of sociopolitical taste, while the very secular Fox News serves the same purpose for others. While symphonies and opera houses around the country, as well as the stations that broadcast them, are firmly in the ruling class's hands, a considerable part of the country class appreciates these things for their own sake. By that very token, the country class's characteristic cultural venture -- the homeschool movement -- stresses the classics across the board in science, literature, music, and history even as the ruling class abandons them.

The country class supports the military absolutely as it is necessary for the security of a free Nation and to safeguard us all within the Nation State.  They normally do not vote lock-step Republican even when they do not vote Democratic, thus they are 'Independent' in word and deed.  For us to have a Nation together there is no political ideology that is seen as 'correct' and the greatest good of the Nation is done by its people, not its government.  Culturally the country class is very much a 'back to basics' view, so that which is good and has worked is cherished and the new only adopted when it has demonstrated its worth and value and does not contradict prior good teachings and work.  The art of reconciling the 'new' to culture is not done from government, business or marketers, but at home and amongst family and friends.  It is the individual that must find a good way to apply what is new under the sun and then ensure that it is understood and implemented to the benefit of all.  To do that the good, old ways must be taught, understood and cherished, which means that new 'teaching methods' that short-change history and accomplishment in understanding are rejected, often completely rejected, and parents take up Do It Yourself schooling.

What is this country class?  If you are an Elite this is an alien culture as they do not depend on the prism of race, class, politics, foreign affairs or any of the touchstones of the Elite to determine what needs to be done by individuals so as to guide society from the bottom up.  Elite schools, elite culture and elite politics are all, in every instance, top-down structures and authorities at the top are not questioned to hold them accountable for what they say or do.  Elitists must divide the rest of society and then push forward their notions of what is 'good' for a privileged sector so as to gain permanent power at the highest levels of government for a ruling class that becomes more and more archaic and brittle over time.  To an Elite member of the select class (or those attempting to cast themselves into it by shutting down their minds to thoughts of human liberty as individuals) the tools of the trade are:  attack, condemn, belittle and twist any fact to fit a pre-defined outlook that does not and cannot adjust to 'facts on the ground'.  If they could adjust to what is actually happening in the world without a prism applied to it, then the ideology would fall to pieces as it cannot withstand actual results that are not what is expected.  What is 'new' or 'good' to an Elitist is to remove power to the bureaucratic class and ruling class as these appointed members are best utilized in 'guiding' society via regulations in every aspect of life.  It is the concept of the perfectibility of man and it always, without fail, comes at a high cost of human liberty, life and blood wherever it is applied.

If the ideology of the Elite class is apparent because it is used as a tool to demean and belittle citizens at every turn so as to invest power in government, then the country class seeks to invert that so that civil discourse and coming to term with honest disagreements can lead to a better society that has little need of oversight or regulation from government at any level.  By keeping to the Framing and Founding documents of the Nation, and their outlooks that are invested in them, the country class feels little need to justify their concepts of a 'leave me alone' attitude towards government as it is a tried and true way to win a good life by one's hard work.  Even such as 'reformers' of government become distrusted as they attempt to add more apparatus into government to 'correct' its problems, but those only serve to increase the size, power and scope of government at each and every turn.  There is no 'good' that can be done by government, save their being less of it.  It is hard to get a spokesman for these beliefs, and yet a few (very few) have cropped up in our history after the Founding.  For this I need not travel back far, at all, in my own postings to come up with this document and these words from a past President of the United States:

It is to be regretted that the rich and powerful too often bend the acts of government to their selfish purposes. Distinctions in society will always exist under every just government. Equality of talents, of education, or of wealth can not be produced by human institutions. In the full enjoyment of the gifts of Heaven and the fruits of superior industry, economy, and virtue, every man is equally entitled to protection by law; but when the laws undertake to add to these natural and just advantages artificial distinctions, to grant titles, gratuities, and exclusive privileges, to make the rich richer and the potent more powerful, the humble members of society-the farmers, mechanics, and laborers-who have neither the time nor the means of securing like favors to themselves, have a right to complain of the injustice of their Government. There are no necessary evils in government. Its evils exist only in its abuses. If it would confine itself to equal protection, and, as Heaven does its rains, shower its favors alike on the high and the low, the rich and the poor, it would be an unqualified blessing. In the act before me there seems to be a wide and unnecessary departure from these just principles.

Nor is our Government to be maintained or our Union preserved by invasions of the rights and powers of the several States. In thus attempting to make our General Government strong we make it weak. Its true strength consists in leaving individuals and States as much as possible to themselves-in making itself felt, not in its power, but in its beneficence; not in its control, but in its protection; not in binding the States more closely to the center, but leaving each to move unobstructed in its proper orbit.

Experience should teach us wisdom. Most of the difficulties our Government now encounters and most of the dangers which impend over our Union have sprung from an abandonment of the legitimate objects of Government by our national legislation, and the adoption of such principles as are embodied in this act. Many of our rich men have not been content with equal protection and equal benefits, but have besought us to make them richer by act of Congress. By attempting to gratify their desires we have in the results of our legislation arrayed section against section, interest against interest, and man against man, in a fearful commotion which threatens to shake the foundations of our Union. It is time to pause in our career to review our principles, and if possible revive that devoted patriotism and spirit of compromise which distinguished the sages of the Revolution and the fathers of our Union. If we can not at once, in justice to interests vested under improvident legislation, make our Government what it ought to be, we can at least take a stand against all new grants of monopolies and exclusive privileges, against any prostitution of our Government to the advancement of the few at the expense of the many, and in favor of compromise and gradual reform in our code of laws and system of political economy.

This is a succinct enunciation of the outlook of Mr. Codevilla's country class and that President is condemned by the Elite class for the outcomes of actions he started but succinctly said he did not wish to start in the first place and warned of the consequences of not using reason and accommodation to work out mutual problems.  That is President Andrew Jackson and the quoted section, above, comes from his Bank Veto message of 1832 which was the last time a massive part of the federal government's work to 'guide' the economy was rejected and dismantled.  That lasted for 80 years until President Wilson signed the Federal Reserve into being.  As for the Elitist imputation that Andrew Jackson was a genocidal racist, they cannot square his actions of adopting a native child as his son nor his words and deeds to ensure that we had good relations with Indian tribes that did work with us and went so far as to castigate Congress for letting those accounts fall into disrepair.  Racial genocide cannot be squared with those words, deeds and the meanings behind them, and yet to divide the people from those outlooks and actions (good and bad) they misrepresent the bad, hype it up to a high degree and then seek to say that is the sum total of the man.  If that were the case he would not have taken the actions he did, give the warnings he did, attempt to avert the problems as best he could and then, only in failure, still try to find a good end to what was a very bad situation in which lives were being lost.

No matter how vilified the man is, his outlooks, rooted in the basics of human individualism as the source of strength for society and prosperity, continue to this day.  Mr. Codevilla is not the first to highlight these people, and another writer took up that task nearly a decade ago:

The new Jacksonianism is no longer rural and exclusively nativist. Frontier Jacksonianism may have taken the homesteading farmer and the log cabin as its emblems, but today’s Crabgrass Jacksonianism sees the homeowner on his modest suburban lawn as the hero of the American story. The Crabgrass Jacksonian may wear green on St. Patrick’s Day; he or she might go to a Catholic Church and never listen to country music (though, increasingly, he or she probably does); but the Crabgrass Jacksonian doesn’t just believe, she knows that she is as good an American as anybody else, that she is entitled to her rights from Church and State, that she pulls her own weight and expects others to do the same. That homeowner will be heard from: Ronald Reagan owed much of his popularity and success to his ability to connect with Jacksonian values. Ross Perot and Pat Buchanan in different ways have managed to tap into the power of the populist energy that Old Hickory rode into the White House. In both domestic and foreign policy, the twenty-first century will be profoundly influenced by the values and concerns of Jacksonian America.

[..]

Jacksonian America’s love affair with weapons is, of course, the despair of the rest of the country. Jacksonian culture values firearms, and the freedom to own and use them. The right to bear arms is a mark of civic and social equality, and knowing how to care for firearms is an important part of life. Jacksonians are armed for defense: of the home and person against robbers; against usurpations of the federal government; and of the United States against its enemies. In one war after another, Jacksonians have flocked to the colors. Independent and difficult to discipline, they have nevertheless demonstrated magnificent fighting qualities in every corner of the world. Jacksonian America views military service as a sacred duty. When Hamiltonians, Wilsonians and Jeffersonians dodged the draft in Vietnam or purchased exemptions and substitutes in earlier wars, Jacksonians soldiered on, if sometimes bitterly and resentfully. An honorable person is ready to kill or to die for family and flag.

[..]

The underlying cultural unity between African Americans and Anglo-Jacksonian America shaped the course and ensured the success of the modern civil rights movement. Martin Luther King and his followers exhibited exemplary personal courage, their rhetoric was deeply rooted in Protestant Christianity, and the rights they asked for were precisely those that Jacksonian America values most for itself. Further, they scrupulously avoided the violent tactics that would have triggered an unstoppable Jacksonian response.

Although cultures change slowly and many individuals lag behind, the bulk of American Jacksonian opinion has increasingly moved to recognize the right of code-honoring members of minority groups to receive the rights and protections due to members of the folk community. This new and, one hopes, growing feeling of respect and tolerance emphatically does not extend to those, minorities or not, who are not seen as code-honoring Americans. Those who violate or reject the code—criminals, irresponsible parents, drug addicts—have not benefited from the softening of the Jacksonian color line.

[..]

Jacksonians are instinctively democratic and populist. Hamiltonians mistrust democracy; Wilsonians don’t approve of the political rough and tumble. And while Jeffersonians support democracy in principle, they remain concerned that tyrannical majorities can overrule minority rights. Jacksonians believe that the political and moral instincts of the American people are sound and can be trusted, and that the simpler and more direct the process of government is, the better will be the results. In general, while the other schools welcome the representative character of our democracy, Jacksonians tend to see representative rather than direct institutions as necessary evils, and to believe that governments breed corruption and inefficiency the way picnics breed ants. Every administration will be corrupt; every Congress and legislature will be, to some extent, the plaything of lobbyists. Career politicians are inherently untrustworthy; if it spends its life buzzing around the outhouse, it’s probably a fly. Jacksonians see corruption as human nature and, within certain ill-defined boundaries of reason and moderation, an inevitable by-product of government.

From Walter Russell Mead's The Jacksonian Tradition, put out in the fall 1999/2000 issue of the National Interest (archived here by Steven Den Beste).

From Mr. Codevilla's outlook of 'what if the country class took power in Congress and most Statehouses?' he clearly puts forward that the top-down methodology of the current ruling Elite class cannot serve as it is inherently Statist, not individual oriented:

Achieving the country class's inherently revolutionary objectives in a manner consistent with the Constitution and with its own diversity would require the Country Party to use legislation primarily as a tool to remove obstacles, to instruct, to reintroduce into American life ways and habits that had been cast aside. Passing national legislation is easier than getting people to take up the responsibilities of citizens, fathers, and entrepreneurs.

Reducing the taxes that most Americans resent requires eliminating the network of subsidies to millions of other Americans that these taxes finance, and eliminating the jobs of government employees who administer them. Eliminating that network is practical, if at all, if done simultaneously, both because subsidies are morally wrong and economically counterproductive, and because the country cannot afford the practice in general. The electorate is likely to cut off millions of government clients, high and low, only if its choice is between no economic privilege for anyone and ratifying government's role as the arbiter of all our fortunes. The same goes for government grants to and contracts with so-called nonprofit institutions or non-governmental organizations. The case against all arrangements by which the government favors some groups of citizens is easier to make than that against any such arrangement. Without too much fuss, a few obviously burdensome bureaucracies, like the Department of Education, can be eliminated, while money can be cut off to partisan enterprises such as the National Endowments and public broadcasting. That sort of thing is as necessary to the American body politic as a weight reduction program is essential to restoring the health of any human body degraded by obesity and lack of exercise. Yet shedding fat is the easy part. Restoring atrophied muscles is harder. Reenabling the body to do elementary tasks takes yet more concentration.

The grandparents of today's Americans (132 million in 1940) had opportunities to serve on 117,000 school boards. To exercise responsibilities comparable to their grandparents', today's 310 million Americans would have radically to decentralize the mere 15,000 districts into which public school children are now concentrated. They would have to take responsibility for curriculum and administration away from credentialed experts, and they would have to explain why they know better. This would involve a level of political articulation of the body politic far beyond voting in elections every two years.

If self-governance means anything, it means that those who exercise government power must depend on elections. The shorter the electoral leash, the likelier an official to have his chain yanked by voters, the more truly republican the government is. Yet to subject the modern administrative state's agencies to electoral control would require ordinary citizens to take an interest in any number of technical matters. Law can require environmental regulators or insurance commissioners, or judges or auditors to be elected. But only citizens' discernment and vigilance could make these officials good. Only citizens' understanding of and commitment to law can possibly reverse the patent disregard for the Constitution and statutes that has permeated American life. Unfortunately, it is easier for anyone who dislikes a court's or an official's unlawful act to counter it with another unlawful one than to draw all parties back to the foundation of truth.

The cutting of the size of government can be done either piecemeal, as Mr. Codevilla suggests, or via the concept of a 'Grand Bargain' like much of what the Progressives propose again and again.  A reduction in government 'Grand Bargain' attacks the root of the government's intervention in the lives of Americans and would address not just the wastrel spending at Education, Energy, Agriculture, the various 'arts', and so on, but would introduce the dismantling of the government welfare state in a way amenable to any American.

That can be done by, firstly, letting those know who currently draw on Social Security that they can continue to do so.  Second that those who paid into the system can then utilize their 'invested' funds to cut their own taxes.  Third FICA goes away as SSA becomes a direct funding for those left in it, and no new individuals will be let into it.  Fourth Medicare/Medicaid are added up, divided by two, apportioned to the States by population and phased out over 5 years.  SSA, Medicare and Medicaid now eat up all income of the federal government and all else, including interest on the National Debt is paid off in loans.  To working Americans this offers a double tax-cut that will last for some years as withholding from earnings plummets by 15-20%, which puts more money into the pockets of ordinary Americans, and by using SSA funds 'paid into' the system many people can live essentially tax free for some years.

That requires a 'cut to the bone' government which has already, at that point, agreed to remove the bulk of HHS and all of many Departments and Agencies.

The final piece, and really should be done, is to remove the 1911 Public Law setting the size of the House at 435 seats.  That is anti-representative in the extreme and needs to end.  For Americans to be represented in our diversity we need deep and diverse representation.  A Maximum House of 10,000 or may be unachievable (though very Constitutional) and the concept is that the problem of corruption is not the amount of money seeking to corrupt, but too few and easily corruptible.  If the Representative position is turned into a job with no real forward motion from it to higher office, then turn-over will be often for those seats as even minor demographic change impacts representation between each census.  That can be done by a majority in both Houses and either a Presidential signature or a veto over-ride.

The 'Grand Bargain' is that Americans, in a time of economic trouble, look to each other and to get the government out of doing ill to all of us, first, and then reducing the size, scope, power and cost of inefficient and incompetent government and making sure that each American is on a level playing field unfettered by heinous taxation.  The concept of being on a road to fiscal rectitude by paying down our debt with a goal of paying it off rang true after the Revolution as President Jackson made sure that he was the first President of a debt-free Nation.  That didn't last past his administration.  Now with the de-bunking of Keynesian economics and the bad examples set in Europe, the US can see its National budget like its household one and know that being in debt and facing bankruptcy is not at all good.  That can be made to stick as it is compelling and offers a ready exemplar of how you manage your own fiscal house.

It starts with pulling out the underpinnings for the massive federal government and its intervention into our economy (via the Federal Reserve, Fannie, Freddie, Ginnie and Sallie) plus ending the insane proposition of the ponzi scheme of SSA and the demographic black hole of federally subsidized health care.  It ends with increased representation, smaller government and much, much lower taxation aimed at setting us free of debt.

That cannot be done in one session of Congress.

Yet it must be done to retain liberty and freedom for all Americans rich and poor alike.