But whatever shall we do?

Professor Don writes in from one of the groves of the academe in South Carolina:

“Mr. Suprynowicz: You have clearly identified the predicament. May I ask your ideas regarding a solution to Obama’s State Capitalism?"
 
I replied: Hi, Professor --

We can always hope it will be abandoned based on the increasing evidence of its own silliness. (Washington commanding Detroit to build only energy-efficient little golf carts, which American consumers have been rejecting for decades?) The precedent there would be the abandonment of some SPECIFIC agencies and programs of FDR’s New Deal, though overall I regret I can’t identify a decade since 1932 when the size, intrusiveness, and unconstitutionality of the central government has not grown by leaps and bounds.

I wish I knew a reassuring historical example of a republic which -- having fallen into the hands of desperate bankers willing to debase the currency and corrupt politicians who laugh at any suggestion they should take seriously their oath to exercise “limited powers” -- has been successfully turned back onto the path of liberty without a period of many decades (centuries?) of tyranny and chaos, ending only when the farmers have to flee the jurisdiction to avoid selling their daughters into whoredom to pay their taxes, and when the military, bereft of any real civilian oversight, becomes essentially indistinguishable from the barbarian hordes. 

(It’s tempting to cite the “quiet” fall of the Soviet Union, though that would require arguing Russia is now a free country with no further territorial appetites, which demands a high degree of relativism.)

It doesn’t even do much good (beyond providing a happy fantasy) to speak of some new “revolution.” Where -- among the graduates of our current government youth propaganda camps -- would you find a righteous people with a firm grasp of the principles of the Founders willing or able to install anything better than what we’ve got, even if by some miracle Washington City were found to be as empty, tomorrow morning, as in one of those science fiction movies where everyone but thee and me disappears overnight?

Libertarians who vow (with various degrees of credibility) to close the Federal Reserve, again issue sound money, and eliminate all unconstitutional “programs,” prohibitions and regulations if elected -- which I suspect would pare back the federal government by at least 85 percent, if we stipulate that the military should abandon its foreign occupations and come home -- routinely receive less than 2 percent of the vote. The other 98 percent of the voters are saying, in essence, “I think my pirate can grab me a bigger share of the ill-gotten loot than your pirate.”

There will still be interim periods of apparent “recovery” and “prosperity,” I dare say -- just as I’m told the champagne flowed in Berlin in 1940. 

Perhaps, in the chaos to come, some of our grandchildren can re-establish a regime on the principles of 1776 (or 1787, though I fear the Hamiltonians saw to it the Constitution contained many seeds of its own destruction) in some mountain fastness, a la Switzerland.

But so long as the populace is happy to be distracted into a discussion of Mrs. Obama’s frocks and the White House dog, I fear our best hope for now lies in the laws of thermodynamics. Entropy. 

: -)

-- 30 —