Black America: Where the Tragedy of the Commons meets the Overton Window

The black community’s disengagement from ordinary acts of civic responsibility is harming America as a whole, but mostly, it’s harming blacks. To save their communities, blacks need to reengage with what was once normative polite conduct across American society. To appreciate this point, consider the tales told by abandoned shopping carts and litter.

Shopping carts were invented in Oklahoma in 1937 and changed the face of retailing. No longer were customers limited to what they could carry around the store, they could now leisurely stroll the store not having to worry about how much they could fit in their cloth bag or how tired their arms might grow.  Today we’re largely indifferent about carts because the idea of them is so ingrained in our shopping experience that we can’t imagine a time when they didn’t exist.

As functional as carts are for the shopping experience however, there’s a different function that they serve that is equally important, but in a completely different context. 

Shopping carts serve as a great proxy for observing conscientiousness. What one does with a shopping cart tells a lot about a person. Most stores that have shopping carts have a bin for you to return them so you don’t have to go all the way back to the actual store. But here’s the thing about shopping carts. You get no compensation for returning them. Nor do you (normally) suffer any consequences for not returning them. The only people impacted by your returning the cart to the bin are others. Returning it is just the right thing to do.

As such, most people return their carts to the bins as one would expect a normal person to do. But others simply leave them in the next spot or put them on the curb next to their car.  There are consequences of such behavior of course, but rarely for the person who left the cart.  The cart can take up a space so that someone else has to get out of their car and move it before they can park.  It can start rolling in the parking lot and hit a car or a person.  Employees have to go around and collect those stray carts and return them to the bin or the store.

Another such measure is littering.  Littering is one more of those little things where the cost of doing the right thing is usually minor, but the consequences for the individual not doing so are generally nonexistent. Litter does of course have negative consequences on the community however, from the cost of pickup to aesthetics to clogging up drains and polluting waters. 

Whether it’s leaving a shopping cart in the middle of a parking lot or throwing trash on the street, both are among the most basic measures one can have of citizenship.  Usually no one is harmed and doing what’s right typically takes but a few seconds of the person’s time.

It’s instructive when one notices that people aren’t taking those few seconds to do the right thing.  It’s like the old saying, “If you want to know someone’s character, watch how they treat people who can do nothing for them.”  We’ve all seen people who are rude to waiters or store clerks, and usually they’re self-centered assholes. Same thing with shopping carts and litter.

At the end of the day, across the country you see communities covered in litter and too many shopping carts that were not only not returned to the bin, but were outright stolen.  Here’s the thing: Shopping carts and litter are just the most benign signs of conscientiousness & citizenship.  The lack of such betrays itself in far more malignant ways as well, and we’re seeing that across the country particularly in videos. Spirit Airlines airport counters. Six Flags parks. Carnival Cruise line ships. Seemingly every restaurant chain in America. Malls. Schools. Subways. And of course, street takeovers. This bad behavior seems to be everywhere, and one segment of society is perpetuating most of it: Blacks. 

It appears to be the case that for a very large segment of black America the ideas of conscientiousness and good citizenship are simply nonexistent. 

This might sound like a peripheral issue, but in reality it’s anything but. It’s what’s called the Tragedy of the Commons, individuals acting in selfish ways that harm society as a whole. 

The perfect example of this is when individuals or packs of looters steal from stores. When it becomes expensive enough, either through having to implement security measures or replace damaged property or buying new inventory, eventually the stores close.  The result is that citizens of the community have fewer shopping options available to them.  Then, when store fronts remain vacant they become magnets for graffiti and vandalism.  More vacant properties scare off potential customers, attract the homeless, drug addicts and squatters, and eventually even more crime.  The final outcome usually being the driving down of property values, tax revenues and finally decay. 

This tragedy, which used to be largely confined to black or urban neighborhoods is today spreading into the suburbs and the rest of the country.  The consequence of this problem, and the fact that most of it is being done by blacks is shredding of civic order and, frankly, increasing the division of races. The meme Black Fatigue has taken hold for a reason and seems to be almost ubiquitous. Black sportscaster and commentator Jason Whitlock says of it:  “It is the antithesis, it is the yin to the yang of Black Lives Matter. It’s white people boldly expressing their fatigue with black people…This was inevitable.”  He’s right. 

As this anti-social behavior expands, it hits companies that are perceived to have significant black clienteles. Carnival Cruise lines has come under fire because recent rule changes that are said to target black customers, Spirit Airways has seen its stock collapse 85% in 5 years and Six Flags recently implemented chaperone requirements due to problems with “teens”, resulting in a decline in attendance and a $100 million loss. These companies are trying to survive and their black customers are making it difficult. 

But of course this uncivilized behavior shows signs closer to home as well. It’s results in schools in black neighborhoods where kids can neither read nor write which in turn results in half of black high school graduates being functionally illiterate, not to mention the third world level of murder and violence among blacks, regardless of their economic status. 

The bottom line is, a civilized society requires that citizens respect a certain level of behavior and decorum, and we’re seeing too many black Americans ignoring that basic responsibility.  When people on the edge of the Overton Window of the culture wars start saying things that significant numbers of people agree with, that suggests a tipping point might be near. If black Americans want to enjoy the full spectrum of the gifts of freedom America has to offer, they’re going to have to, both individually and en masse, recognize that violence, anti-social behavior and the trashing of communities, both literally and figuratively, will have to stop. In something of the opposite of the Tragedy of the Commons, by exhibiting better behavior, blacks will not only benefit themselves, but they will help improve the wider community as well. 

Follow me on X at @ImperfectUSA

A Counterintuitive Perspective on Deportations

Since Donald Trump has begun the push to deport illegal aliens, we’ve seen stories about families being broken up, and people losing their homes or being deported without having been arrested for crimes other than illegal entry. The stories are framed sympathetically to wring American hearts, but they don’t change the debate because you can’t run a country based on emotional anecdotal narratives.

Still, that’s exactly what Democrats want the country to do. They’re suggesting that most of the 40 million illegal aliens they invited into the country over the last quarter century are doctors, engineers, or saints, and, therefore, that each one must be given full due process hearings before being sent home.

It’s no doubt true that of the people being deported, there are some, perhaps many, who are fine upstanding members of their communities. But the problem is, it’s literally impossible to vet 40 million people with the immigration infrastructure we have now, or even one ten times as large. And that’s even more true when ICE has to search for and arrest most of them and literally battle supporters while doing so.

The only real solution to America’s immigration problem is to encourage as many as illegals as possible to return home and to arrest and deport those who don’t.

But how do you get them to self-deport? Here are some suggestions:

1.    Tax remittances at 50% or more.

2.    Eliminate all government funding for everything other than truly emergency medical care. After that care is rendered, deport them.

3.    Guarantee jail time for any employer caught employing illegals.

4.    Cut federal dollars going to any sanctuary city or state. Jail any government official who uses his / her office to assist illegals evade deportation.

5.    Prosecute any NGO or “church” seeking to assist illegals to evade deportation.

6.    Cut federal dollars to any state that uses public funds to support illegal. California, for example, allows illegals to participate in the state’s Medicaid program.

7.    Eliminate banks’ ability to give mortgage or auto loans to illegals.

These steps may sound draconian, but the reality is that our country is in the midst of a crisis, and illegals are a big part of it.

The United States is $37 trillion in debt. Housing is unaffordable because illegal aliens occupy millions of homes and apartments. Hospitals are overwhelmed with illegals, most of whom can’t or don’t pay for the care they receive, leaving the hospitals to eat the costs or pass them on to paying patients.

And of course, the hotel rooms, food, and phones that cities across the country are providing for the swarms of illegals that have shown up on their doorsteps cause cuts in critical local services for citizens. A flood of illegal aliens also lowers wages for Americans because of the competition from illegal labor and the overcapacity schools that have to educate their often non-English speaking children.

Given this crisis, the government simply doesn’t have the ability to take the time to interview each illegal, along with his or her friends, family, and lawyers, before deciding whether to send them back or not. As such, the goal should be to deport every single illegal. Once they’re in their home countries, they can be processed for return to America based on what’s good for America. Most will still not be allowed to return, but nations have to make choices, and the good of their citizens should come first.

The leftists and NGOs in the Illegals Industrial Complex™ tell us these illegals only want to work hard and make a better life for themselves. Maybe, but here’s the thing these hypocrites never bother to tell you: Most can work hard and make a better life for themselves in their own countries.

Imagine that the 16 million illegal Mexicans in the United States go back to Mexico with years or decades of experience gained while working in the United States. That’s 10% of the population, all of whom would bring with them a wide variety of work experiences and skills that they could put to work helping to improve Mexico, a nation with an embarrassment of natural resources. Now imagine the same thing in Haiti, Nigeria, Colombia, and the rest of the countries from which illegals have come to the United States.

In reality, deporting the tens of millions of illegals in the country is probably the single best foreign aid program the United States could ever embark on. We already know that USAID was a colossal grift by NGOs where the funds rarely reached the intended recipients, that “aid” from the West rarely generates the promised results, and that even when Westerners build things in poverty-stricken areas they sometimes find themselves accused of perpetuating stereotypes. Deportations would be a far better way to bring American business knowledge and work skills to a struggling country than most of what we’ve been doing for years.

Add to that the fact that the people who actually made it to the United States were likely some of the most motivated and resourceful people in their home countries to begin with, and one realizes that deportations would reverse a trend of draining struggling countries of the very people best equipped to help them improve. Indeed, that “brain drain” of the most motivated people only functions to widen the gap between the developed and developing world by siphoning off those most likely to change the system in their home countries. Deportations would reverse that trend.

None of this would be easy, of course. Additionally, just because someone with skills or work experience returns to a dysfunctional country doesn’t mean that they can fix everything—but they have a much better opportunity to help their homeland (the ones they love so much they keep waving those flags) when they are in the country than they do from the United States.

The United States has spent trillions of dollars over the last half century trying to improve the conditions of much of the third world, usually with abysmal results. In 2025, we cannot continue to waste money like that anymore.

Donald Trump’s deportation push creates an opportunity to do something that counterintuitively can benefit both the United States and the countries from which the illegals came. It’s a policy that should animate all Americans.

But history tells us that there are a legion of grifters in the Illegals Industrial Complex™ who will stand in the way because they care more about their pocketbooks and power than they do about the country or the countries from which the illegals came, or often the illegals themselves… Trump should not allow them to derail him.

Follow me on X at @ImperfectUSA

Maybe what we need in America is a dictator, or maybe a few of them...

The word “dictator” gets a bad rap. It’s kind of easy to understand why, given some of the people who fall under that title. Stalin was a dictator, as were Mao, Hitler, Ayatollah Khomeini, Hugo Chavez, and Robert Mugabe, among others. Well over 100 million people lost their lives because of those guys over the last century, so there’s that.

Dictators take power, sometimes legally, sometimes illegally and then refuse to give it up. They rule by force of violence or the threat of such, and citizens can rarely do anything to protect themselves.

But that’s today. The original Roman dictators were different, and not like Julius Caesar, perhaps the most famous dictator in history. Caesar took power and basically intended to keep it for life, and that’s the model most dictators through history have taken.

But that’s not how the dictatorship was originally supposed to work. According to Wikipedia, in the early days of the Roman Republic,

"The dictatorship seems to have been conceived as a way to bypass normal Roman politics and create a short-term magistrate with special powers, serving to defend the Republic in war, or otherwise to cow internal civil unrest, especially if such unrest imperiled the conduct of war."

In other words, a dictator was needed when the normal bureaucracy failed to fix a problem. A dictator’s power was not unlimited, although for the specific purpose for which he was appointed, it was close.

Additionally, the appointment lasted only until the problem to be addressed was actually solved. In practice, a dictator’s term generally lasted six months or less, and, once completed, he would return to his previous position or, as Cincinnatus famously did, to retirement. (Notably, George Washington was hailed as a “New Cincinnatus” for his willingness to leave power after two terms.)

But here is the most important thing: A dictator never stopped being accountable for his actions. While dictators were in office they were virtually untouchable, but once their term expired they could be charged for any unlawful conduct they engaged in during that period. That was rare, however, and there is debate today as to whether a dictator being charged for acts during office was an actual rule.

But what does any of that have to do with America in 2025? Potentially a lot, actually.

We see stories across the country (and frankly throughout the West) almost every day of violent criminals being let out of jail on bond, on laughably low bonds, or sometimes without bond at all. Other times, we hear about hardened criminals being let out of prison on parole only to go right back to crime. And of course, we hear about judges who sentence violent criminals to infuriatingly short sentences.

Across the country, we have leftist District Attorneys and prosecutors who regularly see fit to put the desires of criminals above those of the communities they are sworn to defend. Our system is failing.

And while the American practice of electing DAs would seem to mean that they are close to voters and reflect their desires, the reality is that such offices, perhaps more so than any other in our nation, are susceptible to outside influence. This can be seen by how successfully that hardcore leftist, George Soros, spent just $40 million to saddle communities around the country with cancerous DAs who are responsible for rivers of blood flowing down the streets in some of America’s biggest cities.

The Romans’ solution for an intractable problem they couldn’t solve via business as usual? Dictatorship. We should consider the same.

Not a dictator in the sense of Stalin or Hitler, but rather in the style of the traditional Roman Republic, where an office is created to deal with a problem that the normal bureaucracy can’t seem to fix.

In any city or municipality across the country where the violent crime rate is X or above, the federal government should impose a dictator.

I’d call them Justice Dictators, and their specific role would be to decide on bail / release for criminals accused of any violent crimes within a given jurisdiction. What would make this role interesting would be that these Dictators would also be liable if the people they allow out on bail commit crimes while waiting for their cases to be adjudicated.

But, you say, why would anyone be crazy enough to take such a job? Well, the incentive, of course. And in this case, the incentive would be that, beyond their salary, they’d get to keep the government’s fees / costs of whatever bail the accused pays. These vary by jurisdiction and are often deducted from what the accused is refunded if they don’t violate the terms of their agreement. If they do violate them however they lose the bail and the dictator would lose those accessed fees.

This combination of personal liability—up to and including potentially jail time—and the opportunity to earn money should make the position sufficiently compelling to see someone who can live with risk agree to take it. Essentially, this position would, by definition, force someone to actually balance what’s best for society and what’s best for themselves, something that is woefully missing in today’s system.

Today, DAs, parole board members, and judges essentially exist in the ether above their communities. They make their emperor-like pronouncements and go on with their lives, largely immune to the consequences of those decisions, while the members of the community must bear the full brunt of them. A dictatorship would change that equation.

The consequence, of course, would be far fewer criminals out on the street as they await trial, and you would expect those who were out to be better behaved. Another consequence would be higher costs due to having to keep more prisoners locked up for longer, but that should be offset by a drop in crime and associated costs, given that a minority of criminals commit a majority of America’s crime. And best of all, with fewer recidivist criminals on the street, the police can improve their abysmal success rate in solving crimes. That failure is due in significant part to the fact that cops, knowing that criminals will immediately be back on the streets, sometimes before they’re even done filling out the paperwork, are unwilling even to bother arresting criminals.

Now, you might say this is a bridge too far, or maybe it’s a Rube Goldberg contraption that won’t work. Both may be true, but at the end of the day, the American system of justice is broken and must be fixed.

A key element of an effective criminal justice system is that citizens are confident that the system exists to protect them from criminals (even as due process exists to protect criminals from the system). Today, when ordinary people routinely see known and convicted criminals walking the streets among them it shakes that confidence. And the single biggest driver of that is the potentates of the judicial system who make their decisions from on high but never have to suffer the consequences of them.

One of the basic truths of economics, humanity, and civilization is that men respond to incentives. The current judicial system has few incentives for those in charge to take into consideration the safety of the citizens and communities they ostensibly serve. Until that is rectified, we should expect to see continued erosion of the basic elements of our neighborhoods, communities, and frankly, our country.

Follow me on X at: @ImperfectUSA

 

The United States is experiencing something of a perfect storm of non self-perpetuation

 Like most red-blooded American boys, from the beginning of middle school on, I was very interested in girls. Indeed, I spent pretty much the entirety of my teenage years trying to figure out how to get girls. I never did find a formula, but I was forever looking. For the most part, my days were filled with sports of every type, from scuba diving to motocross to baseball, football, golf, karate, the gym, etc. But the entire time, all of that, and school, was set against a mental backdrop of how to get girls, how to get a date…and, umm…more. That pretty much was it, and from what I could tell from my friends, that was pretty much normal. Some guys were more successful, some were less successful, but we were all basically in the same game.

But here’s the thing: For virtually all of us growing up (except those lucky few Casanovas), getting girls was always a challenge. I don’t mean a challenge that someone put you up to—although sometimes it was that—but rather that the entire process of getting girls was challenging. You might admire a girl from afar and practice what you’d say when you approached her, but then you’d chicken out. Or when you bumped into her around a corner, you somehow forgot how to speak English correctly. There’d be the nervousness, the dozen times you’d pick up the phone to call but hang up before you dial that last digit, and more.

Being a young man was often hard when it came to girls, but that was life. (It no doubt was hard to be a girl too, likely for different reasons, but I can’t really speak about that…).

You’ll notice I said was and not is. It might still be, but it’s different.

If you’ve ever seen the Joaquin Phoenix movie Her, you’ll have an idea where I’m going. In it, a lonely Theodor (Phoenix) strikes up a friendship with an Artificial Intelligence, Samantha, voiced by Scarlett Johansson. The friendship evolves into a relationship that seems to be everything Theodor wants, except that Samantha is an operating system.

Given the physical limitations of being a program, Samantha arranges for Theodor to be with a real woman surrogate. It’s a disaster and soon thereafter the relationship begins to crumble when Theodor discovers Samantha is simultaneously having similar relationships with thousands of other men.

That movie was made in 2013. A decade later, we have actual, personalized AI that can carry on conversations like humans and offer compassion and companionship. What’s more, companies are putting AI into anatomically correct robots. They may be less than perfect now and expensive to boot, but technology and efficiency are moving forward at light speed.

Of course, these developments would be nothing but a sideshow if it weren’t for the fact that they’re occurring at the exact time young people are losing interest in sex and relationships, and those who might have an interest are increasingly confused about who they are.

All of this matters because fewer Americans are getting married, and those who are marrying are doing so later and, therefore, having fewer children. The United States’ fertility rate is already below replacement and going in the wrong direction. Indeed, it was just reported that 2024 recorded the lowest birth rate in American history! (And we’re not alone.)

The United States is experiencing something of a perfect storm of non-self-perpetuation. The only growth the country is experiencing is coming from immigration, much of it illegal. That’s a problem because many of the immigrants who are coming to the United States don’t share the cultural values the nation was built upon, things like freedom of speech and religion, capitalism, private property, and the rule of law. With enough people who don’t share its values, a society collapses into conflict, chaos, and eventually civil war or worse.

To all of this, we add the woke notion of “toxic masculinity,” microaggressions, and men losing jobs for addressing women as “ladies.” What is one to make of male and female relationships in a 21st-century America?

The reality is that dating is one of the most consequential adventures humans ever embark on, particularly in a free society where individuals make their own match choices. Again, I can only speak about this from a male perspective, but trying to get up the courage to ask a girl out, getting shot down, and mustering the courage to try again has a tremendous impact on your psyche.

Trying out different approaches to see what works and what you’re comfortable with is a journey unto itself. There may be no more powerful passion in a young man’s life than infatuation, that moment when a young romance is just blossoming, and it basically becomes your raison d’être and makes you do things you probably wouldn’t do if you were rational.

Frequently, the lessons a young man learns and the character he builds during the challenges associated with romance and courtship help form his personality and guide him through much of the rest of his life. That rite of passage is a key element of what it means to become a well-rounded, mature man. Because of technology, fewer and fewer young men are running that oh so important gauntlet, and with the combination of AI and robotics, we’re likely to see even less.

When faced with the choice between, on the one hand, the awkwardness of talking to a girl or a woman along with the fear of getting rejected or having your heart broken by her, on the other hand, with a beautiful and lifelike AI robot that’s programmed to treat you like a king and never reject you, a significant number of boys/men will choose the latter.

That’s a problem. It’s a problem that must be addressed because, for civilization to continue, civilized people need to reproduce. The greatest advancements in human history have come from Western civilization, not the places where fertility rates are actually above replacement. If things continue this way, there are two possible outcomes.

The first is that Western civilization continues to import millions of people from nations and cultures that do not share its values. Eventually, freedom and the rule of law and prosperity disappear as the West regresses toward the mean of human civilization, one characterized by violence, scarcity, and tyranny, like much of what we see in the third world today.

The second outcome is a world where technology replaces most things men do, leaving an elite who control that technology and the superfluous masses controlled by it. Tyranny of the elites will settle in quickly, and while the façade of human civilization may continue for a while, eventually the technology will advance beyond the ability of humans to control it. We then become not only expendable, but very possibly will become slaves or seen as a virus to be eliminated, à la The Matrix.

This may sound like hyperbole, but make no mistake, a collapsing birthrate and an unchecked, exponentially advancing AI are both dangerous on their own. Together, they are a recipe for an extinction-level event.

An 18th Century Scottish Historian Foretells 21st Century America

Our Constitution, perhaps the greatest document in human history behind the Bible, is not quite perfect. In 2025 we can see things that might have been added. Number one is probably term limits.  Another would be a prohibition on deficit spending outside of war.  And maybe they could have added something about judges being responsible for the crimes the criminals they release into society commit…

No doubt there are countless things we could sit here 250 years later and think of that the Founding Fathers could have added but didn’t because they couldn’t see into the future. One thing they could see clearly was that the nature of man is to accumulate power, use that power to take from others and that the most effective way of doing both is by harnessing the power of government. 

Alas, it wasn’t possible to put frameworks in place to control all of the base instincts of men as they are simply unending and evolve constantly. The Founders could not envision our world.  They could write about freedom of speech and the press, but they couldn’t have known about radio or mobile phones or the dark web or Bitcoin or shadowbanning. 

Nonetheless one of the greatest attributes of their Constitution was its staggered terms. The House, the place from which spending originates, is the closest to the people and is elected every two years. The President, who executes the laws, has a term of four years.  Then the Senate, originally the representatives of the state legislatures, serve staggered six-year terms.

The goal of these staggered terms was to tamp the passions of men such that if a majority wanted something they couldn’t easily command it and it would take years for them to take control over the government. The Founders understood that tempers run hot but cooler heads often prevail with time and therefore they wrote a document with built in cooling off periods.

What the Founding Fathers never envisioned however was a permanent government, in either the elected officials or the bureaucracy.  Sadly, today we have both. That wouldn’t be a significant problem if government was as small as it was initially.  Indeed, for America’s first 50 years we had a Department of State, Treasury, War, Attorney General and Postmaster General.  That was it.  Interior and Agriculture came in the middle of the 19^th century when the country was adding states and territories rapidly and farming was becoming a major point of conflict between cattle herders, sheep herders, farmers and miners, not to mention Indians.  Nothing more until the Department of Commerce and Labor in 1903 – the two split in 1913.

The point is, for most of the first half of America’s history the federal government was essentially an afterthought in the minds of most Americans.  For the Founding Fathers government was part time.  Today it’s anything but. To put this in perspective, there have been almost 2,000 people who have served as a US Senator, and of the 25 who served the longest, all but one started his career in the 20^th century – 15 of them after 1960 – and two are still there!  Similarly, over in the House, where 12,000 people have served as Representatives, of the 33 longest serving, all but one began their service in the 20^th century and four are current members.  The Founding Fathers didn’t see a need for term limits because for them Congress was a service to the country, not a job, and certainly not a permanent career.

Today the federal government is anything but an afterthought in the lives of Americans. Not only does it seek to control almost every aspect of our lives, but it spends like a drunken sailor on liberty weekend.  Not surprisingly, most of the regulations that stifle productivity and innovation and the departments from which most spending emerges are those created in the last century. Seventy five percent of the federal government spending is on things that simply exist at the federal level for our first 150 years.  From healthcare spending to food stamps to Social Security to education, the limited government our Founding Fathers left us with has metastasized into a borg that grows year after year, regardless of who’s in control. 

This does not end well, particularly as the United States is $37 trillion in debt, with twice that in unfunded obligations.  The words of Scottish historian Alexander Fraser Tytler explains why:  “A democracy will continue to exist up until the time that voters discover that they can vote themselves generous gifts from the public treasury. From that moment on, the majority always votes for the candidates who promise the most benefits from the public treasury, with the result that every democracy will finally collapse due to loose fiscal policy, which is always followed by a dictatorship.”

On our present course, that is America’s fate. Sadly we have few leaders willing to tell Americans the truth about that reality.  While we have men like Rand Paul and Thomas Massie, Americans writ large don’t seem to be interested in following them. 

There are solutions however.  The FairTax would be a giant step in the right direction as it would remove from politician’s hands the ability to manipulate the tax code to give donors goodies. We could sunset regulations.  As an example, every law on the books would sunset after 10 years unless it was renewed by Congress, and would face sunset every 10 years unless it was passed by 60% of each house. Then there’s zero based budgeting, where every department must justify its entire budget from scratch every two years.  At the same time, welfare and other wealth redistribution programs that were never part of the Constitution in the first place must be eliminated, perhaps phased out over a four year period.  And of course, not to be forgotten… term limits.

Implementing these steps would rein in government spending and regulation, but more importantly they would simultaneously unleash an economic juggernaut unlike anything the world has ever seen. 

But as Tytler suggested, that’s not how things usually work. In 1776 a group of extraordinary men risked their lives and livelihoods to give free men an opportunity to build a new nation based on individual liberty and limited government. But before they could do that they needed to inspire the colonies’ citizens, two thirds of whom either wanted to remain British or were undecided.  Against all odds they not only inspired a nation but led it to victory against the world’s most powerful empire. 

But then they did something even more amazing.  Building on the Declaration of Independence’s recognition that rights come from God, they wrote the world’s first constitution based on those individual rights and framed a limited government to allow men to exercise them. 

Today America needs a new group of would-be heroes, men willing to target the entrenched barnacles that have grown up around our Constitution and the leeches that feed off both. It will take wordsmiths like Payne and Jefferson, coalition builders like Madison and Marshall and a leader like Washington to have any chance at success. Let’s hope they emerge before Tytler’s warning comes true. 

The Mona Lisa and the Louvre demonstrate why when art imitates life, the west should pay attention.

Guest post by Martha Careful

A couple of months ago a “spontaneous strike erupted” among employees at the world’s most-visited museum, the Louvre. In protest over overwhelming crowds and chronic understaffing, employees refused to take their posts on Monday, forcing the iconic Paris museum to shut its doors. But the crowds and unmoving lines weren’t always this way, and to understand how bad they’ve gotten, one must understand how nice a visit to the Louvre used to be.

I first visited Paris 25 years ago. The Louvre was simply extraordinary, and even from the outside it is breathtaking. But on the inside, my personal favorite is the Marie de’ Medici cycle, a series of 24 giant paintings by Peter Paul Rubens chronicling the life of Marie de’ Medici, the widow of French King Henry IV. There is also Winged Victory, Venus de Milo, and paintings by everyone from Rembrandt to Jacques-Louis David to Raphael.

But, as everyone knows, the most famous and the most sought-after artwork in the Louvre is Leonardo da Vinci’s Mona Lisa. I remember walking into the room that held her. There were a lot of people, but it wasn’t crowded per se. You could easily walk around, and eventually you could get fairly close and try and examine her famous smile.

Since that first visit, I’ve been back to Paris many times, including a few visits to the Louvre itself. About a month ago I went once again, this time with my sister and brother-in-law. The first thing I have to say is that the throng of people in the museum was extraordinary. The line just to get through security was more than two hours!

Once inside, as the Mona Lisa was on the top of my sister’s must-see list, we headed there. The museum was as crowded as I’ve ever seen it, but you could mostly navigate around. But when we arrived at the room with da Vinci’s masterpiece, it was like something I’d never seen. It was simply insane. You were shuttled through ropes towards the masterpiece and then out on either side before actually getting within 10 feet of her. What’s worse, almost every single person was holding up their phones to take a picture or a selfie, so it was virtually impossible to get even a good glimpse of the presumed Italian beauty.

The experience was simply sad. The building I had experienced a quarter century before was the same. The works were largely the same. But the museum experience was … not. No, now there were so many people in the museum that the thing one remembers is not standing there pondering what was behind that enigmatic smile, but rather feeling like a steer in the middle of a cattle drive being prodded along with no focus on anything other than not getting trampled.

I’m no expert, but I don’t think that’s the goal of any museum. The goal of allowing ever more people in, while egalitarian, actually diminishes the experience for everyone.

So too with the West. By any measure, Western nations have built the most free, prosperous and advanced civilization in human history. Everything from cars to flight to nuclear power to advanced agriculture to television to computers to MRI machines and more, western culture has been almost exclusively behind the advances civilization has made over the last 500 years. The result has been the creation of nations that are largely more free, prosperous and functional than any in the world. Which is of course, why people want to come here.

But the problem is, like the Louvre and the Mona Lisa, too many people simply overwhelm the system and destroy the experience for everyone. But at least at the Louvre visitors buy tickets with money that is then used to maintain the museum and pay for its operations. Not so with nations.

Most of the illegal immigrants crossing rivers and seas and borders to move to the West are not paying to maintain them. In fact, not only do Western nations have to support them, but most bring with them values and cultures that are anathema to the very ideas that made Western civilization successful in the first place, i.e. Christianity, individual freedom, and capitalism.

It’s the equivalent of visitors being allowed to sneak in the back door of the Louvre then painting graffiti everywhere before starting barbecues in the rooms and using the artwork as kindling. Eventually, the museum would not only run out of masterpieces to burn, but once everything was gone, the building itself would be taken apart piece by piece and carted off. Thereafter, the progeny of the legitimate visitors and the vandals alike would be left standing by the River Seine looking at the ruins and wondering what used to stand there.

Would anyone say that such a scenario would be a good thing? That somehow the Louvre benefited from its new “undocumented” or “irregular” visitors? The answer is clearly “No.”

Just as is true on the small scale, it applies equally, if not more on a larger scale because while the Louvre’s works are generally displayed in the museum itself, the West has not only created a civilization that benefits itself, but it’s created one that has helped bring billions of people around the world out of abject poverty.

It’s understandable that Westerners have sympathy for the conditions others’ experience. The sad reality is that poverty, scarcity, war, and tyranny remain problems for many places, as they have for most of the world throughout human history. That’s troubling and most people who are relatively better off would feel some pull to try and help. But the question is, does allowing tens of millions of people from failed or war-torn or dysfunctional nations to enter the West make the world a better place? For those who escape to the West, it most certainly does. But for the West itself, not so much. Overwhelmed schools, hospitals, governments, communities, trillions of dollars of debt spending and increased rates of crime and social discord. Clearly not better.

The French national motto is “Liberté, égalité, fraternité” or Liberty, equality, fraternity. The West has taken the idea of equality and made it first among equals in terms of objectives over the last half century, and they’re well on their way of achieving it. But not in the way our leaders promised. No, rather than helping to bring freedom and prosperity to the rest of the world, they’re making the world equal by destroying those very things within their own countries, the outliers that escaped the history of man.

This should be obvious to anyone paying attention, but the elites, living in their gated communities, with their bodyguards and their Swiss bank accounts, never have to actually interact with the unwashed masses who live with the realities driven by their policies. No, they get private tours of the Louvre, fly on private jets, and enjoy private club memberships, all while making policies the consequences of which they never actually have to experience.

For anyone who loves art, the Louvre becoming a cattle drive is not a good thing. For anyone who loves liberty and prosperity, the West becoming a borderless society is a terrible thing.

Russiagate Was Treason; Will Trump Prove That No One Is Above the Law?

The esteemed Thomas Sowell, easily the most important economist of the last 50 years, turned 95 a couple of weeks ago. He has an extraordinary ability to take complex ideas about economics and culture and distill them down in prose that speaks to everyone from PhDs to those with a GED.

His ability and willingness to address issues from race to economics to history in compellingly readable books are unmatched. Indeed, his Cultures trilogy is one of the most robust weapons one might equip themselves with in any battle against the nonsensical wokeness that plagues America in the early 21st century.

As one would expect from a career spanning over six decades, Dr. Sowell has more than a few quotes that are perfect for our time. My favorite is easily:

“Racism is not dead, but it is on life support — kept alive by politicians, race hustlers and people who get a sense of superiority by denouncing others as racists.”

Another is:

“One of the sad signs of our times is that we have demonized those who produce, subsidized those who refuse to produce, and canonized those who complain.”

As accurate as those quotes are, the following is perhaps the most insightful I’ve ever read:

“One of the common failings among honorable people is a failure to appreciate how thoroughly dishonorable some other people can be, and how dangerous it is to trust them.”

While that quote seems like a reasonable observation in a normal political framework where politicians tell lies about one another and make promises they never intend to keep, today it’s something more. Its cutting accuracy seems to have been demonstrated every week since Donald Trump 47 took office, from USAID to intransigent bureaucrats to rogue judges. But now, finally, maybe, someone is starting to heed Dr. Sowell’s words.

I’m talking, of course, about the Russiagate hoax that Barack Obama and his national security team foisted on the American people. CIA Director John Brennan, FBI Director James Comey, and Director of National Intelligence James Clapper essentially manipulated the Intelligence Community Assessment [ICA] such that the impact of a Trump Russia collusion charge was devastating. And they had a bit of help from the beginning.

Essentially, they undermined the credibility of the incoming administration and saddled the country with two years of intrigue, corruption, and uncertainty in the form of an investigation by Special Counsel Robert Mueller. What’s more, Paul Ryan, the then-Speaker of the House who basically would have been just as happy with a President Hillary Clinton, would use the distraction to undermine Trump’s No. 1 issue: the border wall. He delayed the fight until after the 2018 midterms, which of course ended up being a bloodbath for the GOP.

Needless to say, Trump’s No. 1 issue was DOA when Congress reconvened.

By the time Mueller reluctantly admitted that there was nothing to the Russiagate hoax — six months after the midterms — the damage had already been done. Some coups take the form of military takeovers, others involve assassinations; this one involved a conspiracy at the highest levels of the Obama administration.

Things are not supposed to work like that. We have elections so the people can decide how they would like the nation to be governed. While there are always many people who are unhappy with the outcome, most Americans accept it because they believe in the system established by our Constitution.

John Adams said of that Constitution: "[It] was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other." That is demonstrably true. It’s a piece of paper. Americans accept the outcomes of elections not because there are stormtroopers stationed on every corner ensuring acquiescence, but rather because they believe that, while flawed, our constitutional elections are a relatively honest and fair way to decide our paths forward.

Which brings us back to Sowell’s quote: “One of the common failings among honorable people is a failure to appreciate how thoroughly dishonorable some other people can be, and how dangerous it is to trust them.” What the Obama cabal did to Donald Trump and the country was anything but moral. It was insidious, it was treacherous, and most of all, it was treasonous.

And now that the Director of National Intelligence, Tulsi Gabbard, has released documents and suggested they show that Barack Obama was behind it all, we’ll get an opportunity to see what the Trump administration is really made of. It’s one thing to tell the American people about the treason of a previous administration, but it’s something else altogether to do something about it. Will it be like the Jeffrey Epstein debacle, where Americans were told the hammer is coming, only to be later told there’s nothing there? Or will this be a ruthless, methodical, and intentional prosecution of the traitors who put the nation through so much?

I would suggest that at a moment in time when public trust in government is near all-time lows, if the Trump administration has any hope of being considered successful, it will take the latter course. For far too long, Americans have watched as elites like Hillary Clinton, Susan Rice, and Barack Obama have not only gotten away with what many see as abject treason, but then they have the temerity to lecture us that “No one is above the law.”

Most Americans agree with that and believe criminals should pay for their deeds. The question is, does Donald Trump? Will he demonstrate to the American people that we are indeed a nation of laws and not men, or will he tell us once again that there’s no there there and that in modern America, the only people who face consequences for their actions are those who stand up to the swamp and the ruling elites?

Follow me on X at @ImperfectUSA