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

Ted Cruz, Thomas Sowell and Battles Worth Fighting...

In my opinion Thomas Sowell is easily the smartest man in America. From Basic Economics, to Black Rednecks and White Liberals to his definitive dissection of the most recent economic collapse in The Housing Boom and Bust, his books are nothing short of brilliant. And of course it’s not just books, he writes a weekly column as well, does interviews, lectures and does research at Stanford’s Hoover Institute. His prodigious talents make him one of the great thinkers and writers of our time.

As much as I enjoy and agree with almost everything Sowell writes, I believe he’s wrong about Ted Cruz. He was not happy with Cruz leading the charge for the government shutdown last year and he’s not at all happy with him on his efforts to unseat RINO republicans.

On the shutdown Dr. Sowell suggested that there was no point fighting the battle because it could simply not be won. “Even if, by some miracle, the Republicans managed to get the Senate to go along with defunding ObamaCare, President Obama can simply veto the bill.” That is factually correct. There was no chance that Obama was going to sign any bill that defunded Obamacare… but that’s OK. Sowell is also correct that the GOP was going to get blamed for the shutdown by a bootlicking media. But the funny thing was, despite the Democrat’s and the media’s warnings that the sky would fall… it didn’t. During the “shutdown” 83% of all government spending went on unmolested, and perhaps most glaringly, only 22% of American people said they were inconvenienced by the shutdown at all! That’s a much lower percentage than the number of Americans who had a negative opinion of Obamacare at that same time, 44% and who wanted Obamacare repealed, 34%.

While the media sought to paint the shutdown as a GOP mistake, Ted Cruz gave the GOP leadership an opportunity to harness that attention to articulate why they were fighting to save the country from Obamacare. The fact that the leadership chose not to, or is genetically incapable of doing so is not Cruz’s fault. At a time when the nation’s attention was focused on government policies, Cruz gave the GOP an opportunity to show that “business as usual” was no longer going to fly. Not surprisingly, they failed to do so.

Dr. Sowell is equally perturbed by Ted Cruz’s willingness to attack the GOP leadership, which includes Senators who are up for election in 2014, such as Minority Leader Mitch McConnell and Whip John Cornyn. Also his filibuster in October in an attempt to get the GOP to hold Obamacare hostage to the debt ceiling.

Dr. Sowell often compares (in a negative light) Cruz to George Washington. There is a United States of America today only because George Washington understood that his army was not able to fight the British troops everywhere, but had to choose carefully when and where to fight. Futile symbolic confrontations were a luxury that could not be afforded then and cannot be afforded now.

He makes a similar point using the illustration of the Dunkirk rescue: The British troops who escaped from Dunkirk came back to France four years later, as part of the massive invasion forces that stormed the beaches at Normandy, liberated France and pushed on into Germany for the final defeat of the Nazi regime.

In politics, as in war, you need power to win, and you don't dissipate your forces fighting battles that you are sure to lose. Symbolism and emotional self-indulgence are just not worth it.

While admitting Dr. Sowell is right that Barack Obama’s veto pen would likely rule the day in most situations, I do not agree with his contention that fighting a battle is not worth fighting just because you know you’ll probably lose. That’s because there’s a difference between a battle and a war, and Americans are very much involved in a war. That war may not involve bullets and bayonets, but the stakes are as high as anything George Washington ever fought for. It is literally for the freedom that he won for us and the Constitution secured for us.

Whereas Dr. Sowell compares Ted Cruz’s battles to Washington’s at New York or to the British at Dunkirk, I think a better comparison is to Leonidas at Thermoplyae or the defenders of the Alamo. In both cases the battles were lost, but they inspired the winning of the larger war. Fortunately, in the war effort Ted Cruz is leading the consequences of losing a battle will surely not be fatal, probably even to a political career. But what they might do is finally arouse an American populace that has forgotten that liberty and prosperity are built on the Constitutional principles of individual freedom, limited government and free enterprise and not on government mandates and largesse.

Ted Cruz may lose many of the battles he fights, but the battles are worth fighting. For too long conservatives have acquiesced to the tactics of “establishment” Republicans and as a result we’ve had more than a quarter century of the winnowing of our freedoms and the unfettered growth of government. From farm bills to debt limits to welfare spending to Obamacare, the GOP’s willingness to play it safe has resulted in one unmitigated disaster after another, culminating in the reelection of Barack Obama in 2012. Maybe Dr. Sowell is right, maybe Ted Cruz’s tactics will lose the Senate for the GOP in 2014. If so, so be it. If the American system is going to collapse under its own weight – which is surely the case with the current trajectory – then let the damage be done so that we can get on with the task of rebuilding a nation based on liberty, the rule of law and free markets. I’m not convinced a majority of American citizens are suicidal however, and as Ted Cruz fights the good fight I expect more and more of them will stop and take notice of his message of (very) limited government. With all due respect to the Smartest Man in America, I believe that’s a message worth fighting for.

A Little Sugar Coating and Bit of Demagogy is a Recipe for National Suicide by Regulation

One of the most odious aspects of regulation is the fact that it usually comes in a sugar coated package. Typically they are the result of a law that is intended to “help” everyone or “protect” some group or to give an advantage to a group whose members are perceived to be disadvantaged.

It’s that sugar coating that makes regulations so difficult to challenge. If you oppose pouring more money into a failed school system you “Don’t care about the children”. If you oppose solar power funding or excessive energy regulation, you “Don’t care about the environment”. If you oppose a minimum wage increase you are a shill for big business and “Don’t care about workers” and if you oppose Obamacare you don’t care about the poor and you’re racist to boot.

Of course once those regulations are in place, once they’re on the books, they almost never come off. Regardless of their ineffectualness in actually solving whatever problem they were theoretically supposed to solve, or despite their actually making the problem worse, the answer is almost never to repeal the law and send the staff out into the world to find jobs in the private sector. Instead the solution is almost invariably more laws or regulations to try and patch over the “minor” problems with the first law or regulations.

The Head Start program is a perfect example of this problem. Started during the heady progressive days of LBJ as part of his “War on Poverty” the program has been a consistent failure, showing no material benefits, yet it still exists. Not only that, its supporters continue to push for increased funding for the program. But it can’t be killed “because of the children”. Of course, that is just one of the thousands of programs costing hundreds of billions of dollars each year that were put in place to stamp out poverty. Yet, somehow, despite the distinctly changing nature of the definition of poverty, there remain more people characterized as living in poverty in the US today than at any point in our history.

Another aspect of this tyranny of regulations is the fact that that sugar coating is usually delivered via a bullhorn. Whether its teachers unions striking for more education spending or the SEIU picketing for the right to organize virtually anyone who still has a job to illegal immigrants demanding amnesty to the Democrats and the media conspiring to convince the country that the GOP wants to throw grandma off a cliff, the facts about the costs and consequences of regulations are rarely ever discussed. It’s hard to carry on a fruitful discussion when one side simply shouts platitudes and refuses examine the actual causes of the problems. If throwing money at education were the solution, the United States would have the smartest kids on the planet… Alas we don’t. If the only choice is between throwing grandma off a cliff and spending more money on a Social Security system that will crumble at some point in the future… everyone will want to save grandma.

There are few issues in life that whose salient points can be easily captured on a picket sign. Of those, none are solved by government legislation or regulation. Much to America’s shame that fact apparently doesn’t matter. “What do we want... (Insert relevant liberal trope here)” “When do we want it... NOW!”

It’s no wonder that virtually everyone in America knows the name of Al Sharpton and Jessie Jackson but few know Jenny Beth Martin or Thomas Sowell. Sharpton and Jackson are snake oil salesmen with no interest in actually solving problems other than how to increase their media exposure while Martin seeks to solve the country’s problems by shrinking a dysfunctional government and Sowell, as the most lucid and articulate economist in America, simply explains the world as it really is and lets the reader choose their path to solving problems.

Finally there is the single most pernicious aspect of this sugar coated world of laws and regulation: Control. More regulations provide politicians and government bureaucrats with ever more opportunities to persecute those they don’t like and benefit those they do. Not sure about that? Just ask the conservative groups who were targeted by the IRS. How about Gibson Guitars or the insurance companies who criticized Obamacare in 2010. On the other side of the ledger are the green energy companies who’ve just been given carte blanche kill Golden Eagles, illegal immigrants the President has decided not to deport or “community organizing” groups the Justice Department is forcing banks to fund. Not to mention the various unconstitutional delays and waivers President Obama has handed out relating to Obamacare. And those are just federal laws, of which there are tens of thousands. There are hundreds of thousands more at the state and local level. When laws can be implemented arbitrarily the rule of law is gone.

Obamacare is the perfect example of legislation which was sold with sugar coating and whose opponents were pilloried as racists or who didn’t care about the poor. Today, simply because Obamacare was so overarching and so spectacularly dysfunctional, Americans are beginning to see that more laws can’t make everything better. Indeed some are even starting to understand that government action can and often does make things worse. The problem is however that most legislation is not of the supernova sort, but of the rather pedestrian sort that is passed and simply blends into the disordered order of the universe of regulations we’re expected to obey. Eventually the stars of regulation will become too numerous and will block out the dark matter in between them, i.e. the freedom upon which America was founded. At that point we will become a nation where every move, every step, every thought are regulated by the state. We are not quite there, but we’ve seen the future and it is North Korea. When we finally get there we’ll wonder what how we got there because all of the “solutions” we were swallowing tasted so sweet.