RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://victorhanson.com/when-and-how-did-we-get-here-gradually-then-suddenly-part-one/

Presidents—Bush, Obama, Trump, Biden—have either been doubling the national debt in their four- or eight-year tenures or added several trillion to it. We all know that adding a trillion dollars in debt to what we collectively owe every 100 days is unsustainable. But then again, we all know that to stop the borrowing, much less to concede the need to run surpluses, would earn a president the smears of “racist,” “uncaring,” and “cruel,” if not run the risk of a recession or worse.

So our presidents, in the manner individual Americans handle credit card debt, embrace Louis XV’s much-quoted observation “Après moi, le déluge”—“after me, the flood.” Put in modern Americanese, it means enjoying the unsustainable while you can because the next generations will pay heavily for what we incurred. Presidents prime the economy by printing trillions of dollars in funny money, hoping, as in the game of musical chairs, that the money music won’t abruptly stop on their watch, leaving them without a seat.

It is astonishing how our major downtowns so quickly, so easily transmogrified into near wastelands. Drive into downtown Los Angeles in 2019 and it was a crowded bustling city, with a rebooted downtown. Ditto San Francisco, Seattle, and Portland. Drive into them just five years later and they are dangerous and toxic moonscapes. Had we shown a photo of a 2024 San Francisco Walgreens to someone in 2019, he would have thought it a caged prison infirmary.

So what or who tore off the thin Thucydidean veneer of civilization so quickly?

https://thespectator.com/topic/thirty-two-hour-work-week-bernie-sanders-bad-ideas/

Bernie Sanders is the bottomless cup of bad ideas. He keeps refilling it. Take his latest venti, a law that says everybody gets to work thirty-two hours for forty hours pay. That’s a magical 25 percent pay increase. His next trick is to pull free steak dinners out of a hat.

What do you think would actually happen if such Bernie’s law were passed, enforced and found constitutional? (None of those would actually happen, of course.) The immediate effects would be another 25 percent price increase for labor-intensive products, a huge burden on low-income consumers and an additional incentive to replace more expensive workers with machines and computers.

The substitution of capital for labor is an on-going process, but Bernie would supercharge the effort and create incentives for innovators to come up with products, machines and computer programs that performed those tasks at lower costs. The more expensive the tasks, the greater incentive to figure out ways to save money on them.

Bernie’s Magic Pay Raise would create a major incentive to hire people off-the-books (for the true market price) or to have them work extra hours that way. It would create new incentives for employers to hire workers as individual subcontractors, rather than wage workers. And, of course, it would lead to tens of thousands of court cases where employees were sued for violating the new wage rules. Since the wages would be above market rates (otherwise there would be no need for a mandate), the yearly increases would lag inflation so that real wages would gradually return to market rates.

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2024/03/west_point_announces_change_to_mission_statement_schools_official_duty_honor_country_motto_has_been_eliminated.html

On Sunday, the Armed Forces Press reported that West Point brass had made a recent decision to “update” the academy’s Mission Statement, which until that point, read as such:

To educate, train, and inspire the Corps of Cadets so that each graduate is a commissioned leader of character committed to the values of Duty, Honor, Country and prepared for a career of professional excellence and service to the Nation as an officer in the United States Army.

With the approved revisions, West Point’s official mission now reads:

To build, educate, train, and inspire the Corp of Cadets to be commissioned leaders of character committed to the Army Values and ready for a lifetime of service to the Army and Nation.

As you can see, the sacred and “hallowed” words, recognized as the official motto of the school since before even Douglas MacArthur graduated in 1903, have been jettisoned—into the Memory Hole “Duty Honor Country” goes!

John A. Lucas is a former special operations military member with more than 45 years experience as an attorney who now runs the Bravo Blue blog; and yesterday, Lucas reported that an officer to whom he spoke “emphasized that the change was the result of a regular review … to see if any changes were needed to ‘modernize’ the statement.”

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2024/03/our_fake_fake_fake_world.html

Will our historical era be remembered as the “Age of Fakes”?  We have fake news, fake meat, fake elections, fake genders, fake vaccines, fake budgets, fake democracy, fake truths, fake hate, fake Russian collusion, fake insurrections, fake climate emergencies, fake freedoms, fake outrage, fake speech crimes, fake money, fake justice, fake intellects, fake women, fake borders, fake wars, and even a fake president.  In some ways, it is a very silly time to be alive.  

So much of our fake world has been built on two monstrously fake foundations: fake progress and fake liberalism.  Presidents Theodore Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson redefined progress as something that only Big Government can provide.  Instead of celebrating human innovation, artistic achievement, work ethic, and private entrepreneurship as the essential ingredients for any prosperous future, progressivism insists that nothing of value can be achieved without a strong centralized government and a bloated administrative Deep State.  President Franklin Delano Roosevelt then picked up the Big Government cudgel by redefining liberalism as a collection of freedoms that only government can provide.  Instead of recognizing human liberty as diametrically opposed to coercive State power, FDR’s “New Deal” style of liberalism insists that only new laws, new social programs, new regulatory agencies, and newly discovered rights can ever make people free.  In the last century of perverse word games, progressivism and liberalism promised progress and liberty and instead burdened Americans with the heavy weight of the government’s chains.  

America’s commitment to individual liberty, private property, and free speech once distinguished it from all other countries in the world.  When it began betraying those commitments and exporting a brand of “rules-based international order” scarcely different from those devised under monarchical empires of the past, it became a global ambassador for fake freedom.  And in a world where freedom is fake everywhere, happiness appears to be fake, too.