Essays in Idleness

Dear Mister Trump. After a couple of months of him in office, I have come to the conclusion that while he is reckless with his “facts and arguments,” hair-trigger in his responses, given to hyperbole at the expense of other rhetorical figures, and proud almost to a fault, he is basically honest. Even naïve. He is not the sort to commit criminal acts knowingly. He is verily a bull in the Washington China shop, if not a mastadon, and a simpleton (compared to Reagan, for example) in his understanding of how the world ticks — an authentic populist. But his schemes for “fixing things” is so innocent in juxtaposition with the policies of his predecessor and rivals, it would be nice if the congressional vermin could find it in their hearts to half play along.

“Please, Mister Trump, do yourself a big favour and don’t tweet that before you’ve shown it to one of those high-class lawyers,” is a thought I have perhaps shared, with many. Mister Obama, whose advice came invariably with scorpion whips, said the presidency is not a “family business.” Nonsense. Rulers are in great need of family advisers, to spread their tentacles wider, and provide the kind of criticism whose loyalty they might trust. Trump’s daughter, Ivanka, seems to have her head screwed on symmetrically, and now has an office in the West Wing. She is a steadying influence on the old boy, and let me humbly suggest he put her in charge of his Twitter account. Not to edit, of course, except for grammar and spelling; just to selectively delete. If she is selling her cosmetic line while she is at it, I have no objection. Everyone in politics seems to come out rich, and this is among the least craven methods for amassing a White House fortune.

The Obamacare fiasco in the House of Representatives, now come to a head, is a reminder that the “administrative state” cannot be peacefully dismantled. The plan was set up, as all progressive measures, to be unrescindable. It did not merely create a vast new class with vested interests; it tipped the scale on medical expenditure (soon one-fifth of the USA economy, thanks to demographics and bureaucratic regulation) from personal to public responsibility. Government is now answerable for anyone uncovered by health insurance, and may use this to routinely demand totalitarian controls. You can’t take Obamacare down (or anything resembling) without replacing it with a more egregious system, or rather, you can’t take it down without tanks.

This is a “problem” with the entire Nanny State. Given 20 trillion of acknowledged federal debt (a small fraction of unfunded liabilities), common sense would indicate the need for economies. But they can’t be made. The federal budget, in USA as in all Western countries, is so dominated by the constantly inflating cost of “entitlements,” and those are so impossible to brake, that cuts must be made to services only governments can provide. There is no “democratic,” and certainly no quiet way out of this rat hole, which the cat of a corrupt jurisprudence now jealously guards.

Americans, as all other denizens of our decaying Western Civ, have become abjectly dependent upon Nanny, spiritually as well as materially, to our ultimate destruction. Individual self-seeking continues, however, and the common effort to game the system accounts for the insupportable debt.

The best excuse I have heard for the president, from Republicans and his international well-wishers, is that it takes a honey badger like Trump to grit in. I agree that vulgarity is often required. But from the outset, the gentleman announced he wasn’t going to mess with the welfare order, that he was just going to make it more businesslike and efficient. (“Businesslike” confers no political advantages.) In other words, from the outset he was totally defeated; and would never have been elected, had he been a genuine radical.

Ditto, for the “nationalist” parties in Europe.