Modern Barbary Pirates - How Government Dragoons The People

'Government is not the solution', said Ronald Reagan, 'it is the problem', thus ushering in an era of privatization and reducing the size and influence of government.  Of course neither he nor any other president was able to do so, and the bureaucracy - despite the considered efforts of Donald Trump and Elon Musk - is still the behemoth it always has been. 

 

The Founding Fathers never envisaged the new republic so.  Government was to be facilitator, caretaker, and defender.  It was the enterprise, ambition, and hard work of the individual which would enable his family, his community, and his country to prosper. 

'Rugged individualism' was the meme and ethos of the day.  It was through this determination, this sense of individual enterprise that Westward expansion was enabled, and the dream of Manifest Destiny, an America from coast to coast, was realized. 

It was private enterprise that built railroads, ports, and roads, that built towns and their granaries, banks, saloons, and stores.  Government was there to facilitate this enterprise, to survey and plat the land.  Land ownership was capital on which money could be borrowed, and fair and just settlement of disputes over property rights was the responsibility of the courts. 

Government was small, supportive, and useful; but over time this narrowly conceived role expanded to its present size, and government today is present, like never before, in the affairs of its private citizens.  It is a multi-trillion dollar business, taking money from individuals and with arrogated authority, spending it willy-nilly in their interest and legislating to itself vast, uninhibited powers and the freedom to upsent ordinary lives. 

The Constitution envisioned only one role for government - the defense of the homeland - but allowed a certain measure of jurisprudence.  The framers of the Constitution agreed on the principle of private enterprise to be aided, facilitated, and encouraged by a minimalist government. 

According to the Left, the Democrat Party and especially its progressive wing had been responsible for legislative actions on climate change, gender equality, redistribution of wealth, and a policy of 'pursuant peace', and legislators in Congress had long been advocates for a strong, interventionist public sector. 

How could radical social reform be effected without the presence of federal authority and the allocation of funds from the treasury?  It was the arrogance, manipulation, and total dereliction of moral responsibility of the private sector which held back the country's utopian promise; and only if this maleficent sector could be flayed, neutered, and disassembled, could the nation truly and equitably prosper. 

Social activists had no qualms about the size of the federal budget and the increased taxes that made necessary spending possible.  It was the duty of every man and woman to contribute his or her fair share to the reformist, universalist, and profoundly moral purposes of government; and the role of government to help the poor, the disadvantaged, and the marginalized with such honestly generated revenues. 

Now, not everyone was happy with this turn of the screw, the complete abandonment of the originalist principles of Hamilton and Franklin, and growing, seemingly unstoppable power and influence of government.  There were those like Harlan Putnam, descendant of the colonial Putnams members of the Massachusetts Bay Colony, in the evangelizing mission of John Davenport, and later scions of shipbuilding and the transatlantic trade. 

Putnams had made inestimable wealth from these enterprises, and went on to found more than one Wall Street investment bank. The Putnams were confidants, supporters, and advisers to the great industrialists of the early Twentieth Century - Rockefeller, Carnegie, Vanderbilt, and J.P. Morgan.  The not only provided valuable financial and economic counsel, but were the heart and soul of private enterprise.  Harlan's ancestor, Isaiah Putnam had warned Rockefeller and his associates of 'the restive lion in his lair', the sleeping giant of government, and now Harlan saw how right his forbear was. 

'Dragooned', he said speaking of the American taxpayer who was at the mercy of predatory, manipulative, seditious legislators and their progressive shills, and who gave up thousands to the beast in Washington with little say. 

Yes, of course they had some say in principle - their votes counted - but the entire system was rigged against them.  Government was the only American institution without accountability.  Billions could be poured down the sluice of the Treasury with nary a nod to performance.  Progressive governance was one based on utopian optimism and neo-socialist promise. No private enterprise would ever get away with such financial irresponsibility. 

The private sector elite of the country - the new Rockefellers and Carnegies, Bezos, Huang, Musk, Brin, and Zuckerberg - do their best to keep the beast at bay, but viral progressivism still epidemic despite the decommission of Joe Biden and the election of Donald Trump, maintains its pressure.  The private sector, made up of greedy, oppressive, arrogant capitalists cannot be trusted, progressives insist.  Their inventions, discoveries, and innovations only benefit the rich, and if they are allowed to exist their predatory, acquisitive nature must be held in check.

It is not just the Harlan Putnams who are exercised over the unwanted jamboree of public spending, but the American working class who unwillingly fuel with their hard-earned money the follies of big government.  Seeing paychecks winnowed away by government taxation with nothing to show for it, these Americans are as exercised as the wealthy Putnams.  They are taxed at tax time, every time they buy a burger or shop at Walmart, every time they fill up the tank, for every move they make; and the rates keep rising. 

'For the public good', insist progressives who have bigger things in mind than the unpatriotic worries of those who, despite their favored status as members of the marginalized, protected class, are dismissed as irrelevant to national priorities.  These people cannot see the big picture, so focused are they on insignificant concerns. 

'Barbary Pirates', said Harlan to a group of investors considering an infusion of cash in a promising new private enterprise but hesitating while Congress debated new, punitive legislation designed to limit such private investment in favor of increased, 'morally dispensed' public expenditure. 

The Barbary pirates were privateers who operated from the North African 'Barbary (Berber) Coast', modern day Morocco, Algeria, Tunisia, and Libya, from the 16th fo the 19th centuries. They captured European and American merchant vessels in the Mediterranean Sea and the Atlantic Ocean to steal cargo. They enslaved an estimated 800,000 to 1.25 million Europeans over three centuries or held them for expensive ransoms. They raided coastal towns and villages across Europe—not just in the Mediterranean, but as far north as Great Britain, Ireland, and Iceland.

'The Somalis are petty thieves compared to them', said Harlan, quite impressed.  'Imagine! over three centuries of uninhibited piracy'; and that was exactly the point, he went on, citing the American history of tax piracy. 

Hayreddin Barbarossa was the most famous of all Barbary corsairs. He and his brother captured Algiers for the Ottoman Empire, and Hayreddin later became the Grand Admiral of the Ottoman fleet after major naval victories.  'There was no one like him before or since...unless you look on our shores'. 

Harlan's colleagues laughed at the simile - Harlan knew his history - but to him it was no laughing matter.  Federal taxation was piracy, no bones about it. 'Taking money from someone who earned it and giving it to someone who didn't'.  A corruption of moral justice. 

There were those who lived off the grid, deep in the woods of Humboldt County or the Idaho panhandle.  No Social Security card, no drivers' license, existing without a trace, living off the land and their wits, originalist Americans, but too fringy, deliberately disenfranchised, and wayward to make a difference, but at least they stood on principle. 

Harlan's hero was White Wolf, a Comanche chief who raped, disemboweled, hanged from trees, and burned men, women, and children in defiance of white intruders to Comanche land and a bloody lesson to them.  He was a true American - proud, native, defiant, and indomitable, a symbol of honor, strength, and courage. 

'I'm sure he paid no taxes', Harlan said to his colleagues, and so ended a toast to him. 

The Political Saga Of Fanny Farmer - How Victimhood Became Drollery, Alexander Hamilton, And The Unwashed

'I am so sick and tired of these Podunks', Fanny said to Claude, her partner for the night and fellow activist in town for a meeting of Scientists for Social Justice, the progressive lobby group to which they both belonged. 

Claude was not her love nor anything close, but she was old enough to remember the 'love the one you're with' posters on her mother's bedroom wall, and having inherited enough of her Sixties love thing to be unconcerned about incidental affairs, she rolled over.  Besides, Claude was a good worker, a good colleague, and a good traveling companion.  They had gone to Cleveland together to protest ICE storm troopers; to Lewisburg for a No Kings rally; and to Atlanta for an abortion rights demonstration. 

'I'm too old for all this travel'.  It was not time to hang 'em up, but ready for a more suitable desk job in Washington.  'I know that sounds bad', she said to Claude, taking the bogarted joint from him, kicking him to attention, 'but I haven't enough steam'. 

'There are no desk jobs in our business', said Claude.  'Its barricades or nothing'. 

What about Bob, she said, referring to Robert Muzelle, Managing Director of the organization, as happy and satisfied as could be, resting on his laurels, sit-ins, freedom rides, Bull Connor and the Pettus Bridge 'with Ralph and Martin', fat windbag, full of himself, never once getting out of his chair except for a a tribute to himself, an honorary title for his meritorious and tireless commitment to progressivism.  'He has a desk job'. 

'I'm getting on in years', Fanny said.  True enough but certainly not over the hill.  Just enough years to give her second thoughts.  Not whether it all had been worth it - activism was what had always counted - but was that all there was?  Was there no Act II?

It was the ten-dollar bill that did it, or at least that was the epiphanic moment of truth.  Alexander Hamilton, reviled patrician lord of the Old White Guy Constitutionalists who argued with Thomas Jefferson about the fickleness and cow shed ignorance of the majority, and insisted on an intermediary legislative body to protect the commonwealth from the tribalism and venal interests of the mob, suddenly made sense. 

All communities divide themselves into the few and the many. The first are the rich and well born; the other the mass of the people. The voice of the people has been said to be the voice of God; and however generally this maxim has been quoted and believed, it is not true in fact. The people are turbulent and changing; they seldom judge or determine right. Give therefore to the first class a distinct, permanent share in government. They will check the unsteadiness of the second.

God forbid such a conversion, she said, blessing herself, making the sign of the cross, a reflexive gesture learned as a child and never gotten rid of despite her adopted secularism and radical progressivism.  Even granting Hamilton the benefit of the doubt - Shakespeare was neither the first nor the last to pillory the mob for its gullibility and capriciousness - was apostasy, a heretical venture away from the moral plumb line of her political faith. 

Yet, there he was - a handsome, chisel-jawed man of wealth, status, and influence expressing his anti-democratic sentiments to proto-liberal Jefferson, the man who understood not only the tenets of democracy but its ethos, its moral center, and its enduring legacy, and winning the argument. 

Fanny had spent months in fetid homeless shelters, on squirrely food lines, in nasty public housing gulags, beside in clinics with new transgender women, at the barricades with fierce lesbians, and it was beginning to show.  These were not America's best  and brightest, the Musks, Brins, Huangs, Bezos, and Zuckerbergs, at the top of the phylogenetic pyramid, a genius cluster never before seen, but on the lowest rung. 

And the masses she and her fellow activists were promoting so aggressively?  The foul, crime-ridden, endemically dysfunctional 'inner city'?  Pimps, ho's, Fentanyl dopers, crack-smoking losers? What was she thinking?

Again she blessed herself and again said, 'God forbid'; and yet these niggling, insidious, traitorous thoughts kept piling on, all because of one, fleeting, desultory, accidental glance at the ten dollar bill and the engraving of Alexander Hamilton. 

'Who's going to Anacostia tomorrow?', asked one of the assembled group.  Fanny groaned at the thought.  Another trip across the river in a caravan of three armored Chevrolet Suburbans bought second hand at a Defense Department auction, to meet with 'the community', local women demanding reparations for the city's indifference to the squalor and violence of the streets.  Anacostia, Brentwood, and any number of other communities in the blighted black wards of the city had done nothing but accept walkin' around money, entitlements, and a free pass and sit in their sinkholes waiting for more. 

Now, Fanny would never have thought that way before her epiphany - that startling revelation produced by one incidental look at the first Secretary of the Treasury. Before that, she would have gone across the river willingly and happily to join with the community in condemning racism and white privilege, marching with them to demand equal rights and justice.  Pharoah Jones, the self-anointed King of Anacostia, would have been her hero, the Black Odysseus of the ghetto; but now he was little more than a caricature, all fitted out with bling, grilled teeth, ermine coat, and snakeskin boots. 

Was all of this hatred, meanness, and vile assumptions always there, brewing and festering inside her, tamped down by her own idealism, her sunken costs, her Skinner-esque behavioral training?  Had she been a hypocrite all along?  Or like all epiphanies, did the truth simply sing out and she heard its chords?

'The latter, I hope', she said to herself as she demurred, claiming a conflict.  Anacostia would have to wait. 

Hamilton, as Secretary of the Treasury would never have agreed to or even considered such entitlement cash poured out in unaccountable sums on the basis of victimhood alone - a financial travesty, a consummate waste of valuable taxpayer monies, money that could be used to facilitate individual opportunity, create the infrastructure for wealth creation, and pave the way for private enterprise. 

Her advocacy group Scientists for Social Responsibility shamelessly took money from donors and earmarked federal funds and gave it away without a second thought given to accountability, performance, or positive outcomes. A virtual open sluice gate of dollars which would never be seen again in cash or in kind, misused, diverted, lost. 

When her masters shouted 'redistribution of wealth...Occupy Wall Street...from the haves to the have nots...to each according to his needs...' she had always raised her arms in solidarity.  The American economy was built on the backs of the poor and only the one percent benefited.  Now, thanks to that Augenblick of Alexander Hamilton on the ten dollar bill she had been about to use for a tuna sandwich and a diet Coke, she could only shake her head at her mindless credulousness.  How could she have?

An apocryphal tale, baldly untrue, said those in her former camaraderie who couldn't believe that a social justice warrior of Fanny's reputation, credential, and red badges of courage could be such a turncoat, a traitor.  But they were the blindered ones who had never had Fanny's revitalizing vision.  They were the ones still stuck in the mud, floundering but thinking it was only exuberance.  

Fanny had made her bones and her public image as a progressive, a liberal activist, and a professional harbinger.  Now that she was out of that particularly limelight, it was hard for the camera to pick her up.  By now in any case she is probably retired someplace warm with both her early life and her conservative reincarnation long recessed.  When sitting on a balcony in South Beach overlooking the Atlantic on a bright January day, nothing really matters anyway.   

Bodybuilders, Tarts, And Walkin' Around Money - Beating Trump At His Own Game

Arnold Schwarzenegger started off his career as a bodybuilder, then Hollywood actor, then two-time Governor of California.  There was something virile and queer about the idea of a Venice Beach muscle man that appealed to liberal Democrats.  Two-in-one, they said when thinking of the future, consolidate the gay contingent and appeal to young straight men. 

 

So they tapped Marcelo Fenn, one of the regulars on the beach for a starring role in a campaign ad aimed at consolidating a Democratic majority in the House.  No bodybuilder on Venice beach was straight, and anyone passing by would know at a glance. Queer as can be, all bulging glistening muscles, tight little bikini, and cute spotters.  The word 'muscle' comes from the Latin for 'mouse', for the Ancient Romans thought that a he-man's twitching biceps looked like a wriggling mouse.  How gay!

In any case Marcelo claimed he was straight but that was for commercial purposes, for he had the former California governor in mind as he did his sets on the beach.  Yes, being that kind of buff was an insular thing, a gay thing, not like in the old days when kids looked at Conan the Barbarian and Hercules in New York as just great action flicks.  No, Venice beach was one thing and one thing only, so if Marcelo was to pursue his political ambitions, he would have to lose the thong and the Coppertone and dress the part. 

To keep bread on the table, he continued his job as Master Trainer at Pietro's Gym in Redondo, but worked his way up the political ladder, first as a willing and tireless volunteer for Alderman Harlan Oates, then mayoral candidate, Bettina Robes, then for Patterson Ilk, aspiring Congressman from California's Thirty-Third district.  Finally, noticed by Harlan Adams, the Democratic party's outreach managers to the gay community charged with assembling an 'alternative' campaign nucleus, Marcelo was tapped to be an important Democratic operative, a 'swing' campaigner, reaching out to both sides of the gender aisle. 

The second most important and unlikely member of the newly-formed outreach team, was Wanda Fobbs, an octoroon pole dancer from Louisiana who was famous for her provocative, tarty, low-brow routines that had great appeal among the white dock workers at the Port of New Orleans.  Her sultry looks, her sinuous, raw sexuality, and almost irresistible appeal, made her one of the Quarter's biggest attractions. 

Wanda (nee Betty Barnes) was, like Marcelo, ambitious.  Turning pole dancing into higher office was not a routine affair, but someone with her brains, seductive charm, and easy companionship were made for politics, and, again like Marcelo, decided to make her way in the electoral arena.  First ward heeler, then alderman's aide, then mayoral campaign liaison to the North Ward, and finally in the train of her Congressman running for re-election, she was realizing her dream.

The reason for the success of both Marcelo and Wanda was not their sharp political insights or their agile intelligence, but their low-end personas.  They were at home in the seediest, tackiest, most disreputable places.  Venice Beach was a tourist attraction exactly because of its sideshow appeal.  These beefy queer guys in thongs and barbells were not real, they were Barnum & Bailey inventions, tarted up and tricked out for paying customers; but no one could doubt their presence.  It was hard not to look at these grotesque creatures, tiny heads on swollen, impossibly muscled bodies; and they knew it. Marcelo was a crowd pleaser par excellence. 

The clubs were Wanda appeared had the same appeal.  Wanda couldn't possibly be real, slithering up and down the pole, pussy hard by, eyes closed in ecstasy.  She had to be an invention, but what a creation! It was this innate sense of crowd appeal which lent her imagination to politics, and she was as right as rain.  

Harlan Adams knew right off that Wanda was exactly the right person to appeal to dockers, longshoremen, long-haul truckers, pipe fitters, mechanics, and crane operators.  The working class, the unvarnished, unpretentious, down the line rutters and solid Democrats who, under the DEI, race-gender-ethnicity progressive things, began to doubt their allegiance 

The final member of the select Democrat campaign team was Pharoah Jones, otherwise known as The King of Anacostia, Washington, DC's most blighted, crime-ridden, drug-addled inner city neighborhood.  Jones was a pimp, a drug dealer, a numbers runner, and a fixer.  He was smart, able, opportunistic, and without an iota of moral compunction.  He was up for anything. 

As such he attracted the attention of DC politicians who needed an operative in Ward 8, someone who could spread the generous walkin' around money they had in their personal treasuries.  Jones could buy votes like nobody's business.  He exacted promises for a generous 'emolument' but was there as an enforcer if the returns were not commensurate with his payouts. 

The black inner city community was infamous for its indifference to the vote.  Residents were happy enough to live and let live, or better put, their off-the-grid livelihoods were more than enough.  Dismissed by the white people of Ward 3, Upper Northwest's patrician elite who wished that everything in  Washington east of the Anacostia River would suddenly hive off and drift out to sea, black men could do without them, forge their own destiny. 

It was not surprising, then, that Pharoah Jones came to the attention of Harlan Adams.  He was exactly the man he was looking for - a smart, street savvy, opportunistic, ambitious black man who could work wonders with the inner city for the Democrat party. 

Now, there were many important Democrat constituencies that Harlan needed to serve, the lesbian and transgender communities to name just two; but with Marcelo, Wanda, and Pharoah he felt he had the hard core around which a truly diverse, influential team could be built. 

This would show that homophobic, racist bigot Trump! and beat him at his own game.  He was one for identity politics - what with his white, blonde air-heads, his yachts, mansions, Mar-a-Lago, golf courses and ditzy, bourgeois ballrooms and arches.  He played gutter politics and made it seem like high-class noblesse oblige.  

In contrast to Harlan's engagement of prime Democrat constituencies with respect, Trump pandered, threw red meat to his MAGA wingnuts, and made it all look like passionate leadership. Two could play that game, but Harlan's was honorable. 

It wasn't long before the triad of Marcelo, Wanda, and Pharoah began to bicker.  That's what happens when you get newly entitled bitches together, said Harlan; but he had a hard time separating them, and election time was coming up.  He needed them out their hustling, not sitting here on Capitol Hill in a cat fight. 

It didn't work of course - the diversity cabal, that is.  The Trump legions were everywhere and routing Democrat candidates who still hung on to transgender surgery, up-to-the-last-minute abortion, jungle tom-toms everywhere, the primacy of the undocumented, and all the rest. 

Harlan was undaunted.  'I did my best'.  It was just that he underestimated the feistiness of the diverse and the food fights that they seemed always to have.  

'Better luck next time', said one of Trump's advance men who was a collegial adversary of Harlan who was already planning an even more aggressive outreach into Maine of all places.