The End Of Government As We Know It - From Shutdown To Reduction To Closure - Originalism And Welcome Laissez-Faire

Ronald Reagan famously said, 'Government is not the solution, it's the problem', and in one short, pithy sentence began the reversal of the FDR-era monolith.  It was FDR who open the sluice gates of the treasury to fund massive infrastructure and public works programs and to put people displaced by the Depression back to work.  Regardless of the outcome - economists are divided on the need and utility of such significant public spending - FDR created the bureaucracy, initiated the legislation, and set in motion the new American dynamic - aggressive progressivism. 

 

In the past progressivism was limited to specific causes.  Reformers like Debs, Lafollette, Gompers, and Brandeis focused on industrial inequalities and the need to right the balance between capital and labor.  The working man was front and center of the new collectivism - unions, collective bargaining, and the innate value of work was the triumvirate or the new generation.  

The right to work under favorable if not congenial conditions, and the equal right to air grievances without retribution were based on the idea of the dignity of labor.  There was something noble about the working man and something ignoble about the stock broker, the investment banker, and the real estate mogul. 

Since government was seen as the arbiter of that new value, the enforcer of new rules and regulations to assure a fair shake for the working man, and the stalwart defender of a communal, harmonious society in which no capitalist would absolutely rule, it is not a surprise that it grew apace.  If government could have a say in labor relations, then why not in every other aspect of American life.  Just as the worker needed protection from predatory, exploitive capitalism, so did American's wellbeing.  Health, welfare, education, and social services came quickly under government authority. 

LBJ accelerated the course of aggressive progressivism when he inaugurated his Great Society, a grandiose government program to end poverty.  Under his watch the poor, the marginalized, and the forgotten would be cared for, helped, and brought under the big tent of prosperity.  Billions of dollars poured out of the treasury to fund every social program imaginable.  It was a heady time, and few questioned the nature or efficacy of the spending.  Helping the poor, especially the black man, was an undeniable, absolute good, so any investment was a good investment. 

Of course this was just whistlin' Dixie, the first of the pie-in-the-sky idealistic assumptions about the role of government in assuring a just and equitable society.  The private sector was derogated by liberals.  Its profit motive was antithetical to commiseration and compassion, they said, and it must never stand in the way of the higher authority of the people, embodied in the state.  Yes, government would take private taxpayer monies to fund the generous programs for the poor, but this was part of the contract, each according his need and each according to his ability to meet it. 

The public sector grew and grew despite the warnings of conservatives who did their best to limit the growth of government and return as much power as possible to the private sector; but the great bureaucratic monolith had reached such as size that it was virtually impossible to trim, reduce, or eliminate.  It had a life of its own.  

Not only was big government the Controller of the Dole - responsible for implementing the huge programs of social welfare and infrastructure - it became the arbiter of the public interest, and slews of restrictive regulations were set in place to assure that the received wisdom on health, education, welfare, and public safety was applied universally and without question, 

Now the bureaucracy was truly a frightening thing, a monstrous organism with limitless power and authority.  True, programs were initiated by the President and the Congress, but it was the responsibility of the bureaucracy to implement them; and they did so at will and subject to their own initiative and political disposition. 

Government - the Congress and its handmaiden, the vast Washington bureaucracy - had become a great, ugly bolus of presumption and arrogant righteousness. 

Enter Donald Trump who understood this better than any president before him.  He saw that not only had government in all its forms become an oppressive, invasive monster; but that it threatened the very ethos of America - individualism, private enterprise, and personal responsibility.  Reducing the size, scope, and importance of government would not only be a money-saver, returning billions of dollars of taxpayer monies to their rightful owners, but would reset the moral compass of the nation. 

The man was serious, and within a few months of taking office he and his associate, the billionaire Elon Musk began to bulldoze the bureaucracy, cleanse the Augean stables of Washington, close the doors of the most inefficient, irresponsible, and unnecessary agencies. Even DOGE (Department of Government Efficiency) was surprised at what they found.  Program after program had been devised and implemented under the flimsiest of Congressional authority and never evaluated.  Millions of dollars wasted on schemes based on nothing more than political philosophy and idealism.

One after another hallowed government departments standing since the days of FDR, came under scrutiny.  The simple question, 'What are you doing, why, with what expected result and what observable outcome?' was asked for the first time; and there were few acceptable answers. 

Is a Department of Education really needed in one of the world's most decentralized educational systems?  Was a Department of Energy required in one of the world's most competitive markets?  Why was there a Department of Health when American health care is the most privatized in the world?

The Administration has taken a Libertarian approach.  'We are not against government per se.  You need to simply demonstrate objectively that it can perform stated tasks better and more efficiently than the private sector'; but of course Trump and Musk knew that the vast, tangled, ingrown, venal, and self-interested bureaucracies could never demonstrate that, and so they were scheduled for demolition. 

Now comes government shutdown - the periodic result of Republicans and Democrats unable to agree on key budget-related legislation.  In this case the Democrats have insisted that illegal aliens be afforded government health care, Medicaid, when Republicans have said that this goes counter to its core principles of restricting any and all public benefits to American citizens. 

Trump, true to form and as eager to reduce the size and influence of government by any means, has said that a government shutdown is a good thing, for it will enable him to get rid of thousands of needless and unnecessary jobs.  The Democrats are doing his job for him, and so be it. 

The Constitution prescribes only the military defense of the nation as a government responsibility; and only through political assumption and arrogation of authority has the ambit expanded to include the range of interventions up till now taken for granted.  Donald Trump, in keeping with his originalist political philosophy intends to return the country to the vision of the Founding Fathers.  The howls and cries from the Left are no more than that of children whose toys have taken away.  Their demand for a universal, pervasive, ineradicable public sector presence is folly. 

The Left is a disassembled, fractured, desperate lot.  Badly defeated by a foe they have labeled as Satanic, sent scurrying as the new President has made good on each and every one of his promises, and befuddled with his determination to destroy their arrogated center of power - the federal government - they can only turn to hysterical, predictable rants of 'tyranny...insurrection...autocracy'.  Their day and the day of big government are over. 

So, yes, there will be confusion at the airport as TSA officials have been kept home, leaf-peeping in the national parks and forests put on hold, and junk mail kept in post offices for a while; but all necessary to confirm the administration's absolute commitment to a reversal of policy, programs, and political ethos. 

Brothels, Streetwalkers, And Cathouses - Bring The Free Market Back To The World's Oldest Profession

Of course there are hookers in Washington.  Just take the short trip over the Anacostia River to Southeast.

In fact SE 32nd Street and MLK avenue is an open market jamboree where crack, Fentanyl, heroin, guns, and women vie for space.  Cars from Capitol Hill, Prince George's County, and Virginia crowd the avenue.  It's Saturday afternoon, always a brisk time for business. 

Prostitution, along with drugs and firearms, is illegal in DC, but the ghetto has always been given a bye, part of the consideration given to street culture by the municipality and its white liberal supporters.  The black man has suffered the indignity of enslavement, Jim Crow, and segregation for three hundred years, so it is only conscionable and right to let his culture thrive and flourish.

Prostitution of course is not unknown in official Washington.  Madame Duplessis' establishment has served the needs of Senators, Congressmen, and governors for years.  Although there have been the usual and predictable clean sweeps - feminists decried the modern enslavement of women; neo-Puritans with Bibles open to Leviticus 9:22-24 shouted down the perfidy of men; and labor organizers who recognized prostitution as a legitimate enterprise but one in need of institutional protection - the house of Madame Duplessis was always given a pass.

Governor Eliot Spitzer of New York, caught in flagrante delicto in the McKinley Suite of the Mayflower Hotel in Washington, claimed he was too busy to chase women.  He was quickly run out of office, but he insisted he had done nothing wrong. Yes, he had committed an infraction of an outdated blue law, but such establishments such as that of Madame Duplessis who had furnished the goods, did a civic service.  Men who might otherwise be courting other women and abandoning their wives, saved them grief and aggravation. 

When Dominique Strauss-Kahn, former candidate for the French presidency and a known Lothario was caught with a harem of paid women in a luxurious apartment on the Champs Elysees, he said, 'How was I to know they were prostitutes?  Women all look the same without their clothes’ and with that took the lid off of the little sexual opprobrium left in Paris. 

 

He was right, after all, so why should any man be convicted of such innocent behavior?  Of course the Rue St. Denis in Paris, not far from the Centre Pompidou, was well-known for its streetwalkers who solicited sexual partners in front of cafes, boulangeries, boucheries, and charcuteries.  

These were the classic Paris icons, Irma La Douce, all tarted up in short skirts, high heels, and face paint unbothered by the police or municipal authorities because sex was a national treasure, a tourist attraction, and an international export. 

Prostitution is the world's oldest profession, and it is easy to see why.  Women have long been aware of the economic value of their sex and have been more than willing to trade it for favors, bonbons, and minks.  Men have always been indiscriminate in their sexual desire, any port in a storm, so on an evening off and after a few cafe-Cognacs why not drop by St Denis?

Shakespeare made bawds, pimps, and whores a feature in his Henry IV plays - Falstaff was a regular, a man of hearty appetites, fitting for the likes of Mistress Quickly and her Boar's Head tavern women.  

Pericles' daughter Marina gets sold into prostitution but thanks to her innocence, purity, and godliness she never has to consent and in fact converts johns to righteousness. 

The American West was not without its saloons and whore houses, and it was part of trail riding to come in from herding cattle and go upstairs with a young tart.  The women did not feel oppressed or put upon by randy, abusive men. Tricking was just a profession, a lucrative one, and a way out of the cow towns of the prairie.

So where does this current distaste for prostitution come from?  Certainly a by-product of progressive duplicity - championing the strength and enterprise of women on the one hand, and desperately trying to protect them from men on the other.  Prostitutes are nothing but men's playthings, examples of their innate, persistent devaluation of women, feminists say.  Nothing could be more demeaning, dishonoring, and wrong than a woman being forced to open her sex to all comers for money. 

In a supposedly laissez-faire market economy it is surprising that prostitution has come under such harsh and punitive light.  Why shouldn't sex be viewed as an economic commodity like any other product.  After all, prostitution aside, who ever said that sexual favors were not part of any contract negotiation? Even in the best of marriages, some sexual trading is par for the course. 

 

When rumors circulated in Chillicothe, home to the Victorian era suffragettes and the Women's Temperance Society of America, that the conservative government now in power in Washington was considering decriminalizing prostitution, the citizens were nonplussed.  'A travesty, an unconscionable civil injustice, a welcome mat for the abuse of women'' said Margaret Owens, a longtime, militant 'Christian feminist' who had championed the purity of women rather than their equality; and in so saying became the ally of more secular women's groups who found prostitution an insult to womanhood on psycho-social and political grounds. 

Yet the men of Chillicothe were quite pleased by the possibility.  Of course at first recondite about their expectations, they gradually became more outspoken.  'What harm does it do?' they said.  Sex with a hooker presented no threat to marriage, nor suggested any umbrage or marital dissatisfaction.  Men are simply built differently than women, and sex can be compartmentalized - hookers on one side, loving wives on the other.  In this male universe the twain never have to meet. 

Liberalizing - decriminalizing - prostitution makes eminent sense.  It will return a naturally occurring free market activity to laissez-faire economics, grant men the right to express their inbred sexual needs, and reduce the rates of divorce, separation, and abandonment. 

Opening the doors to brothels would not harm women in any way.  Women would work there by choice, not obligation.  Wives would be assured of otherwise unfaithful husbands, men would be happy, tax revenues would help fill municipal coffers, and Chillicothe society would be back to 'human normal' as one alderman put it. 

Eliot Spitzer, the disgraced former governor caught buck naked in a Mayflower suite, now vindicated, was quoted as saying, 'Bravo.  It's about time'; and Dominique Strauss-Kahn, the French Lothario, who had run into the scandal mill of New York politics, accused of rape by an overly ambitious District Attorney but then acquitted, noted that America was finally becoming more French. 

'I've got too much on my plate', said Donald Trump when the prostitution initiative was brought to his attention; but privately he thought it was a good idea.  Of course he as a young man never ever had to resort to commercial sex, women were always at his beck and call, but for his less fortunate constituents, why not?

Donald Imperator - The Birth Of A Militant Democracy And The End Of A Fractured, Broken One

The Mayor of Chicago howled 'fascist' as military convoys made their way to the crime-ridden, drug-addled, gangland that once was America's second city. Since his election, the Mayor had presided over a city of rancid politics, random looting and violence, and a police force hamstrung by Defund The  Police. 

 

The place was a mess, a disturbed city descending into Third World anarchy while the Mayor fiddled and cried foul.  

The black man cannot be treated like a slave on a plantation, a field hand, a chattel to the white supremacist elite.  Jim Crow, Simon Legree, and segregation are alive and well in the mind and spirit of the white man, an ignoramus, a racial recidivist, a Negro-hating, murderous demon. I'm black and I'm proud, and I will not give an inch to the storm troopers of the racist state. 

As has been the case in Baltimore, Detroit, St. Louis, Los Angeles, and Memphis, the black population cheered the Mayor's words, smiled and embraced in solidarity.  We will show whitey, they said, and broke out of the projects and torched, looted, upended, and destroyed the privileged enclaves of the elite. Chicago, a city beset by crime, dysfunction, and mayhem became even more so thanks to the Mayor's incendiary words. 

'This will not stand', shouted the Mayor of Los Angeles as federal troops entered the city.  'We shall fight to the last, will stand tall at the barricades, and will remind America of the primacy and inevitability of the black man'.  Of course nothing much had changed in South Central since the riots of the Sixties.  The inner city was still as ungovernable, dysfunctional, and backward.  The socio-economic indicators of the neighborhood ranked at the bottom of any tote sheet.  Rapes, murders, assaults, armed robberies, gangland slayings, and a universal Fentanyl epidemic were the norm. 

MS-13 Mara Salva Trucha, the expatriate Salvadoran gang, ruled the Mexican slums, murdering opponents, intimidating and threatening civilians, and making millions out of cross-border black market trade.

The city was on edge, and crime from brazen storming of Rodeo Drive top end boutique stores to pickpocketing, carjacking, and cellphone theft was dramatically up.  Los Angeles was a post-apocalyptic war zone of fierce anti-social brutality. 

Donald Trump, was having none of it. 'This will not stand' became a federal meme, an ironic turning on its head of the empty political sloganeering of mayors.  Not only would federal troops clean up cities which their elected representatives had left to fester and rot, but pressure would be put on those who governed.  Corruption, racial exploitation, the perpetuation of an enslaving ethos of entitlement would go.  Responsibility and accountability would replace black laissez-faire. 

Washington's liberal elite crowed.  See, they said, we were right in warning about the imperial ambitions of Donald Trump, his attack on democracy, and his desire to rule with an iron, dictatorial hand.  'Democracy Matters' said lawn signs in tony white neighborhoods, as progressives united in their hatred of Trump and his autocratic intent, all the while sitting back and watching American cities descend into bloody anarchy.  The ghetto would no longer be a quiescent, accommodating place.  At long last and in a reprise of the Sixties, black men would burst out of the plantation confines of the inner city and express their anger.

 

The Left was correct in one thing - American democracy was broken - but wrong in its causes and even more wrong in its ideas for reform.  It was the Left in its permissive, idealistic, distorted view of an ideal society which contributed to, fomented, and aided and abetted the chaotic decline of democracy.  Its focus on race, gender, and ethnicity; identity politics, and diversity, equity, and inclusivity destroyed any hope for a central core ethos of responsibility.  It denied the value and authenticity of the Constitution and the insights of Jefferson, Hamilton, and Franklin. 

The common meme is that Putin and Xi are anti-democratic, imperialist autocrats who wish to restore empire and recreate nations of czars, princes, and mandarins. Yet those who arrogantly assume American cultural and political supremacy - its exceptionalism - ignore the truth.  China has always said that the chimera of American 'freedom' means nothing to a nation determined to raise hundreds of millions out of poverty, return the nation to its former premier status, and to demand the respect and attention of the rest of the world. 

Vladimir Putin looked admiringly at the former Russian empire, the glories of Peter and Alexander, the primacy of the Orthodox Christian Church, and the cultural legacy of the Hermitage and all it represents.  Russia was brutal and thorough in its suppression of the Southern Caucasian rebellions and insisted like China, that Russia was one country, ethnically diverse but politically unified. Neither country had any patience for regional identity, separatism, or violent independence.  

China is the world's example of non-democratic success.  It fulfilled its promises to radically reduce poverty, to build the world's biggest economy, and to use its financial resources and acumen to influence its adversaries. 

Donald Trump is definitely taking a page out of China's playbook.  A country must be unified, solid in its core beliefs and ethos, and willing to sacrifice for the common good.  America now is divided, divisive, misruled, and left to the streets - a chaotic sideshow, a freakshow of democracy; and it must be returned to its originalist roots. 

The arrogant miscreance of the black inner city community, supported and promoted by white liberals, is anti-democratic at heart, domestic terror writ large.  When images of the streets of Poland or Hungary are juxtaposed with those of Chicago or Baltimore, the difference could not be more stark.  Those countries have refused idealistic progressivism, open borders, and a welcome to anti-democratic, autocratic Islamic migrants.  They value the integrity and well-being of the majority as a priority, not the caustic demands of the minority. 

The President of El Salvador has been the most outspoken about his idea of a reformed democracy.  By rounding up, incarcerating, and eliminating Mara Salvatrucha and other violent gangs, even at the price of individual civil rights, he has guaranteed the civil rights of the many. 

Former President of the Philippines, Rodrigo Duterte was no different.  The violent crime and terrorism rampant in his country had to stop, and his paramilitary sweeps restored order and civility to the nation. 

Winston Churchill famously said that democracy was the worst system of governance...except for all the rest...and that assumption has held firm in America despite its obvious cracks and fissures.  Democracy, when under its banner chaotic separatism is allowed to flourish, is broken.  Donald Trump knows that the system is broken but fixable; and he has not hesitated to use his legitimate, Constitutional powers to set the ship aright. 

The residents of Washington, especially in the inner city are quite happy with the presence of federal troops who, working with police, have addressed the issue of violent crime in the Nation's Capital.  The Mayor who at first was just as militantly opposed as her counterparts in Chicago and LA, realized the boon that was offered, and thanked the President for his federal assistance. 

If democracy is to survive, it cannot do so American style. America must lose its arrogant assumptions that its form of governance is ipso facto the best; and must realize that the wave of crime and anti-social behavior is not just an isolated, temporary phenomenon, but one inextricably tied to the distorted ideas of political idealists and 'democratic' terrorists. 

The American Left, by championing the mayors of broken cities, executives ruling willingly and complaisantly over mayhem and disorder, calling it free expression, is ensuring its own demise.  The electorate, like all, might be credulous and even gullible; but enough is enough, and Donald Trump has called out the opposition for the destructive, insidious movement that it is.