Christopher Chantrill

Road to the Middle Class contains my writing and my daily blog. It investigates and celebrates the cultural artefacts that ordinary people appropriate as they struggle to adapt from country ways to the demands of life in the city. Start here.

USgovernmentspending.com is a resource on government spending in the United States. It contains information on federal, state, and local government expenditure in the United States from 1902 to the present. Start here.

USgovernmentrevenue.com is a resource on government taxes and receipts in the United States. It contains information on federal, state, and local government taxes, charges, use fees, and business revenue in the United States from 1902 to the present. Start here.

UKpublicspending.co.uk is a resource on public spending in the United Kingdom. It contains information on public expenditure by central government, local authorities, and public corporations in the United Kingdom from 1983 to the present. Start here.

American Thinker publishes my op-eds most weeks. Click here.

US Stuck on Stupid analyzes the perfect storm of political bungling in the years from 1929 to 1939 that plunged the American people into untold misery during the Great Depression. Start here.

Biography

I am a member of the international capitalist conspiracy. Both my grandfathers owned and operated import/export businesses in the early twentieth century, one in St. Petersburg, Russia, where my father was born, and the other in Kobe, Japan, where my mother was born.

I was born in India and raised and educated in England. I immigrated to the United States in 1968 and worked for many years designing and implementing utility control systems and software in Seattle.

Despite 35 years living in Seattle, I instinctively revolted against the suffocating left-coast culture of the Soviet of Washington, and came to revere the four great Germans who helped inspire the Reagan revolution: Ludwig von Mises, F.A. Hayek, Leo Strauss, and Eric Voegelin.

I have written for Liberty, FrontPageMag.com, and The American Thinker. My forthcoming book Road to the Middle Class celebrates the self-governing culture of the United States in which enthusiastic Christianity, education, mutual aid, and living under law have taught generations of immigrants to rise from indigence in the countryside to a life of competence and prosperity in the city.

Daily Blogging

WE BLOG DAILY, Monday to Friday, at www.roadtothemiddleclass.com, chiefly on national US politics, religion, education, mutual aid, and law. We also look at our junior partners in the global Anglospheric hegemony, the British. It is hard to say why, but very often our blogging zeroes in like a laser on liberal hypocrisies, monopolies, and sinecures. Of course, at Road to the Middle Class we love our liberal friends to bits, but we do not take them quite as seriously as they do. If we get too pompous and serious, please get in touch and tell us to lighten up.

We love to get email from our readers.

Enjoy.

Clark's McCain Put-down

YOU AND I can only guess at the tactical political calculations of presidential campaigns.

So we just shake our heads and wonder at the attempt by Gen. Wesley Clark, an Obama supporter, to brush off Sen. McCain’s military experience as mere by-play. As Jake Tapper quotes,

â€œHe hasn’t held executive responsibility. That large squadron in the Navy that he commanded — that wasn’t a wartime squadron,â€ said Clark, who did command NATO allied forces during the war in Kosovo.

And the corker: â€œWell, I don’t think riding in a fighter plane and getting shot down is a qualification to be president,â€ Clark added.

You have to assume that remarks like that were poll tested by the Obama campaign and run by focus groups. Unless. Unless the Obama campaign is just an amateur operation that just shoots from the hip.

(This is not impossible. The only campaign I served on was a very amateur operation, as it was bound to be when it ran mostly on volunteers.)

But let us assume there are adults at the Obama campaign. They must think that they have to take down McCain’s advantage as a combat veteran with actual service in the military. It is true, of course, that service in the military does not immediately transfer to “national security” experience. But we know that McCain has made national security a key concern as a United States Senator. You are really taking a big risk to try impeach his credentials as a serious actor on national security.

So I reckon that the Obama folks reckon they are toast unless they can take McCain out on national security. That means that they are looking at polls and focus group results with negative results on Obama’d electability that you and I can only guess at.

But hey, with the help of the mainstream media, maybe they can do it!

Or maybe, given the fact of evil right-wing swift-boating extremist bloggers, they can’t.

New Hope for Global Warming Deniers

THERE ARE some of us, and we are few, who reflexively recoil from the latest liberal enthusiasm.

(And why is it that every liberal enthusiasm involves a dip into your pocketbook?)

So we grab at hopes that the liberals are wrong—again.

Last week there was a straw to grasp for us global warming deniers. A couple of astsro-physicists published a paper on sunspots and the solar cycle.

As reported by Andrew Bolt the phsysicts are predicting that the sun may turn quiet with very few sunspots in the next 20-30 years. Some scientists believe that global temperatures typically dip by 1 to 2 degrees during these episodes.

The theory is that the convection currents in the sun are driven by the rotation of the Jovian planets, Jupiter and Saturn. They represent the biggest mass in the solar system after the Sun, and cause the sun to “wobble” around the center of the Solar System.

If this is true, and if Cycle 24 is really a quiet cycle, and if the climate cools by one or two degrees... Well, it could dent the current global warming “consensus.”

Author Ian Wilson comments on his paper.

It supports the contention that the level of activity on the Sun will significantly diminish sometime in the next decade and remain low for about 20 - 30 years. On each occasion that the Sun has done this in the past the Worldâ€™s mean temperature has dropped by ~ 1 - 2 C.

Well, it means new hope for global warming deniers.

But go ahead, AlGore. You can crank up the thermostat in your energy-guzzling house if things get a little chilly. We won’t mind.

Conservatives Obtuse on '60s Civil Rights

WHY WAS it that Sen. Barry Goldwater voted against the 1964 Civil Rights Act? A majority of Republicans in both Houses of Congress voted for it. But Mr. Conservative voted against.

William Voegeli tells how it came about.

The fact is that Bill Buckley and the National Review crowd were so anxious to roll back the New Deal and Big Government that they were blind to the need for federal brute force to end the power of the segregationist South. They hoped that the South would evolve away from Jim Crow. And they wrote cringingly embarrassing stuff about whites being for now at least “the advanced race.”

When the Civil Rights Act came up for passage two young lawyers, William Rehnquist and Robert Bork, briefed Sen. Goldwater to vote against the bill. The rest, as they say, is history.

Eventually, Bill Buckley realized that he had been wrong.

Asked by Time in 2004 whether he regretted any positions he had taken in the past, Buckley said simply, "Yes. I once believed we could evolve our way up from Jim Crow. I was wrong: federal intervention was necessary."

It was, writes Voegeli, “a textbook example of letting the best be the enemy of the good” and conservatives have paid for their sorry obtuseness in spades, as blacks have never after 1960 voted more than 10 percent for a Republican presidential candidate and liberals have seen the civil-rights template as the first, best, and only appropriate way to deal with social problems.

Yes, but, conservatives may retort.

But nothing. With an African American man the presumptive nominee of the Democratic Party in 2008, liberals can be justly proud of their courage back in the 1960s.

President Johnson in 1964 is said to have told an aide that Democrats had probably lost the South for a generation, and he probably thought they would lose the presidency as well. In other words, he understood that passing the Civil Rights Acts would have untold consequences, many of which could hurt his party. But he did it any way because it was the right thing to do.

Whenever conservatives get a little cocky about their noble virtue versus the eternal perfidy of the liberals, it wouldn’t hurt to remember their foolishness and pusillanimity back in the decisive decade of civil rights.

Chris Chantrill

Take the Test!

US GOVERNMENT EXPENDITURE

At usgovernmentspending.com we have assembled a record of government spending in the United States for the last century. You can view government spending, federal, state, and local, for every year from 1902 to the present. And you can generate charts of that spending. more>>

US GOVERNMENT RECEIPTS

At usgovernmentrevenue.com we have assembled a record of government revenue in the United States for the last century. You can view government receipts, federal, state, and local, for every year from 1902 to the present. And you can generate charts of that revenue. more>>

UK PUBLIC EXPENDITURE

At ukpublicspending.co.uk we have assembled a record of public spending in the United Kingdom for the last century. You can view British public spending, central government and local authority, for every year from 1983 to the present. And you can generate charts of that spending. more>>

ROAD TO THE MIDDLE CLASS

The Road to the Middle Class is a journey from a world of power to a world of trust and love. In religion, it is a journey from power gods that respond to sacrifice and augury to the God who makes a covenant with mankind. In education, it is a journey from the world of the spoken word to the world of the written word. In community, it is the journey from dependence on blood kin and upon clientage under a great lord to the mutual aid and the rules of the self-governing fraternal association. In law it is the journey from the violence of force and feud to the king´s peace, the law of contract, and private property.

Road to the Middle Class: The Book

Contents

Chapter One

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