Christopher Chantrill

Road to the Middle Class contains the eponymous book 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.

An American Manifesto is the site for my book and blog. I am writing this book about "life after liberalism" and blogging about it as I go. All are invited to comment. Start here.

USgovernmentspending.com is a resource on government spending in the United States. It presents tables and charts on federal, state, and local government expenditure in the United States from 1902 to the present. Spending data are sourced from US budget data and US Census reports. Start here.

USgovernmentdebt.us is a resource on government debt in the United States. It presents tables and charts on federal debt and overall national debt in the United States from 1792 to the present. Data are sourced from US budget data and US Census reports. Start here.

USgovernmentrevenue.com is a resource on government taxes and receipts in the United States. It presents tables and charts on federal, state, and local government taxes, charges, use fees, and business revenue in the United States from 1902 to the present. Revenue data are sourced from US budget data and US Census reports. Start here.

UKpublicspending.co.uk is a resource on public spending in the United Kingdom. It presents tables and charts on public expenditure by central government, local authorities, and public corporations in the United Kingdom from 1900 to the present. Spending data is sourced from UK government Public Expenditure Statistical Analyses, the UK National Statistics “Blue Book,” and academic studies. 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.

US Federal Bailout gets down to the details of the recent federal bailouts. Everyone knows about TARP and the bank bailout. Fortunately, the banks have paid back most of the money they got in the fall of 2008. Now you can check out all the other bailouts and guarantees that the federal government handed out in its efforts to stave off a global financial meltdown. Start here.

US Midterm Elections tabulates the history of midterm elections for the US Senate and the US House of Representatives going back to 1790. You can sort the elections by year, by party strength, and by party gains and losses. 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. And you can follow on Twitter .

Enjoy.

The Liberal Con

EVERYONE in the political elite knows that "entitlements" are really welfare. So when middle-class voters talk about having "earned" their benefits, well, here's the New York Times:

Anecdotes about citizens’ demanding that government “keep its hands off Medicare” are Exhibit A in the prosecution’s case. In July 2009, for example, President Obama informed an audience that he had received a letter from a woman who wrote, “I don’t want government-run health care, I don’t want socialized medicine, and don’t touch my Medicare.” Such demands, wrote Timothy Noah at Slate, reflect a politics of “infantile denial.”

Except, writes William Voegeli, it was the liberals and Democrats that taught Americans to believe that Social Security and Medicare were just like an insurance policy. You put your money in so you can take it out later.

Central to liberalism at high tide was a rhetorical effort to establish the untruth that Americans receiving social-insurance benefits were getting back nothing beyond what they had already paid for...

Vincent M. Miles, one of the inaugural members of the Social Security board, explained the basis of this right in a 1936 speech: The program’s old-age benefits “are best understood if we compare them to insurance.” The monthly checks from the government are “like the installments on annuities from an insurance company.” And, “like an insurance-company policy, the worker’s old-age benefit from the government must be paid for in advance. Instead of weekly, monthly, quarterly, or yearly premiums, however, the government collects weekly or monthly payments which are called ‘taxes.’”

Of course, this was a lie, a liberal "con." Social Security has never been run like an insurance policy. It has always been run like a welfare program. Taxes have been arbitrarily set based on the overall immediate payout needs, and benefits have always been skewed to provide a basic benefit to the low-paid and the contributor that has only paid in for a few years. Medicare is worse, because it is not an actuarial program based on simple mortality, but on the future demand for health care and the demands of the health care practitioners.

Yet now our liberal friends are sneering at the simple-minded people that bought the "con."

Nothing remarkable here. Confidence artists have always regarded their "marks" with disdain, and rightly so. Because you can only get taken in by a confidence man if you want the something-for-nothing that the confidence man offers.

But that doesn't change the fact that liberals lied about their welfare state entitlement programs. They lied because that was the only way that they could get proud and independent Americans to buy into their programs, and get Americans to exchange their birthright for a mess of pottage.

| perm | comment(0) | | 05/18/12 1:38 pm ET

Why Obama is "Even Close"

COLUMNIST David Brooks was well chosen to be the gentle voice of conservatism for The New York Times. He's careful to write in a way that makes his ideas at least acceptable to his knee-jerk liberal readers. So when he asks the rhetorical question: why is Obama even close in the presidential opinion polls, he provides comfortable words for the NYT faithful. After backing and filling for 700...

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| perm | comment(0) | | 05/16/12 12:42 pm ET

Plato's Receptacle

SUPPOSE you are Plato and you've been pushing your concept of the Forms for ages. Everything comes from these perfect ideas that can be comprehended up there in the firmament beyond the rim of heaven. Ordinary things that you and I see, the perceptions and particulars, are not reality but opinion, true belief.

But if you were Plato you might worry a bit about how you get from the perfect Forms to the everyday sensible particulars. So Plato pops behind the curtain and briefs his alter ego Timaeus on a quick and dirty fudge, a half-way house between the Forms and the particulars: The Receptacle.

You can think of this Receptacle as a kind of wetnurse. Or you can think of it like gold: Gold is gold, but you can manipulate it into all kinds of shapes. Or you could think of it as the mother, the receptacle of the father's seed or Form, which incubates the offspring. Or you could think of it as a plastic, impressionable stuff, or you could think of the receptacle as the odorless liquid that is used as the base for a fragrance. You see the point. Plato reckons he needs something more substantial than Forms upon which to hang the everyday impressions of moment to moment sensation.

In our modern science we have a similar concept, for we understand that the sensible particulars we detect with our eyes are in fact the result of electromagnetic radiation emitted from a lattice of atoms and molecules, which don't necessarily have sensible properties by themselves but emit signals to us that we interpret as red and yellow, hard and soft, solid and liquid.

Let us take an example: a left shoe. First of all, the left shoe comes into being in a Receptacle, as an instance of the Form of shoe in a process of shaking disordered elements into order, producing the particular instance of left shoe. On the gold analogy, it would be the combination of elements shaped and molded into a shoe. On the mother-father analogy it is the offspring of the Form of a shoe incubated by a lactating mother. On the plastic, impressionable stuff, it is the Form of shoeness impressed upon plastic stuff into the particular of a shoe. Or the receptacle is shaken and stirred, like the pieces in a kaleidoscope into the instance of a shoe from the Form of shoeness. On the reflection metaphor, the left shoe is a projection into a certain space or site of the Form shoenessness.

In part, the Receptacle is meant to represent stuffness, the place where Form is manifested into stuff; in part, according to another interpretation, the Receptacle is the space, the place, the room where an instance of a thing comes into being and then, in time goes out of being.

But what happens when the left shoe moves? Perfectly simple. We have the shaken-and-stirred analogy to account for that. The shoe is shaken from its original position and moved, for the Receptacle is not just stuff but a space, a site of stuff. Or it is gold, moved and remolded into a new shape in the Receptacle. Or it is switched from one breast of the wetnurse to the other.

There is no doubt that, the more specific you get, the more incoherent the analogies become that Plato uses to illustrate his Receptacle concept. But there is no shame in that. Our modern science is barely free from incoherence. We have the action-at-a-distance problem with the notion that a single photon can seem to go through two slits at once and interfere with itself. And what really do we have in a solid lattice of molecules, or a soupy wetland of a liquid? We have our likely story, our true belief about what is going on that is developed by persuasion and we have our understanding, our theories of relativity and quantum mechanics that are communicated to young physicists by years of instruction.

What does it all mean? Ask Plato about that.

| perm | comment(0) | | 05/14/12 11:47 pm ET

Arianna's Greek Fantasy

IF you want a native's eye view of the Greek crisis why not turn to America's favorite Greek, Arianna Huffington. That's what The New York Times did. When I was growing up, my family was a tiny microcosm of the current Greek economy. We were heavily in debt; my father’s repeated attempts to own a newspaper ended in failure and bankruptcy. Eventually, my mother took my sister and me and left ...

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| perm | comment(0) | | 05/13/12 9:30 pm ET

Marriage: It's For the Next Generation

RIGHT now, I'm reading Mrs. Gaskell's Wives and Daughters. This 19th century novel is about broken families and step-parenting. Of course, back in those days you didn't have divorce. But you did have 17-year-old Molly Gibson, who wakes up one day to realize that her widower father is going to remarry. Just like today's children of divorce, Molly is not happy about this. In fact she is ...

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| perm | comment(0) | | 05/11/12 1:47 pm ET

We're Overseas about "Overseas"

TODAY I'm in Greenwich, Connecticut, for the roll-out of my daughter Beatriz Williams' debut novel, Overseas. There's an event at the Greenwich Library tonight at 7pm EDT, but right now we are listening to an author interview on "The Business of Living" AM1490 WGCH. It's a delight: Beatriz comes across as knowledgeable, confident, articulate, with a good radio voice. Just how you'd want your ...

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| perm | comment(0) | | 05/10/12 11:02 am ET

A 60-40 Year? |

| 05/09/12 10:33 am ET

The Four Causes in Plato

EVERYONE knows that Aristotle invented the Four Causes. In the Metaphysics he lays it out: the Material Cause, the stuff that something is made of; the Formal Cause, the form or pattern, the shape of something; the Efficient Cause, the source of the something, such as the father of a child; and of course the famous Final Cause, the purpose or "end" of something in the world. Today of course, ...

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| perm | comment(0) | | 05/08/12 1:51 pm ET

Endgame of the Welfare State |

| 05/07/12 12:40 pm ET
Rasmussen Misses Point on 50-50 Elections |

| 05/04/12 1:28 pm ET

What About Atlantis?

WHEN Socrates and his chums gather the day(!) after they discussed The Republic for another chat on important philosophical matters, the first thing they do is rehearse what they agreed to the day before. How everyone should stick to one job, how the guardians were a race apart, how children should be raised in common and how "the bad ones were to be secretly handed on to another city". But ...

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| perm | comment(0) | | 05/02/12 11:08 pm ET

What I Want From Romney(2) |

| 05/02/12 11:52 am ET

Conservatives Are Indeed Social Darwinists

PRESIDENT Obama, deep in his liberal bubble, seemed to think he was hurling the worst insult in the world at Paul Ryan when he described Ryan's budget as "thinly veiled Social Darwinism." He was relying on the notion that, ever since Richard Hofstadter and Social Darwinism in American Thought, "social Darwinism" was an ever-useful pejorative to sling at evil Republicans to send them slinking ...

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| perm | comment(0) | | 04/26/12 6:37 pm ET

Chris Chantrill

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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>>

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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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AN AMERICAN MANIFESTO

With the failure of the welfare state, it is time to consider what comes next. In "An American Manifesto: Life After Liberalism" I develop a narrative about where we are and where we should go to redeem the American experiment.

GAMES

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