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.

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.

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.

Next Year's Agenda

SOME PEOPLE are getting impatient. They are asking why the Republican Party doesn't have a party position for the mid-terms. Other people are looking forward already to a Republican Congress. They are asking how the Republicans should avoid the mistakes of 1995.

I think the critical thing is to tell the truth and shame the devil. That's Shakespeare, by the way.

For the Fall election it is critical for Republicans to promise what they really intend to do come January. It's not hard to come up with a doable agenda: continue the Bush tax rates and lower corporate income tax rates; repeal ObamaCare and start over on a non-bureaucratic approach to health care; cut wasteful spending.

The American people are not yet ready to cut entitlements. They need to see the entitlements system broken before they will agree to that. But there's plenty of other stuff to work on. There is the utter waste of government money in education, for starters. Then there is green energy, that is crony capitalism from start to finish. Then there is the fabulous ethanol program. There are tons of things that can be cut at the margin as governors like Mitch Daniels and Chris Christie have shown.

After the elections, whatever the result, President Obama will have to start working with Republicans. No more "I won," or telling people to shut up while he fixes things that Bush broke. Republicans should start working with the president, or at least urgently saying to the media that they need to get together with the president and solve the nation's problems.

The people have spoken, Republicans should say. But the president is still the president, and we are all Americans. We should work together. What the people have told us is that they don't like bailouts, they don't like stimulus, they don't like ObamaCare, and they don't like earmarks. So let's get together, Mr. President, let's clean up the nation's capital as you promised in 2008 and get about the people's business.

Personally, I feel that President Obama is no Bill Clinton, and that he just doesn't have the talent or the temperament or the experience to do a good job negotiating on the issue-by-issue process of day-to-day government. I think he's a guy that likes to say: call me in when it's time to call the big shots.

But the Republicans must treat the president as the president. If he won't deal straight--and I don't think he will--then they need to go to the media and the talk-show hosts and tell them about it.

But Republicans must start out in September with a clear and honest agenda, and then continue in January saying: let's get together Mr. President and let's work together for the American people.

| perm | comment(0) | | 09/02/10 11:56 am ET

2010 Isn't 1994, etc.

PEOPLE IN THE political world like to sneer at generals for "fighting the last war." So what is all the talk of 1994, and the worrying about a Republican Congress overreaching in 2011 in a reprise of 1995?As Ronald Reagan said: to say that Congress spends money like a drunken sailor is an insult to drunken sailors. And the re-fighting the wars of 1994 and 1995 is an insult to generals.The only...

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| perm | comment(0) | | 09/01/10 12:21 pm ET

Stimulus and Confidence

THE BIG QUESTION in economic crises is Confidence. When the stock market is going south and banks are going broke and everyone is worrying about a "double dip" they are looking for the magic bullet that will turn the whole thing around and restore Confidence.In the liberal world-view, you restore Confidence with a stimulus program that keeps money in consumers' pockets and gives them Confidence...

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| perm | comment(0) | | 08/31/10 12:24 pm ET

Glenn Beck's Girl Conservatism

SUPPOSE YOU are a liberal, and here you are on Monday morning after the Beck Restoring Honor rally. What are you to think? What does it all mean?You go read Ross Douthat in The New York Times and he isn't really that helpful. OK, he says, he underestimated Glenn Beck. But it's not really such a big deal:Beckâ€™s packed, three-hour jamboree was floated entirely on patriotism and piety, with no â€œ...

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| perm | comment(1) | | 08/30/10 12:14 pm ET

I Just Got a Tingle!

FOR THE LAST couple of years I've sneered at liberal Chris Matthews and his famous tingle. But now I take it all back.Needless to say, my tingle--and yes, it was in my leg--had nothing to do with President Obama. It came at the end of an American Spectator blog by Ben Stein. It had to do with the comments of his Hispanic gas station attendant."We have to wake up," he said. "Those people want...

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| perm | comment(0) | | 08/27/10 12:24 pm ET

Ben Quayle's Way With Words(1) |

| 08/26/10 11:30 am ET
Palin the Kingmaker |

| 08/25/10 11:59 am ET
Government's Kiss of Death |

| 08/24/10 12:25 pm ET
Obama's Religion Problem(1) |

| 08/23/10 12:33 pm ET

What Conservatives are For

THE LAST two weeks have been brutal for our liberal friends, and they just don't understand what went wrong.

Obviously, they said, this whole 9/11 Mosque controversy is about rights, the right of freedom of religion. Moslems have a right to worship and government has no right to circumscribe that right. Anyone who disagrees is a bigot. Period.

Our liberal friends, I reckon, were put on this earth for one great thing. They were put on this earth to midwife the civil-rights revolution. In their finest hour in the early 1960s they insisted on realizing the promise of the American revolution that all men are created equal. They insisted that the original sin of the American founding should be redeemed. They risked a lot in pushing through the civil-rights acts, and lost the South for a generation, just as Lyndon Johnson feared. Conservatives like Barry Goldwater and Bill Buckley didn't get it; they got all caught up in legalisms.

The trouble is that liberals, put onto this earth for that one thing, want to fit every issue into the civil rights mold. They are like the hammer: everything looks like a nail. They've made women's rights into a civil-rights issue, gay rights into a civil-rights issue. And now they want Muslims to be an historically marginalized group and apply the civil-rights solution to them too.

The conservative retort to liberals on the 9/11 mosque issue is simple, and it illustrates what conservatives were put on this earth to do.

Conservatives say to liberals: Yes, of course Muslims have a right to put up a mosque anywhere they want. The question is: should they exercise that right. Or should they think about the insult that such a mosque, so close to a site where 3,000 people, mostly Americans, were killed by Muslim terrorists, represents to New Yorkers and most Americans. Should Muslims, in a spirit of friendship and kindness, forbear to exercise their undoubted rights.

We conservatives are saying is that politics in particular and social relations in general are not just about rights and the rule of law. Life is not merely a mechanical thing about following the rules. Nor is it just an adversarial proceeding as in a court of law. Nor it is a blind application of bureaucratic rules. Life is give-and-take. Life is friendship. Life is restraint, holding back when you know you are about to hurt an acquaintance.

Indeed, if you try to reduce everything to a pound of flesh you will find that you inevitably end up committing one cruel injustice after another. The quality of mercy is not strained / It falleth as the gentle rain from Heaven.

This need to blend rules with the sentiment of mercy and friendship has been at the heart of modern conservatism since Edmund Burke railed against "sophisters, economists, and calculators" 220 years ago. Here is the full quote from his Reflections on the Revolution in France.

The age of chivalry has gone and that of economists and calculators has set in, and the glory of Europe has departed.

Perhaps Burke was a little overwrought that day.

In the next few years we will see conservatism applied to the moral and material mess created by the bureaucratic leviathan we call the welfare state. Conservatives will be doing what they were made to do: pointing out that you cannot reduce the social relation--the caring things like care of the aged, care of the sick, the education of children--to rules and bureaucracy.

That's what conservatives are on this earth to do. To show liberals where they went wrong.

| perm | comment(1) | | 08/20/10 12:15 pm ET

They Just Don't Get It, cont. |

| 08/19/10 12:03 pm ET
One Step at a Time |

| 08/18/10 12:34 pm ET
Liberals Defend Religion! |

| 08/17/10 12:08 pm ET
Cordoba House vs. St. Patrick's Cathedral |

| 08/16/10 12:25 pm ET

A Culture of Friendship

IF LIBERALISM is the culture of compulsion, then what should conservatism's culture be?Simple. It should be the culture of friendship, and not just because Aristotle wrote that friendship was the basis of politics, indeed all social bonds.We could also all it the culture of involvement, of engagement, of voluntary cooperation. All this is just trying to say one thing. The culture of reason, of...

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| perm | comment(0) | | 08/13/10 12:56 pm ET

Forget Medved, the Future is Bright! |

| 08/12/10 11:37 am ET
The Luck of the Liberals |

| 08/11/10 12:13 pm ET
Central Bankers Don't Know Nothing |

| 08/10/10 12:44 pm ET
Learning Lessons Good and Hard |

| 08/09/10 12:52 pm ET

The Culture of Compulsion

WHAT IS THE center of the conservative critique of liberalism? It is, I believe, that liberalism has replaced the community of social relationship with a rigid mechanism of administrative bureaucracy.Of course, the old ways of traditional face-to-face community had its problems. It was often unreflectingly conservative and often hardened hierarchy into oppression. The question at the beginning...

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| perm | comment(0) | | 08/06/10 1:27 pm ET

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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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

eyepoppinggames