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.

Are Incontinent Fools Wise?

YOU MIGHT WONDER why Aristotle is so interested in incontinence that he devotes the whole of Book VII of his Nichomachean Ethics to it. Is that really a problem for philosophers to worry about?

Well, it is, at least the kind of incontinence that Aristotle worries about.

The continent man is one "ready to abide by the result of his calculations" while the incontinent man is "ready to abandon them." Why does the continent man abide by his calculations? Because he knows "his appetites are bad, and refuses on account of his rational principles to follow them." The incontinent man, on the other hand, abandons his rational principles "as a result of passion."

But if you chop logic like the sophists, worries Aristotle, then you might end up unraveling your rational spaghetti into believing that "folly coupled with incontinence is virtue." For if continence makes a man stand by a false opinion, then it is good if an incontinent man, that abandons "any and every opinion", abandons a false opinion.

Aristotle briskly clears away the problem of this sophistical mirage, the virtuous incontinent, for he argues that the incontinent man is in the position of someone "having knowledge in a sense and yet not having it, as in the instance of a man asleep, mad, or drunk." He is like a city that "passes all the right decrees and has good laws, but makes no use of them". He is neither good nor bad, just a muddle.

But what about the continent man with the wrong opinion? Well, Aristotle says, these are likely strong-headed people, "hard to persuade in the first instance and not easily persuaded to change". This is to suggest that an continent man can be consumed with "passion and appetite". On the contrary, the "continent man will be easy to persuade". For being a man of rational principle, he is not led by his appetites and his pleasures, but readily bows to rational persuasion.

But let us not confuse the incontinent man with the self-indulgent. The first stands by his choice, and is not apt to repent his follies, while the incontinent man means well but is led astray by his passions. The self-indulgent man is "incurable and the incontinent curable." Think of the difference between dropsy and epilepsy, says Aristotle. The "former is a permanent, the latter an intermittent badness."

So that's all right!

| perm | comment(0) | | 01/27/12 9:04 am ET

The Anguish of the Reactionary President

BACK IN THE old days, rulers ruled. They ruled over everything, from church, to military, to trade.

But then came the modern mechanical era. God no longer kept the planets in their orbits, and an "invisible hand" seemed to guide merchants and consumers without the constant intervention of a wise ruler.

What is a ruler to do? He worries about "inequality." Not because he's caring and compassionate, or even because he's a brilliant technocrat, but because if you want to meddle with the workings of the "invisible hand" you have to start out by saying that the "invisible hand" isn't doing the job. It's making some people too rich and leaving some people behind as too poor.

Thus Marx. Thus the British Fabians. Thus the American Progressives. Thus the New Deal. And thus our modern "progressives," university liberals, and President Obama.

It's not that the president is a socialist, but that socialism is just one phase in the serial attempts of the modern educated elite to justify its rule over the "commanding heights" of the economy, the culture, and politics.

In President Obama's recent State of the Union speech, we see the box that he and his educated elite friends are in. They want to rule. They want new programs. They want new regulations. They want to be patrons, and they want us to be adoring and grateful clients.

But the science is in. The "invisible hand" really works. And it really works better if the government isn't endlessly manipulating the economy to get out of its latest jam with money printing, debt defaults, and endless subsidies.

And now the educated elite has run out of money. But the band plays on.

In his speech the president has to walk a fine line. He must invoke the great narrative of American exceptionalism, quoting Abraham Lincoln. But he must twist it to fit his ruling-class agenda. Thus he invokes "fairness" to justify increased taxes on the rich. Here's the data from the IRS on this. The rich pay a huge chunk of federal taxes, the rest of the top 50 percent pay almost all the rest and the bottom 50 percent pay almost nothing. What the bottom 50 percent do pay goes towards payroll taxes, i.e., Social Security and Medicare.

I've been arguing with a left-wing friend recently about "inequality." He has a chart that shows that median income went up with average income in the 1950s and 1960s. But since 1980 the median income has lagged the average income, so the rich have been getting more of it.

Folks like Walter Russell Mead and Megan McArdle tell why this happened. The post-World War II economy was corporatist. The benefits were parceled out by an inside deal between the Big Units: big government, big unions, and big corporations. But this crony capitalism ran out of money in the 1970s, as the rest of the world recovered from World War II and began to compete. But then breathtaking new developments in technology and commerce poured gigantic fortunes into the laps of the entrepreneurs that took the opportunities and made them into consumer products, men like Bill Gates and Steve Jobs. Then there was Sam Walton who built Wal-Mart up from nothing to become the world's biggest retailer. There's nothing fancy about Wal-Mart, just hard work to buy low and sell low, and provide an emergency operations center so Wal-Mart can flood assistance into disaster areas.

But what about the salvific progressive political leader? Where does he fit in all this? He really doesn't. We really don't need him. That is why the educated elite keeps coming up with new end-the-world scenarios. That's what political leaders and religious leaders have always done to persuade us to follow them.

And that's the point. Obama ran for office as a salvific leader under whose transformative leadership the "rise of the oceans began to slow and our planet began to heal." But really, global warming is a crock, and we've been working successfully on the environment for half a century, since about the time that Barack Obama was born in Hawaii.

The great Montesquieu imagined the modern government with its separated powers: legislative, executive and judicial. This was not an argument against tyrants, but an argument about the inevitable tyranny of a unified government.

Now we need to expand Montesquieu's ideas into a Greater Separation of Powers, between the political, the economic and moral-cultural sectors. Obviously the scope and power of salvific political leaders will be much reduced.

President Obama and his ruling class will kick and scream all the way to their eventual irrelevance. Oh well. I can handle that if you can.

| perm | comment(0) | | 01/26/12 9:45 am ET

Duck and Cover, Mr. President

I SUPPOSE THAT President Obama knows what he is doing with his class warfare strategy for reelection. Â His State of the Union speech was complete with Warren Buffett's secretary, the one that pays more, percentage-wise, in tax that her boss. But I'd like to warn you, Mr. President, that there is a ballistic missile en routeÂ that may well change the terms of trade in the current political...

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| perm | comment(0) | | 01/25/12 10:18 am ET

Obama is not a Friend of Catholics

YOU CAN UNDERSTAND that the liberal Catholics would want to find a way to support Barack Obama. Â After all, he believes in a lot of the same stuff they do: social justice, and solidarity. Â So it's not surprising that they would support Obama in 2008. But now they are finding out that Obama isn't returning the compliment. Â William McGurn in The Wall Street Journal: Now, suddenly, we have...

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| perm | comment(1) | | 01/24/12 10:50 am ET

Educrats Chase Teenaged Sailor Round World

HOW ABOUT THAT 16-year-old Laura Dekker from Holland, who just finished a round-the-world solo cruise in her 38 foot ketch Guppy? How about those child-welfare authorities that were hounding her and her parents? Miss Dekker fled abroad in 2010 when Dutch child welfare authorities took legal action to try to stop her making the voyage. She later won a 10-month court battle, promising judges she...

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| perm | comment(0) | | 01/23/12 1:48 pm ET

What About That Mean?

EVERY VIRTUE, says Aristotle, brings things into good condition. Â Therefore virtue is also "the state of character which makes a man good and which makes him do his own work well." Does that mean that the harder you work at virtue, the better? Â Not exactly, for virtue is not found in extremes, writes Aristotle, but at the mean between two extremes. Â It is "an intermediate between excess and...

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| perm | comment(0) | | 01/20/12 12:34 pm ET

The Green "Fight Against Big Oil"

WHEN ACTOR Robert Redford writes that the Keystone XL decision is an historic victory against Big Oil. Â He writes: President Obama has just rejected a permit for the Keystone XL tar sands pipeline -- a project that promised riches for the oil giants and an environmental disaster for the rest of us. His decision represents a victory of historic proportions for people from throughout the pipeline...

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| perm | comment(0) | | 01/19/12 12:48 pm ET

How Many Divisions Has the Soul?

STALIN FAMOUSLY inquired in 1944 how many divisions the pope had. Â Reportedly, Pope Pius XII replied that â€œYou can tell my son Joseph that he will meet my divisions in heavenâ€. Almost as confusing is Aristotle's explanation of the elements of the soul in Nicomachean Ethics I 13.Â OK, chaps, he says, there are, first of all, the rational and the irrational, although they are not quite as obviously...

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| perm | comment(0) | | 01/18/12 1:33 pm ET

Who Gets to Judge?

IF WE SAY, as we did yesterday, that we in western society are dealing with the Two Great Crimes of Modernity, then what do we do about it? The two great crimes are really quite simple. Â Capitalism's great crime is plantation slavery, when business owners got to own the people that worked their sugar plantations, first in Cyprus, then in the West Indian sugar islands and Brazil. Â And then there...

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| perm | comment(0) | | 01/17/12 12:31 pm ET

Two Great Crimes of Modernity

LET'S TELL it like it is. Instrumental reason, the Enlightenment, write Horkheimer and Adorno, is a dance of domination, domination over nature and domination over man. "What men want to learn from nature is how to dominate it and other men." Oh, gee, we already did. in Modernity's Original Sin. Â But let us do it again in a slightly different way. The Original Sin of modernity, the application...

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| perm | comment(0) | | 01/16/12 12:23 pm ET

Happiness: Is Virtue Sufficient |

| 01/13/12 12:58 pm ET
Barack Obama, "Vulture Capitalist" |

| 01/12/12 1:16 pm ET
Aristotle's Waffle on the Function Argument |

| 01/11/12 1:47 pm ET
Make Some Lemonade, Mitt(1) |

| 01/10/12 1:08 pm ET
What's the Story? |

| 01/09/12 1:58 pm ET
Let's Keep Things The Way They Are |

| 01/06/12 12:33 pm ET
Obama Deepens the Divide |

| 01/05/12 12:08 pm ET
Can Romney Beat the Mark of Bain? |

| 01/04/12 1:16 pm ET
Decline of Violence and Guns |

| 01/03/12 1:31 pm ET
Pinker's Better Angels |

| 01/02/12 1:24 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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