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 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.

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.

LATEST BLOGS

If GOP is Mean and Nasty, Then Dems Are...

OUR LIBERAL friends is the media and the academy and the Democratic Party do a superb job of painting conservatives and Republicans as mean and nasty. Haters, even.

Yes, but what do we do about it, writes, Lorie Byrd? We could just fight dirty, like they do. But that’s a problem; after all, we are conservatives.

I would not say we need to fight “dirty,” but at the very least we should stop being worried about being seen as mean or nasty... We not only do not fight hard enough against the image, and the unfair (and often untrue) allegations and accusations in reaction to them, but we do nothing to preempt them.

How the Republican Party and conservatives manage to do that is a big topic of discussion, but there is no doubt it is something they must do if they want any chance of regaining political power.

Actually, I think this will take care of itself. Conservatives were seen as mean and nasty when they were in power. In other words, to a liberal, a conservative with power is, by definition, mean and nasty. And certainly, a conservative with power is a roadblock to everything that liberals hold dear.

Now liberals are in power, and a lot of people don’t like it.

So the solution is simple. Tell the world what liberals are really like, using daily examples.

Of course we are not talking about liberals, personally. Many of my best friends are liberals. But liberal politics...

After years of painstaking research I have found that liberal politics always involves the following five characteristics:

CRUEL, CORRUPT, WASTEFUL, UNJUST, and DELUDED.

All we conservatives have to do is come up with examples, every day. Here are two, taken at random off the web yesterday and today:

Cruel:A mother discovers that her daughter at Stanford will have to live in a mixed-sex dorm room, i.e. two boys sleeping in the same room with daughter.
Unjust: A Tea-Party activist was denied the right to speak at a Quincy, MA city council meeting.

There are examples of this every day. And I will record them, and publish them away on my public Delicious account. I will use the following tags cruel corrupt wasteful unjust deluded as appropriate.

Here’s how you’ll find them:

See? That isn’t hard.

Remembering Jack Kemp

THIS WEEKEND Jeb Bush was telling conservatives that the Reagan era was over.The American people responded, he said, to the message of hope and change offered by the Democrats in 2008, and Republicans should offer the same.

Well maybe so. But before we do let’s pause one moment to remember Jack Kemp who, after Ronald Reagan himself, symbolized the Reagan era.

Jack Kemp was an AFL football hero who parlayed his local fame as quarterback of the Buffalo Bills into a seat in Congress. In the 1970s he responded to the Carter malaise and inflation by proposing, with Senator Bill Roth (R-DE), the Kemp-Roth plan to reduce income tax rates across the board by 30 percent.

The idea was anathema both to big-spending Democrats and budget-balancing Republicans.

But it caught the attention of presidential candidate Ronald Reagan and eventually became enacted in 1981, taking effect in 1983.

The year 1983, when the Reagan-Kemp-Roth tax cuts took effect, marked the beginning of the Great Boom that lasted from 1983 till 2000.

You can say that going over the events of the late 1970s is mere nostalgia, and that we should move on. Maybe we should, if we just want to win the next election.

But the point that Reagan enthusiasts are trying to make is that the policy of hard money, low tax rates, and restrained government spending is an agenda for the ages. In this view the troubles in the economy since 1998 arise from the abandoning of the Reagan-Kemp principles. Government is always a dead weight on the economy. It is also used by special interests who want to use the power of government to skew the economy to their advantage.

The point that Reagan and Kemp enthusiasts want to make is that the Obama agenda of cheap money, high spending, mega-projects, and high tax rates will end in tears just like the Carter economy of the late 1970s.

If that is nostalgia then let’s have more of it. It would certainly be a fitting memorial to Jack Kemp, conservative hero and great American.

Specter, Souter, Who Cares?

THE WORD this week is that either the Republican Party is becoming a rump as the hard right slams the door on a departing Senator Specter (D-PA). The purists always want to purify a party after a big loss, they say—as if that is going to help its political fortunes!

Or you can say that Sen. Specter was always more of a Democrat than a Republican, so what’s all the fuss about?

At least, according to Byron York, the Democrats don’t much like Specter either.

The fact is that the Republican Party is in the wilderness right now and that means that young men with an eye on the main chance (and old men wanting one last go at the aging whore of power) will all be working to slide their way into the Democratic Party. That’s where the money is—and the power and the love of beautiful women.

When the Republican Party rises again it will rise as a coalition of interests damaged by the big-government Democrats. Don’t worry. There will be plenty of them. RIght now many of them don’t yet know who they are.

Then there is Justice Souter and his retirement from the US Supreme Court.

It’s predictable that liberal Supreme Court justices would be streaming for the exits after the election of a liberal president. So if Justice Souter resigns this summer then he can have the confidence that President Obama will replace him with another reliable liberal vote. Meanwhile the reliable conservative justices will be hanging on like grim death, hoping to survive until the next Republican president gets into the White House.

This weekend is the 30th anniversary of the Thatcher Revolution. It is sobering to recall that the Brits only elected a conservative like her when the Labour Party had run the ship of state on the rocks, and the crashing waves of inflation, strikes, and incompetence were threatening to break up the ship completely.

In the day-to-day alarms of politics people come and people go. Real change doesn’t happen until there’s a crisis.

Sometimes not even then.

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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