Christopher Chantrill
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The Day After the Wealth Tax

So, the California Democrats want to tax the wealth of billionaires. Of course they do.

But we Sun Tzu fans want to know why. What is driving this absurd idea to tax the most creative Americans and spend the money on corrupt schools and healthcare?

Yes, I know. Our Democratic friends are running out of other people's money.

Lewis M. Andrews goes a bit deeper. He thinks about “the perspective of the Democrat Party’s two most reliable financial and organizational backers, the public employee unions and government subsidized nonprofits.”

So what is the point of taxes on billionaires? It won't solve the fiscal problem of blue states, but

it would at least give unions and nonprofits the ability to enter negotiations on the post-crisis preservation of their priorities from a much higher base line.

And one of the fundamental rules of politics is that you can never cut spending programs.

Well, all I can say is that I hope they are wrong. I hope that the resulting fiscal meltdown will be so bad that it will trigger a mostly peaceful rebellion against corrupt big government unions and corrupt nonprofits.

After all, the average voter is getting screwed by their local governments and the NGO Industrial Complex. Every Single Day. All the governments deliver is lousy schools, ridiculous handouts to migrants and drug users, and asphyxiating regulations. on the lives of ordinary people. And the cost is big salaries and gold-plated pensions.

But you never know.

Thing is: the way we see a current regime defeated these days, from US MAGA to Reform UK to populist nationalism in Hungary, is not by a brave new agenda but just a non-ideological impulse to stop this nonsense and stupidity already.

All parts of the government in the US are exactly what the Biden administration demonstrated to all and sundry: corrupt, incompetent, and eye-wateringly expensive.

Ditto for the Starmer regime in Britain. It is clear, after the Labour Party got blown out in the late local elections, that Sir Keir Starmer is just a creature of current progressive banalities, and doesn’t have a clue about How to Get Out of Here.

When you think about it, the Democrat response to running out of money is the obvious one: the job of every regime is to reward its supporters. If it comes to the point where the regime actually “runs out of other people’s money” — hello Iran — then it is pretty well useless. It was already useless for people not connected to the regime. But when the regime can’t even keep its own supporters happy, then things really turn South.

Are we at that point yet? We’ll only know when it’s too late. The problem for the current regime, I’d say, is that it has to pay out trillions every year to people who are not really its devoted supporters: Social Security and Medicare recipients, for example.

On the other hand, the problem for the next regime is that its supporters don’t want to give up their freebies from the current regime, from Social Security to free public schools.

I say that what is needed is a political genius to sell the American people on converting Social Security to a real IRA plan, Medicare to a real health insurance plan, and childhood education to a program of vouchers, charter schools, and micro schools.

Oh, and “never trust experts.”

Only problem is that I think it will take more than a genius to achieve that.

Maybe the place to start is to ban unions for public employees and demolish the NGO Industrial Complex. That would only require a semi-genius political leadership. Maybe the answer is in an echo of The Communist Manifesto:

The following will be pretty generally applicable

  1. Abolition of all public sector labor unions.

  2. Confiscation of the income of all non-profit institutions not given to the poor.

For a start.

But maybe the real answer is a comprehensive and mandatory study of the Spencer Pratt campaign for LA Mayor.

| Mon, 11 May 2026 23:33:57 GMT |


Hey Gerry! How's the Mandering?

Yep, who was that Elbridge Gerry guy that first invented gerrymandering up in Massachusetts? Bless his heart! You know that the original gerrymander was shaped like a salamander?

But the question now is, after our Democratic friends got their Virginia gerrymander nixed by the Virginia State Supreme Court, how desperate are our Democratic friends?

After all, if they were going to win the midterms going away, why bother?

You mean that, in fact, our Democratic friends knew they were in a whole peck of trouble, and desperately needed those extra seats in the Democratic column? No! Because the triumphant truth of Allyism and its fight for the Oppressed against the White Male Oppressors cannot fail!

Like I say, my belief is that the Age of the Educated Class is about over, and our liberal and globalist and wokey friends need to get used to it. And their idea that they can save the world with politics is a conceit and a lie. After all, how do they know that it is their truth that will fundamentally transform the Earth instead of another Saving Truth?

I say the meaning of life, the universe, everything, is not 42 but grandchildren. Whaddya think of them apples?

Especially now that Nigel Farage and his Reform UK Party look like they are cleaning up the local elections in Britland and eating Sir Keir Starmer for breakfast. Or at least, a pub lunch.

I was reading recently that the one thing that drives politics — especially since the expansion of the vote in the 19th century — is the Nation. A few of the smarter Commies realized this in World War I. That’s what the Frankfurt School was all about.

Forget your ideology, your Rights of Man, your limited government, your Justice, your Oppression, you educated snobs. Humans, we humans, identify with the land we love.

Now I, of course, am a bit weird in this respect. My Dad was born in Russia, my Mom in Japan, and I was born in India, and raised in Britland. It’s a long story!

And I freely admit that I was probably first radicalized in Britland when some professorial adjunct at Uni told me that I was taking away a university place from a working-class lad.

But I tell you, with tears in my eyes, that I became an American the morning I woke up in the gin-clear Colorado dawn of Denver after flying in to see my parents for Christmas in 1965 after my first term at the University of Leeds in Britland, just down the road, I suspect, from Downton Abbey in Yorkshire. And I’ve never looked back.

And then I started reading The Wall Street Journal during the reign of Bob Bartlett, and learned about Mises and Hayek & Co.

Listen, dear liberal friends. I get it. You are the educated ones. You are the wise ones. You know. And you know that the future belongs to those that administer and regulate and hand out goodies to the plebs — but only the right kind of plebs, supervised by a whole universe of educated wise ones in their cozy NGO sinecures.

And now it’s all collapsing around you and you “cain’t stand it.”

Let me be clear. Gerrymandering won’t fix it. Woke politics won’t fix it. Government programs won’t fix it. Wealth taxes won’t fix it. Mental health professionals won’t fix it. You guys are done.

And as I say, the only question now is the size of the butcher’s bill. That’s ‘Murican for the only question yet unresolved: whether youse educated-class guys and gals will go quietly into the good night. Or not.

What’s it to be, sports fans?

| Sat, 09 May 2026 03:14:10 GMT |


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Christopher Chantrill Follow chrischantrill on Twitter

Christopher Chantrill (@chrischantrill) is a writer and conservative.

He runs usgovernmentspending.com, the go-to resource for government finance data, and is a frequent contributor to the American Thinker. He lives in Seattle, Washington. Click for more.


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TODAY’S MAXIMS:

The world must be made safe for democracy — Woodrow Wilson

Socialism is the faith of rich kids that never had a job. Marx, anyone?

all maxims...

BIG IDEAS:

The simplest way to understand human society is as Three Layers such as Nobles, Yeomen, and Serfs.

My take on Three Layers is my Three Peoples Theory of Creatives, Responsibles, and Subordinates.

I believe that we moderns live in Three Worlds: the War World of politics, the Market World of the economy, and the Life World of family and neighborhood.

And the trouble with politics is that it reduces human society to a war against the enemy, as determined by Nazi jurist Carl Schmitt.

The world that we all live in today is the one created by the German Turn in philosophy, psychology, science, and meaning.

But our modern elite, the educated elite, has taken, I believe, a Wrong Turn and has imposed a cultural Great Reaction on the world, a lurch back to the primitive. This manifests in the elite’s conceited Activism Culture and its patronage of Subordinate people as its Little Darlings.

The principal reason for the elite’s Wrong Turn has been that it does not understand and does not want to understand how the Three Peoples’ Religions are necessarily different.

The root of the educated elite’s Wrong Turn is its conceit that it knows what the world needs. I think there is a better way; I call it “A Good Life Better than the Left”.

IN BRIEF:
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