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Life Unaffordable? Blame Politics and Government
All the experts agree that the US is facing an “unaffordability” crisis.
Of course, I get where this is coming from. Prices are up about 40% since the Day Before COVID, so everyone is blaming it on the Other Guy.
The Democrats are blaming it all on billionaires and oligarchs.
Ron Dreyer quotes Evan Barker and her new book: Nothing Left: Confessions of a Democratic Operative.
As life becomes more unaffordable for Americans, and our politicians do not take meaningful action to address the problem, it is clear to me that the future, right or left, regardless of who is in power, will be populist. Whichever “establishment” party is in charge will continually be voted out, every four years, until a transformative FDR-like figure emerges, from either side of the aisle, delivering either a Republican or Democratic version of transformation that permanently improves the lives of most Americans.
OK. So what “transformation that permanently improves the lives of most Americans” is on offer?
None, really. Because the affordability crisis, the “problem” to be addressed, is the fault of two parties. There’s the Democrats, courtesy of FDR & Co. And there are the Republicans, that don’t have a clue.
You see we have an affordability crisis in the US in part because government takes about 40 percent of the income Americans earn in useful work and spends it on stuff that is less useful. Then it regulates the economy in favor of various interests. Wanna know who that is? Any group that can credibly be described as Big Something, from Big Government to Big Pharma to Big Education. And also any group that can be described as an Industrial Complex, from Ike’s Military Industrial Complex to the Activist Industrial Complex to the Climate Industrial Complex.
Then there is the Federal Reserve System that printed 40 percent more dollars in 2020-21 and has reduced the value of the dollar by 99 percent over the past century.
Then there is Social Security that channels savings for retirement through government.
Then there is government healthcare programs and regulation of healthcare. Healthcare costs are increasing faster than anything else, from real estate to automobiles.
Then there is government welfare that encourages women to get government to pay for their children rather than the child’s father.
Then there is government education that is mostly administrators doing who knows what.
Then there is government subsidies for home loans that increase the price and the size of homes.
There’s your affordability crisis.
The Democrats won’t do anything about it because each of the programs mentioned helped buy them votes back in the day.
The Republicans won’t do anything about it because nothing infuriates a human more than having their government benefits cut.
Back to Evan Barker. She understands that the “establishment” parties are chained to the status quo.
But what can “populists” of left or right do about it?
Right populists like Trump are trying to fix the economy with magic tricks like Trump Accounts and Trump Tariffs and No Tax on Tips.
Left populists like the DSA are trying to fix affordability with government food stores and taxing billionaires with a wealth tax.
Nobody dares to deal with our real problem: the trash mountain of free stuff handed out over the last century.
| Fri, 14 Aug 2026 00:15:01 GMT |
Merker: Rousseau's Invention of the Revolutionary Radical
In his Perishing Promise, Bjorn Merker develops an understanding of the West, “divided down the middle by an ideational watershed” of a reformist Enlightenment versus a revolutionary Enlightenment.
I have boiled this down in my Maxims to Liberty vs. Liberté, and Equality vs. Egalité:
Anglo culture: Liberty is the right to be left alone by government, to live life as we have always lived it.
Continental culture: Liberté stands opposed to tradition in the emancipatory overthrow of the present way of life.Anglo culture: Equality means the ancient rights and liberties of Englishmen, and nobody is above the law.
Continental culture: Egalité means substantive equality. No social distinctions except to support the common good.
Rousseau was the guy that really set up the Continental revolutionary tradition, and “man is born free, but everywhere he is in chains.” It’s the secular analog to the Fall of Man. Only now it’s all the fault of society, not the fallen man. So Rousseau produced a “universal alibi.”
[A]nyone experiencing a lack of satisfaction with their lives… [could] treat their condition as one for which they bore no responsibility but which instead could be laid at the feet of “society”.
Thus society robs the frustrated individual of “a happiness they would have enjoyed by virtue of their nature.” Obviously there is only one thing to do: overthrow the society that has frustrated you.
The curious thing is that Rousseau wants to solve the frustration of the individual by the force of a societal “general will” that instinctively works to advance the “common good”. And how does this happen? Through the “great soul of the legislator”. And who is that “great soul”?
We know now. It is the Rousseau, or Marx, or Lenin, or Mao, or devoted activist that knows he holds the secret of the general will and common good in his soul and has the talent to express it. So what’s the difference between this “great soul” and the monster soul encoding in capitalists, robber barons, economic royalists and billionaires? Never mind. Anyway:
[T]he fasle alibi of Rousseau’s stance of blaming “society” (“civilization”) for his own subjective discomforts, combined with his totalitarian collectivist prescription for a cure, supplied the modern world with a permanent gate of recruitment to the banner of the partisans of overthrow[.]
No doubt our present generation of woke DSA kiddies exactly fits the mould. Encouraged by their woke university teachers and emboldened by the lack of completion in their young lives, the answer to their woes is obvious. Burn it all down.
For us, the point about Rousseau is that he helps us understand the revolutionary radical. He interprets his feeling of failure, of inadequacy, as the fault of society. If our radical feels he is in chains, because of lack of tenure, or lack of material success, it cannot be his fault, born free. It must be the chains that did it.
Interestingly, to me, Rousseau wants to understand the “general will” as magically imposed by a great soul. But anyone with half a brain understands that the “general will” is worked out every day in the market economy by the communication between buyer and seller in the price system. And the millions of transactions between millions of actors is what works out the “common good.” That is why we say that humans are social animals.
But that is the last thing that the educated sons of businessmen (Engels) or tippy-top lawyers (Marx) are willing to admit.
It’s obvious that the feeling of inadequacy is a fundamental experience of human life, whether it’s the feeling of Sin, that it’s all your own fault, or the feeling of injustice, that it’s all society’s fault.
And it seems there are two solutions. One is to build yourself up, despite discouragement and, willy-nilly, make yourself into a worthy person and contribute to society. The other is to build yourself up by destroying society.
With the example of Rousseau, Bjorn Merker helps us understand how the two solutions to the problem of inadequacy present themselves to people in the modern world.
| Thu, 13 Aug 2026 01:34:03 GMT |
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Christopher Chantrill
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.
“I love this guy.” — Steve Ballmer
A Commoner Manifesto
Commoners have nothing to lose but their shame
The field of perception is the distinction between reality and fantasy
For my friends, everything; for my enemies, the law — Óscar R. Benavides, president of Peru 1933-1939
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”.
ABC of Politics – Activism Culture – “Anatomy of Revolution” – Allyism – Critical Theory – Downstream-ism – Dutch Finance – German Turn – Good Life – Great Reaction – Little Darlings – Perfect Plan – Women in the Public Square – Ruling Class – Three Layers – Three Peoples – Three Peoples Religion – Tribalism – Two Cultures – Wrong Turn
Today’s topic: Reactions to Nietzsche
