Christopher Chantrill - Writer, conservative, government spending taxes debt deficit

Christopher Chantrill

Welcome!

WELCOME. I am Christopher Chantrill @chrischantrill, writer and conservative. You can see my work at the following sites:

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.

US Spending 101 is a “university” of government spending. It features several walks through the pages of the usgovernmentspending.com suite of websites. And the learning never stops. But it is not a real university, nor does it offer credits for courses completed. 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.

UKpublicrevenue.co.uk is a resource on public revenue in the United Kingdom. It presents tables and charts on public revenues by central government, and local authorities in the United Kingdom from 1900 to the present. Revenue data is sourced from UK Office for Budget Responsibility, the UK National Statistics 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 Presidential Elections tabulates the results of presidential elections going back to 1788. 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 CHRISTOPHER CHANTRILL, 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.

Soon after moving to Seattle, I instinctively revolted against the suffocating left-coast culture of the Soviet of Washington, and soon came to revere the four great Germans who helped inspire the Reagan revolution: Ludwig von Mises, F.A. Hayek, Leo Strauss, and Eric Voegelin. Since then I have broadened my appreciation of “The German Turn” that has transformed the world over the last 200 years.

I have written for Liberty, FrontPageMag.com, and The American Thinker. My 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. My book An American Manifesto: Life after Liberalism tries to imagine what America would look like after the end of left-wing politics and big government.

Disclaimer and Transparency

WE make no respresentation about the accuracy of the data presented in these websites. Nor does Christopher Chantrill represent himself to possess any formal qualifications to select, evaluate or present the information. Users are urged to check all data against the published data sources and to report any errors or inconsistencies.

The websites have no relationship with any government institution, or any other institution. They are supported solely by advertising and by the life, fortune, and sacred honor of Christopher Chantrill.

Daily Blogging

WE BLOG DAILY, Monday to Friday, 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, 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.

LATEST BLOG

Bjorn Merker's "Perishing Promise"

When and how did the West go wrong? Let’s call the history of the last 1000 years an “experiment in popular sovereignty.” That is what Bjorn Merker calls it in his unpublished book Perishing Promise: a thousand year history of how the West came to fight itself.

The idea was that change, in the increase of “either human equality or human freedom” or both, would lead to a society “in which every member is happy, equal, and free.”

In the introduction, Merker writes, the whole project has failed, because it has been “pursued by means of state policy, power, and programs.” We live, therefore, under a

soft despotism that wields the slogans of popular sovereignty, self-governance, and democracy as means to buttress its power over the populations under its jurisdiction.

Ain’t that the truth, DSA kiddies!

Then Merker proceeds to discuss his understanding of social reality.

We humans live with “the human brain” sitting atop “an unimaginably complex organic vehicle of survival we call our body.”

But back to the brain. Merker wants us to understand our brain in three parts:

First nature, “the nature we have as humans irrespective of the idiosyncratic particulars of our personal history.”
Second nature. In our early years we develop “much of our basic perceptual, cognitive, and social learning” by just being a kid in a family. Let’s just say that it is the time where a youngster learns to play the “social game” as playing and practiced in their family.
Third nature. This is our unique property as human beings, and it issues from “the watershed adaptation of our species: the biological singularity of human language.” And that “makes all the difference in the world.”

Obviously, our “third nature” and language is an adaption of unimaginable power. But there is a problem. How do we know whether our tribe “is descended from the gods”? If something goes wrong, “is it punishment for something we did?”

The conceptual fertility of language which allow us to ask fanciful questions with such ease also allows us to provide fanciful answers with equal ease.

But if everyone is using their language abilities to conjure up fanciful answers to fanciful questions, how to we decide what’s right and what’s wrong — short of asking Dr. Fauci to decide? No problem, we humans have solved the problem.

Each culture.. finds its way… to a set of authoritative answers that put and end to the interminable uncertainty [conjured up] by human language… Call them “closure beliefs”[.]

Yes indeed.

A “closure belief” is a fixed, traditional, answer to questions that lie beyond the powers of a given culture to adjudicate on empirical grounds… for the conduct of its practical affairs.

“Typically [these] ‘closure beliefs’ are the products of long and tortuous historical processes of cultural transmission[.]”

Or, we could say, in the age of mass media, such “closure beliefs” can be established every day at 6:00pm by Dr. Anthony Fauci and Dr. Deborah Birx declaring that the latest government edict represents “the science.”

I think that the notion of “closure belief” is extremely powerful and important. It helps us understand what is going on in the public square today.

You could say that, just as Nazi jurist Carl Schmitt wrote that “Sovereign is he who decides on the exception”, the cultural hegemon is he who decides the “closure belief” on a particular topic.

Back in the day, we can say, “closure beliefs” were decided by shamans. Then by the Church. Then by Enlightenment intellectuals. Then by Stalin’s secret police. And now?

You can see that a lot of what we argue about in the public square these days is about what discussion is closed and what discussion is open. In other words, we don’t have a way of establishing “closure beliefs” any more, because nobody today has the moral authority that shamans and priests had in the olden time.

For instance, guys like me say that the question of socialism is closed. We have tried socialism all across the world and it has failed every time it was tried. But the DSA kiddies all think that capitalism equals racism and exploitation and settler-colonialism and socialism is really cool and, anyway, young people with useless degrees like them are going to be demolished by AI by the middle of next week.

So it’s a rerun of the hand-loom weavers being replaced by machine looms. And when our whole way of life gets demolished we humans get real angry and start breaking things.

More to come, starting with our medieval beginnings.

| Wed, 05 Aug 2026 22:52:42 GMT |

Social Cooperation Among the Guys

I believe that humans are social animals. We cooperate for our mutual benefit. It’s in the jeans.

But obviously that is not the whole story. Men are also coded for fighting and defending the border of the territory of the band, the clan, the tribe, the nation.

In the current era the fighting part seems to have overwhelmed the cooperating part, so that the conventional wisdom is that we need a strong government to protect us from all kinds of perils, from Nazis to Commies to racists to economic royalists to climate change.

I don’t like that, so for some time I have tuned my social media receptors to news of ordinary non-governmental cooperation: how do actual humans cooperate in the wild?

Yesterday, on my X-feed, I found out, in a post by NOBUNAGA on the deeply philosophical question of the all-American truck culture. You should go and read the post for yourself, but I will help with some quotes from the post.

I needed to move a sofa.
I mentioned this to an American. He said, “You know anybody with a truck?”
I did not know anybody with a truck.
He looked at me with real concern. Not pity. Concern. The way you look at a man who has told you he does not have a name.
“You gotta know somebody with a truck.”

Well, eventually NOBUNAGA found Kevin, and Kevin showed up with his truck and a helper, name of Tony, and they moved the bed in 11 minutes. Then NONABAGA offered to pay.

I offered them money. Both of them laughed at the same time, which felt rehearsed and was not.
I asked what I owed them.
Kevin said, “Buy the pizza.”
That is the price. That is the entire economy. The truck costs one pizza and the pizza is not negotiable and the pizza is also not expensive and everyone knows what size.

Well, they sat down next to the sofa and ate the pizza.

Three weeks later, Kevin texted me.
“You free Sunday? Helping Tony move a fridge.”
He did not ask if I wanted to. He informed me of a fridge.

So off he went.

I went. I moved the fridge. I have no truck. I contributed only arms.
Afterward, a man I had never met asked me if I knew anybody with a truck.
I said, “Yeah, I got a guy.”
I have a guy.
I am somebody’s guy now, too. Tony has told two people about me.
He describes me as “the guy who’s strong for his size.”
I have never been prouder of a sentence in my life.

Go and read the whole thing for yourself. Right here.

Up to now I have talked about men as fighters, women as carers. Men have a culture of courage, women a culture of being good. Men know they are expendable, women expect to be protected. Etc.

Here we are talking about the culture of social cooperation among men with no government, no force, no guilt-tripping in sight. And it is good.

All very well. But what do we call the culture of a “guy with a truck?”

I know: we are talking about the culture of barn raising, just like in rural America of the olden time, and the Amish of today.

OK. Been there, done that.

Now I am on the look-out for an X-post that tells us all we need to know about the instinctive culture of social cooperation among women. With no government in sight.

| Tue, 04 Aug 2026 20:59:06 GMT |

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.

An American Manifesto: The Book

Contents

Chapter One

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