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

**A bit of a C*ck Up on the NetZero Front**

Apparently the triumphant progress to NetZero in Britland is hitting a few potholes. As reported by Powerline.

Britain is incapable of building the wind farms, solar farms and transmission networks essential to net zero, a government report has warned.

Because? Oh, because Britain can’t produce enough “high voltage cables” or “switchgear” or “transformers.” Then there’s a shortage of “design and commissioning engineers, project managers, and installation technicians.” And to top it all,

The UK lacks the ships needed to build offshore wind turbines[.]

Wot? The nation that ruled the world with the Royal Navy and spawned hundreds of naval novels from Hornblower to Aubrey & Maturin? And it can’t build ships any more? Good lord, old chap!

OK. Let me help get those Brits “sorted.” Government is capable of only two jobs. The first one is to stop ordinary life to fight a world war, and the other is to hand out freebies to its supporters.

Note that to fight a world war the government tells everyone to stop business as usual and get to work providing the sinews of war. And just to help matters it stops production of civilian cars and trucks and homes and rations gasoline and everything else it can think of. And it drafts all the young men so that they can’t slow up the Big Push by getting married and settling down to have children.

But in the case of climate change governments haven’t quite declared a world war. They have, at a moral level, but not at a direct economic level. They have waved their hands in the air over EVs and supplied their tippy-top liberal friends with EV subsidies. But ordinary people don’t want EVs. Because? Because even at this late date, Americans feel, at a deep level, that one day they might want to “see the USA in a Chevrolet” even if the Chevrolet is a 3-row Japanese SUV. And an EV can’t cut it.

Of course, then there are my Four Laws, of which the first three apply to government direction of the economy. Remember?

Socialism cannot work because it cannot compute prices (Mises). OK, so the government is trying to direct traffic on the climate front, but the price system is getting in the way because green energy is expensive and so the market prices are saying “Don’t.” Just like President Biden.
The administrative state cannot work because the Man in Washington does not have the bandwidth to run the economy (Hayek). So, doing the green energy transition by direction isn’t going to work because the job is so huge that ordinary government bureaucrats — even directed by Literally Hitlers — just can’t see the size of the job or all the details that need to be figured out. That’s what the government report quoted above found out.
Regulation does not work because “regulatory capture” (Stigler). Yes. You and I probably don’t want to know the “six ways from Sunday” that the green energy regulations are being captured by Big Green and the Climate Industrial Complex. Not to mention Ten Percent for the Big Guy from the White House to the tiniest town in the hills of West Virginia.

So, you Brits, this is not that hard. When a government tries to do anything in the economic line, it usually fails. Because the job of government is to fight wars. And that is all.

Of course, that is why the economies of the western world are in a complete mess. Because of all the wars on COVID and poverty and ignorance and bigotry. Because they are not really wars for survival against the Mongol hordes they amount to nothing more than handouts to government supporters. And so they bollix up the economy and make us all poorer.

But that just advances the day of the Great Commoner Rebellion.

| perm | 04/18/24 9:30 pm ET | comments |

What Are They Afraid Of?

Yesterday a socialist mayor in Belgium sent the cops to shut down a conference of National Conservatives in Brussels.

The day before NY prosecutor Alvin Bragg put former President Trump on trial for alleged payment of hush money using the wrong account.

Today the US Senate voted not to hold a trial of impeached Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas.

A couple of days ago Maine voted to join the Interstate Compact in which states agree to cast their Electoral College votes for the winner of the popular vote in future presidential contests. This is a Democrat initiative that is based on the idea that Democrats always win the popular vote, and the president should be elected on the national popular vote. You can see why. If you look back at recent presidential elections, Trump in 2016, Bush in 2000, both won the Electoral College but lost the popular vote. In all the other elections since 1900 the winner of the popular vote won. We wuz robbed! If you are a Democrat.

However, I think that the flap over new NPR CEO Katherine Maher’s ridiculous woke racist tweets has nothing to do with the case.

The daughter of wealthy parents whose wedding was announced in the New York Times, Maher grew up in a wealthy white suburb of New York City before studying at the American University in Cairo, the Institut français du Proche-Orient in Syria, and finally New York University.

Really, darling, what do you expect a privileged educated white woman to believe? She believes the current fashionable virtue-signaling beliefs that “people like us” always believe.

Obviously, our rulers are worried and upset. Things are not going according to plan. I think the most helpful view on this is Mike Benz’s comment to Tucker Carlson. I go through the whole conversation here.

Benz thinks that the key moment was in 2016 with Brexit in Britain and Trump’s election in the USA. The national security states here and in Europe realized that Houston We Have a Problem.

Now the entire rules based international order would collapse unless the military took control over media, because Brexit would give rise to Brexit in France with Marine Le Pen, to spexit in Spain with the Vox party, to Italy. Exit in Italy to Gregson in Germany to Grexit in Greece.

I suppose all educated people in the tippy-top Elite 1% — like NPR’s Katherine Maher — get completely flummoxed when the world changes. And it doesn’t hurt that they all believe that nationalism equals Nazism equals literally Hitler, and the genocide of the Jews and a world war.

Why would you tippy-tops believe that?

What do you mean, peasant! Everybody knows that!

Frankly, I don’t have a clue what is coming. But I do believe that

Populist nationalism catering to the ordinary middle class has been building over the last 50 years. In the US at least since Nixon.
Unlike the Age of the Educated Class, which was all about the ideology, populist nationalism is organic. It doesn’t know what it is, and it doesn’t know where it is going.
I don’t think that the populist nationalist states will get into a war with each other, despite the fears of Literally Hitler in the tippy-top Elite 1%.
The endless enthusiasm in the tippy-top Elite 1% for full social mobilization, — for climate change, systemic racism, regulation, large-scale migration — is going to come a cropper, economically, sooner rather than later.
The big challenge for populist nationalism will be the We are the One and Only political culture that is the heritage of Russia, of China, and of Islam.

But do you know what I think?

I think that it isn’t going to matter whether they Get Trump. Or whether they close down Conservative Nationalist conferences. Or whether they refuse to get a handle on immigration. Or whether they fix the Electoral College. Or whether NPR CEOs are entitled white women from here to eternity.

The world is changing, our noble rulers don’t like it, and there is nothing they can do to stop it.

| perm | 04/18/24 12:14 am ET | comments |

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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

>>more>>