I can’t help but believe that we have been here before.
First, I don’t think the political “class” has learned a thing. We watched Greece go through their bankruptcy, conveniently referred to as “The Crisis.”
Creditors agreed to kick the can down the street by 10 years, but it’s resulted in impoverishment, loss of income, and a humanitarian crisis. Greece is a socialist hell hole.
It also required that all that Europe had to bail them out of their bankruptcy.
Are things different in Greece today? Not really. They are on the same path to insolvency and another bankruptcy all directed by exactly the same people who created the crisis in the first place. The only question is, when?
Argentina elected Javier Milei, a very colorful libertarian economist who brandished a chain saw and promised to cut government waste and fraud. Students of history know that before World War I, Argentina was among the 10 richest countries. But Socialist, populist policies destroyed their economy, bringing it to the edge of collapse.
Milei had significantly reduced poverty, but is now running into much the same detractions as Musk is encountering in the United States. Now the Argentinian economy appears poised to survive, the political class and their puppets come out demanding their cut.
A little over 40 years ago, we watched the entrenched bureaucracy, their alleged beneficiaries, and politicians conspire to slow the “Reagan Revolution’. It was documented in detail by Nobel Prize-winning Economist Milton Friedman and his wife Rose, in their book “The Tyranny of the Status Quo”.
We, as a people, have not learned a damn thing from any of this, and even reasonable men are starting to believe that the only way out is a rather unreasonable revolution. Presidents of the United States from both sides of the political spectrum have called for an end to government excess and waste.
While Reagan made the only modern attempt, every single President, including Bush 41, Clinton, Bush 43, and Obama bloviated about reigning in government waste and corruption. Of course, Biden was just fine with it, and contributed to the waste and fraud with sophomoric policies that did little more than line the pockets of his cronies.
Presidents preach about government waste and then do nothing about it for exactly the same reason – what Freidman described as the Iron Triangle of Politics. You have already seen what this triangle has done to Elon Musk. They have made him boogeyman number one, and they have been successful in immolating a rather large chunk of his net worth.
The Democrats are in complete panic mode over this because it reduces their power, hamstrings the bureaucrats who are beholden to them, and prevents them from having an eternal lower class that is under their thumb.
How long is it going to be before the Democrats use the Trojan Horse that they obscenely funded with your hard-earned dollars? The Black Lives Matter? Whatever Stacey Abrams received all that cash to put together? ANTIFA? Many others have received your tax dollars, too.
What we have heard from the opposition thus far is nothing – there is going to be a lot more coming, and the Democrats’ plan is to restore all of the waste and fraud, plus some. This is how a bartender from New York goes from borderline poverty to an eight figure net worth on a $174,000 per year Congressional salary.
Friedman described the “Iron Triangle of Politics” as the Politicians, Bureaucrats and Beneficiaries who effect the waste and fraud that is so rampant in Government. Let’s face it, half the population does not care because they don’t pay taxes.
The other half cares deeply because the excessive level of taxation and regulation is starting to impact their lives.
Along comes Elon Musk, and he’s making a difference. He’s finding the waste and the fraud and publicly calling it out. At the same time, President Trump is doing something about it. The Left has done all that they can to Trump, and he’s President anyway. They needed a new lightning rod – Elon Musk.
The other side of this issue is not going to go quietly, and their power, which unbeknownst to us, even though we paid for it, is significant. The Left is out claiming that Musk’s approach is a hammer, while a scalpel is what’s needed.
We are well past rooting out the problems and surgically extracting them. The only way this stops is through bold, decisive action. Historically, the only way the level of waste and fraud that we are experiencing can be stopped is through revolution.
I’m hoping that we don’t have to do that, but the framers of our great nation cautioned us against what is happening today. Friedman cautioned us about this slightly more than 40 years ago.
What happens to Milei in Argentina bears careful examination. It could well be a harbinger of things to come in these United States. Stopping government waste and fraud is not going to be easy.
Our government is too large, too invasive, and too brutal, and it’s way beyond what we need a government to do, and the excess must be stopped.
Now, not later.
