To contribute to the sea of Trump shock ink – and it depresses me to think there is more of it than epic poetry, the same way it’s depressing that there are more Juggalos than polar bears – here is the libertarian takeaway: the anti-establishment aspect is the main thing. National elections, every four years, are a very clumsy, indirect, form of political adaptation. And as this clumsy power is getting more and more powerful, the stakes are getting higher as more power wends its way up to the executive branch of government. I’ve said it in other articles: I’d have a good laugh on the power-hungry Democrats, for the irony of their crying over power-hungry Trump making off with their power, if I didn’t think nobody in the country will be laughing at the outcome (Trump has a “pen and a phone” too). Maybe a silver-lining will be an awful President Trump, causing Congress to rediscover its role. But for now: what comes from the Government, goes to the Government. It’s scary to think that President Trump will hold policy power over the heath care insurance of most Americans; over a sixth of the whole US economy. Power like that must make a Communist apparatchik febrile with lust. Ask our Founding Fathers or Victor Von Frankenstein about how power, once made, cannot be controlled. It’s a rod we made for our own back.
We get to vote for a candidate somewhat representing a bundle of issues, some buried deep inside, every four years, a grab bag. But that bag is getting more and more baggy, less and less grabby. Say I wanted tort reform, where do I turn? Say I want the money given to the Kleptocrats of Afghanistan to go to the lesser Kleptocrats of Detroit. Say I feel our incarceration rate is a bipartisan anathema to our free heritage. This narrowing of options is a feature of our system, not a bug: remember at the height of the war in Iraq in 2004, our choice was between a socialized medicine Republican (with Medicare part C) and a pro-war Democrat (or wherever Kerry wound up).
This quandary of limited political adaptability applies through the entire “politically developed” world: If I’m a Briton, and I don’t want a Belgian to tell me what olive oil is to be put in front of my customers, or what the definition of “cheese” is, where do I go for redress? To the equivalent of the EU cheese Department of Motor Vehicles? For five thousand years of recorded human history, “cheese” was what tasted cheesy. Most people don’t like politics, and they don’t want their cheese tastes to be politicized. With the modern clerk-state a man with incarceration power can overrule your tastes, and like Czar Nicholas II said: “I do not rule Russia. 10,000 clerks do.” These sorts of rules were to be put on bureaucratic auto-pilot. But auto-pilots can fly you right into a mountain, too. Also, “bureaucratic auto-pilot” is not a phrase anyone with sense would associate with success in a modern, dizzyingly adaptable, twenty-first century economy.
Law must be accessible to be respectable, and rule of law is the mortar gluing the West together. But is mortar is being eroded by Byzantine cheese and olive oil machinations? This is where overregulation leads. There is a mammoth number of laws and regulations passed in the USA every year that contain criminal sanctions. These are powers of the Government, written in stone, with only a very rare chance those affected by them can have any input, and the only output is force: jail or fine. Famously, Nancy Pelosi wanted to pass Obamacare in order to find out what is in it. But a violator of the rules of what’s in it will not have this whimsical good-faith defense honored. It makes mockery of the notion of rule of law. This is why NAFTA never affected the legitimacy of any country (It’s the “free trade” part. We should invite the UK on over). If you have a rule that dictates what constitutes olive oil, you can bet it was not lobbied for by restaurants that serve it, but by a status quo coalition of those who stand to benefit from etching the definition of olive oil into permanent legal stone (same historical rule: olive oil is what tastes olive oily). If you strip away the layers of legalese this looks to ordinary people an awful lot like bribery. Bribery and insider double-dealing is most definitely delegitimizing to the perception of Government.
In the Trump post-mortem much of the media coverage has been from the perspective that it was some sort of Salem Witch, black-magic spell outbreak that came over the resentful white “left-behinds.” I watched CNN election coverage for hours on “black Tuesday,” and they made not one mention of the cost spirals of Obamacare, which Bill Clinton described as “the craziest thing in the world.” Or of our three quarters of a generation of stalemated, staggeringly expensive warfare Hillary Clinton wanted to continue. There was no mention of the obvious failures of the auto-piloters.
The election bundled a lot of these issues into the Trump bag. His success correlates with the developed world’s general political earthquake (no concept of “white left-behinds” in France).
Another lesson for the elites: the voters just might be smart enough to take into account the European experience with concentrated government: that there is hardly any prospect of back-tracking from bad policy ideas once made stoney. The EU project is popular nowhere, yet it is somehow all-powerful.The Europeans have solid historical reasons to fear and loathe unpopular and all-powerful, governments, yet the best expert arguments against Brexit were that the EU is bad, but leaving would be worse. This is an excellent argument against building Frankenstein’s monster in the first place. Look at Greece: with less than 2% of the GDP of the Euro area, it nearly brought everyone’s economic well-being down in a procession of crises. Anyone would agree that this is not a resilient, robust system. But the only way to change the EU egg is to break it, and an egg cannot be remade (like Obamacare? We will see). The possibility of being unable to retrace my steps back from an error is problem-solving logic I use on my job every day. It’s logic available to all other problem-solving systems, except our hugely baggy, barely grabby Government. And one suspects the system was designed to be insulated from accountability from the start. So all the peasants, the outsiders, “the basket of deplorables” can do is seethe and look for a chance at revenge. Their torturer is somewhere inside the bag, so the revenge will always lack specificity and clarity; the attack was opaque too.
The American people have dragged out Doctor Victor Von Frankenstein, with their torches and pitchforks, before more monsters could be made. We will see what monster their Deliverer turns out to be. That there is a bag for a monster to grab is a rod we made for our own backs.
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