[This is something like the second post I’ve put up in the past six months.  I have no excuses to offer to a silent room, at least beyond observing that if I don’t work, my children don’t eat, the house goes back, and then I can’t keep this tiny patch of the Internet free to be my echo chamber.]

In the course of re-reading one of my favorite non-P. G. Wodehouse fiction books, R. F. Delderfield’s To Serve Them All My Days, I ran across this quotation from Edmund Burke:  “Among a people generally corrupt, liberty cannot long endure.”  It set me to thinking.

Burke specifically set me to thinking about the IRS scandal.  As usual, Paul L. Caron’s keeping score over at his blog.  He posts daily (literally) updates on the most recent oozing filth to be squeezed into daylight from a stone-walling bureaucracy that has long since abandoned any pretense — any at all — that the laws, let alone The Law, applies to it.  Granted, you have to be at least some fraction of a bubble out of plumb to get sufficiently into tax law as not only to teach it but to blog about it, but I’m sure Prof. Caron’s a loyal husband and loving father.  More to the point, his dogged insistence that old men forget, but the IRS shall not be forgot (w/apologies to Henry V) gives me hope that he may be one righteous man upon the finding of whom the gods of civic chaos may stay the visiting of justice upon a wicked land.

Very briefly summarized, where we are is that the senior — as in the commissioner and his chief counsel — folks at the IRS cobbled together a program to target applicants for non-profit status under § 501(c)(4) of the Revenue Code who had certain key words in their names, or who engaged in advocacy contrary to certain political positions, or who even made disseminating copies of the U.S. constitution a project (don’t you just recoil in horror from that last?).  Specifically, they were looking for nasty, ominous-sounding key phrases like “patriot” and “9/12”; they established as a selection criterion criticism of Dear Leader.  These groups were then subjected to an organized-from-on-high, highly detailed program to harass them, to make them expose the names of any who sympathised with them or actively supported them (whether or not members; I guess it’s good that Lindbergh only supported the Nazis but never actually joined up eh wot?).  Even when all the intrusive questions were fully answered (no kidding: among the questions which the federal bureaucracy felt itself entitled to ask was what were the contents of prayers said by some of these groups), and the broad-ranging scope of document demands satisfied, the IRS simply refused to rule one way or the other.  Months and in some cases years went by.  Meanwhile the leftish organizations sailed through the same process in a matter of weeks.

Well so what?  Here’s what.  Without a ruling on 501(c)(4) status from the IRS, an organization which desired such status could not raise funds, as a practical matter.  And as we all know, these days without money your voice remains unheard.  Now, curiously these initiatives within the IRS had their genesis shortly after the 2010 mid-term elections and shortly after the Citizens United ruling.  Gentle Reader will remember 2010 as the election cycle in which Dear Leader and his party in Congress got beat like a red-headed step-child.  This beat-down was to no small degree the result of hundreds of thousands of ordinary citizens, many of them utter new-comers to the political process, coming together to express at the voting booth their disgust at things like the auto bail-outs, the porkulus stimulus bill, and crowning the edifice of legislative malfeasance, the comically misnamed Affordable Care Act.  These people and groups, nebulous, not under the control of the quisling Republican party, and most annoyingly, remarkably intelligent, coherent, and focused on the subject and origins of their outrage, had to be suppressed.  They just had to be.  But being a many-headed hydra they couldn’t be slain with a single blow to a central organization, nor could they be bought off (both of which statements have applied to the Republican congress members for generations now).  What to do?  The answer of course was obvious:  Use the administrative machinery to starve them of money and therefore air.  By cutting off their funding sources you ensure that each tiny group remains isolated, confined to a tiny core of members who can only do what they individually can afford to do from their own resources.  And of course you remind them that their resources are not safe by having your colleagues in the ATF, OSHA, and the other alphabet-soup agencies come a-visiting, each bearing a document request list.

It wasn’t just the bureaucratic intimidation treatment, either.  The IRS also leaked things like donor lists of entities whose applications were still in progress to outfits closely aligned with Dear Leader.  And it’s not like those lists were just leaked out there on some message board, either.  No, those lists were provided to specifically adverse organizations, which then went out and organized harassment of those donors.

And it worked.  In the 2012 election cycle the Tea Party groups were a pale shadow of their former selves in 2010.

During the time this was happening, of course, the IRS commissioner and his chief counsel are spending a truly astounding amount of time at the White House, meeting with Dear Leader.

I’m sure that was purely a coincidence.  Like Lois Lerner pleading her Fifth Amendment privilege when Congress hails her to testify.

And on the other side?  Well, I don’t know if you can even call it a “side,” because to be a “side” in a dispute you at least have to acknowledge that there’s a disputable issue.  The IRS shenanigans have disappeared into a black hole of non-information.  About the only mentions of it you hear are solemn, slavish repetitions by the unpaid Democrat operatives mainstream media of transparently bogus statements by Democrat congress members and their staffs that there’s no story there, that it’s a “fake scandal,” that the whole thing is made up and besides racism. 

The IRS itself has taken a number of positions, starting with “this was just a couple of rogue agents in the Cincinnati field office,” each of which has turned out not only to be inconsistent with observable patterns of behavior but to be flat-out contradicted by documents originating within the IRS itself.  The DoJ claims it is “investigating” the wrong-doing, but has not even contacted so much as a single group which was the target of these tactics.  Not a single one, nor their lawyers.

To repeat:  From those ever-vigilant watch-dogs of government we get . . . nothing beyond the credulous repetition of party talking points.

When you do hear public mention of the goings-on, it’s very frequently by someone whose sympathies with Dear Leader are either already well-known (as in the vacuous celebrity prettyfaces), or whose sympathies are otherwise made clear by circumstances.  And the tone of their remarks can only be described as crowing over all them nasty Tea Partiers just gettin’ what they deserve because racism.  After all.

Which brings to mind Burke’s observations.  There are two things which every society absolutely, positively, as in cannot-last-without-it have: (i) a secure — which is to say uncensored and private — postal system, and (ii) a politically non-active revenue-gathering mechanism.  If I cannot trust that the check I write each month for my house payment will not be plundered by either postal workers or by third parties who are allowed to get at the mails by the postal workers, then what incentive does a lender have to lend money to anyone who cannot walk in and physically hand over the money?  What incentive do I have to make my payment and not to lie and say I did and blame it on postal pilfering?  How does the financial system work?  How does the retail system work?  How do businesses do business?

If the revenue authorities view themselves as, and actively pursue the role of, political operatives advancing the cause of one faction or the other, and suppressing such as they happen to disagree with, in what material respect does that then differ from tax-farming?  Or from the ancient Russian custom of “kormlenie” — “feeding”?  Are the revenue agents not feeding their political positions from the populace?

Absolutism and corruption go hand in hand.  One feeds the other.  If you start with one you will end up with the other as well.  In an absolutist system, the ultimate value — in fact, the only value — is to work the system to one’s own advantage.  This value system (if you can call it a “system” since it consists of a single precept) necessarily produces an outlook of “whatever it takes,” and the result is as Hayek observed, even making it a chapter title: Why the Worst Get on Top.  Those who are willing to play the system, and able to do so, have a vested interest in producing and maintaining such a system, because of course in a system that is not absolutist, that is not based upon the capricious will of some Decision Maker — whether that be a divinely chosen King, or a divinely blessed clerisy, or the embodiment of that will-o’-the-wisp beloved of tyrants for the past 250 years, the “general will,” such as the SovNarKom — they must inevitably expose themselves to the frustration of their purposes by something that cannot be worked around:  The Law.  Notice also that in any system in which the Will of a decision maker is elevated to sacred status, the advantage must always go to the sociopath, who views his fellow humans as being precisely what Kant establishes they must not be: tools to the ends of another person.

Not only does “The Worst” or the sociopath flourish most under such a system, but presented with the chance he will actively seek to create such a system.  Again, that is because under any other system he will be hemmed in by something other than his own daring and his own Will to Action.  What holds this person back is only the critical mass of his fellow citizens who refuse to accept his proposition that anything goes, and who act on him (and each other, for that matter) through the device of The Law.

A recurring theme within what we may characterize as “survivor’s literature” from the Soviet Union, and specifically from the camps, is the thorough-going corruption of Everyone.  Part of that was the “you die today; I’ll die tomorrow” ethos of the camps, but you can see it right out in plain day, even before the first transit prison.  The lying, the attempts to curry favor, the stoolies, the thievery, the violence, the joyful subjugation (even unto death) of the weak by the strong:  Anyone who wants a one-scene summation of the brave new world created by Dear Leader’s idols need only read Dolgun’s description of “India.”  But more to the point:  Everyone was on the take; everyone was sharply on the look-out for what he could steal from the system, what he could steal from his fellow man, every chance he had to advance himself by doing down the guy next to him.  Nor was this wonderful world (you remember that world; it’s the one the praises of which were meretriciously sung by Walter Duranty, the fellow whose Pulitzer, won by whoring himself over the corpses of seven million famine victims, the NYT has yet to disown) even necessarily wholly new to the Soviet Union.  Read through depictions of life in Imperial Russia beyond the glitz of the court and the high nobility.  It’s depressing, almost sublimely so.  Everyone, every last damned one of them, is a crook.  They’re all looking for that one leg up that will enable them to “feed” a little more fully off the system.  The reaction, in me at least, is more one of sadness than outrage.  When every last square foot is owned — literally owned — by the tsar, when no one is free because no one is beyond a decree that Prince So-and-So, hitherto a member of the high nobility, is to be broken on the wheel, his body chopped into quarters, and his family exiled to far Siberia, what is left but to claw what advantages you can from a world that — let it be said up front — has zero moral claim on your loyalties?

I vividly recall a day in my securities regulation class in law school.  This was the mid-1990s, when the former Soviet bureaucracy and the blatnye that form an ever-present background in survivor’s literature finally merged.  This was the era of broad-daylight murders and kidnappings.  Somehow the subject of Russia came up, and how capital markets functioned in Russia, and the sheer criminality of it all.  Some American student came out with a typical pie-in-the-sky proposition of why don’t they just do it thus-and-such way.  All the way down front (and this was a large lecture room), one of the Russian LL.M. students turned around in her seat and asked, incredulously, “Do you have any idea how things in Russia actually work?”  Silence.

There is a good English expression for what is going on at the IRS and what went on — to some extent, still goes on — in Russia:  lawlessness.  In fact, the last sentence in The Gulag Archipelago is, tellingly, “There is no law.”  In survivor’s literature lawlessness is experienced not only by the utter corruption of law worked by the infamous Article 58 (guard to prisoner:  “How long is your sentence?”  prisoner:  “Five years.”  guard:  “What did you do?”  prisoner: “Nothing at all.”  guard:  “You lie!  The punishment for nothing at all is ten years!”) but also by the “socially friendly elements” of the blatnye.  They ruled the roost in camp until nearly the end.  What changed?  The Ukrainians decided they’d had enough of it.  They very simply decided they were going to kill all the stoolies and all the thieves.  And so they did.  Within a very brief time the camp authorities realized that their precious thieves were about to be exterminated, and moved them to completely different camps.  No more did the camp guards have the thieves to help them out, to install in the trusty positions.  Now you had entire camps full of nothing but Article 58s.

And yet, even after the camps were long shuttered, the rot remained.  And in the end the Soviet Union fell apart.  It simply fell apart.  For the only time I’m aware of, a sovereign nation, not at war and without a single hostile boot on its soil — in fact, at the head of a servile alliance system — and sitting on top of untold natural wealth in the form of generations’ reserves of fossil fuels and just about every useful mineral known to modern man, pulled the shutters closed and went out of business.  Because it couldn’t go on.  Because it had finally rotted out from within.  Will anyone argue that liberty prevails in Russia now? 

 What is going on within the IRS, and the DoJ, and the other federal agencies, is the take-over of the American polity by the blatnye, only so far without the knives across the throats.  We have an entire half of the political spectrum cheering them on, promising them soft landings at “non-profits” and “educational” establishments when, like Lois Lerner, they finally get so backed into a corner that they’re no longer useful to Dear Leader in their agency jobs.  What happens when, like Phaemon’s dog, all members of the apparatchiki, of all political stripes (can anyone out there guarantee me that there will never be a neo-Nazi IRS agent, or a Maoist lawyer on the DoJ staff, or some dude at OSHA who thinks that Pol Pot really had it right?) decide that this is Just How It’s Done Nowadays?

One of the tragedies of human existence is that it is so much easier to destroy, to undermine, to do evil, than it is to build and grow constructively.  It took the citizens of Cologne roughly 600 years to build their cathedral.  A couple of plane loads of errant bombs from Bomber Command or the 8th Army Air Force could have reduced it to rubble in a matter of minutes.  It took England from the reign of Henry VIII, when he could simply tell Parliament that he wanted Lord So-and-So attainted and executed, until 1714 (don’t quote me on that date; I’ve slept since I last looked it up), when for the last time a British monarch withheld the royal assent.  Not quite 200 years.  It took them several generations to move from the world of Lord Holland, who made himself one of the richest men in the kingdom by siphoning from his job as paymaster of the army, to the world of the 1830s, when visitors to official offices were adjured to “pray speak only of business.”

Where is the United States on that trajectory?  When FDR wanted to persecute Andrew Mellon, he instructed the IRS general counsel, Robert Jackson (whom FDR later rewarded for his whoring himself in that fashion with a seat on the U.S. Supreme Court), to get after him.  Which Jackson went ahead and did, bringing criminal charges against Mellon for having claimed deductions on his personal income tax returns . . . that the code said he was entitled to claim.  But at least Jackson proceeded in the open, and however farcically through the mechanisms of the law.  We are now at a point that law is neither more nor less than irrelevant to how the IRS treats any particular person or organization, and the processes it uses to treat them that way.

We are straying ever closer to the point of being “generally corrupt.”  “Corrupt” is an epithet long hurled about in American politics.  In 1824 Henry Clay sold his support in the House to John Quincy Adams, and was rewarded with the job of Secretary of State, up until that point a stepping stone to the presidency itself.  From that moment forward, Jackson’s slogan became “Corrupt Bargain,” and Adams collapsed in 1828.  Nowadays we would see nothing objectionable about Clay’s acting as he did (come to think of it, there has never been another Secretary of State make it to the Oval Office since then, has there?).  Let’s get that straight:  We see nothing wrong with selling one’s vote for president in exchange for a specific political office.  This is despite the fact that most states out there have laws imposing criminal sanctions on promising office in exchange for vote.  Oh.  I’m sure that never happens.  A sizable portion of our popluation now accepts it as unremarkable that the IRS and other federal agencies will make decisions which are — in economic terms at least . . . for the time being — life-and-death to their subjects based upon partisan political considerations.  And we whoop and holler in support, when it’s one of our side doling it out to the Other Guys.

Among a people generally corrupt, liberty cannot long endure.

The current brass in the Navy, in all its hoary wisdom, has decided to dispense with Chief Petty Officer initiation.

As at least one retired Master Chief Petty Officer opines, this is a decision fraught with implication for what sort of navy we choose to have in the future.

Way back in the day, when I was a brand-new ensign on a straight-stick, superheated steam, automatic-nothing guided missile destroyer, I got to experience the range of chiefs.  Alas! my very first Chief Petty Officer was lousy (actually, that descriptor may well have been literally true, because among his other failings he had abysmal personal hygiene).  In fact, he was such a bumbling incompetent that the other chiefs came within an ace of kicking him out of the chiefs’ mess.  In an organization that small (our total crew, officers and all, was under 450), that sort of collective revulsion is just unheard-of.  He’d made chief back in the 1970s, when the military in general was scrambling for every warm body it could find, and a great number of people who would never have otherwise pulled it off advanced well beyond their Peter Principle level.  He was respected by absolutely no one on board, and trusted in the same measure. 

I was ASW officer, and I still recall with humiliation the time our sonar went down, hard.  When my chief reported that they just couldn’t isolate the problem, I sat down with him and my senior E-6 sonar tech (except for their appearance he was his physical and mental twin) to pore over the technical circuitry diagrams (any CPO out there worth his salt knows that when an ensign feels called upon to get into the equipment in that detail, there is something badly, very badly wrong . . . as was in fact the case).  I was able to run the problem down to one of the multiple equipment cabinets that made up the suite.  I asked both of them, face-to-face and point blank, whether they had tested each of the specific electro-doo-dads in that cabinet.  As in tested this one? and this one? and this one?  Oh yes, sir; we’ve gone through them all with a fine-tooth comb.  Zero idea of what to do next.  In desperation I borrowed a missile firecontrolman from the missiles officer (he was an FC2, I think), and in less than an hour he had identified the precise problem: a blown diode or some similar thingummy . . . in exactly the cabinet I’d located.  A bit of soldering work and we were no longer blind underwater.

My next chief was at the opposite end of the spectrum.  I could (and in fact, by reason of my other duties, often did) run that division by periodically calling up the workcenter and asking him how things were going.  “Just fine, sir,” to which I was happy to be able to reply with confidence, “Good.  Let me know if that changes.”  He was known as being somewhat prickly, but I got along with him by letting him do things his way with very few exceptions, and on those cases I could carry my point by pointing out, “Chief, you’re just gonna have to indulge me on this one.”  That’s not a silver bullet that can be fired frequently and I didn’t.  We got along extraordinarily well.

All of which is to say that there is a helluva lot more to being a chief than knowing how to put together a PowerPoint presentation, or mouth the latest slogans, or conduct sensitivity training so no one’s feelings get hurt.  Being a Chief Petty Officer was more than a uniform.  It was more than a paygrade.  Watch the video at the link; every sailor in the navy gets to watch the Forrestal catastrophe.  Read out Battleship Sailor, by Theodore Mason (it’s a great read, and an insider’s glimpse into a world that once existed and was blasted away, literally in a matter of hours, viz. the pre-war battleship navy).  He was a junior radioman in USS California (flagship of the Pacific Fleet Battleships) on December 7, 1941.  His chief was Chief Radioman Thomas Reeves, who was (posthumously) awarded the Medal of Honor for his actions that day.  Folks, that’s why you have Chief’s Initiation.  It’s the difference between having as your senior enlisted some community organizer on the one hand, or on the other having some guy who’s pissed more salt water than you’ve seen go by the bow, and (very respectfully of course) has socks that have been in the navy longer than you have.  Sir.

So yeah, what he said.

If a foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds, then what is an evil consistency?

On June 22, 1941, Hitler’s Germany launched Operation Barbarossa, the invasion of the Soviet Union. Hundreds of thousands of troops, thousands upon thousands of tanks and aircraft, even greater numbers of trucks and transport all poured across the frontier. It remains and perhaps will forever remain the largest single unitary military operation in history. Germany’s assault caught the Red Army not completely unprepared, but largely so. Most of their air force was destroyed on the ground, the first day. Writing on the vast canvas of the Eastern European plains, the Wehrmacht wrought large the tactics their parents’ generation had first pioneered (ironically, also in Russia) in 1916-17. Seeking weak spots, avoiding confrontation with strength, surrounding, always surrounding, the Germans bagged hundreds of thousands of prisoners at a time in enormous encirclements. It was more than a bit like modern industrial drift-net fishing.

For decades the standard line on Stalin was that he’d finally met his master in treachery. Koba had trusted Adolf, you see; he’d trusted him to abide by the Soviet-German Non-Aggression Treaty signed back in the warm August night of 1939, when Molotov and Ribbentropp whacked up Poland and the Baltic countries between them. Under the commercial arrangements entered into, Stalin kept up his deliveries of oil and other strategic materials literally until the last minute – the final train crossed the border into Germany less than eight hours before the invasion. Later more revisionist histories I’ve read deny that Stalin was duped. According to them Stalin was playing desperately for time while he in fact prepared his own attack on Germany. Under the newer theory, Hitler simply got the drop on him. 

Of the two opposing theories of “what in the hell possessed Stalin?” I have to say I like the newer one better. It has the advantage of being perfectly consistent with everything else that has ever been known about Joe Stalin. The original take requires one to accept the proposition that someone as cold-bloodedly calculating as Stalin just this once, and despite years of careful observation, behaved utterly unlike his past and subsequent actions. To get an idea of just how devious he was, there is good indication – now that the NKVD archives have been at least partially opened – that the Germans’ surreptitious poison pen correspondence fraudulently implicating Marshal Tukhachevski and others in sundry plots against Stalin, which were filtered to the NKVD, and which then became part of the basis for the disastrous 1937 purge of the Red Army’s senior command, were in fact planted on the Germans by Soviet agents whose mission was to set up the Red Army commanders. Someone who could cook up something that sinister is supposed to have been taken in by a man as un-subtle as Adolf Hitler? Leopards do not change their spots, and then change them back. 

It wasn’t as if Hitler hadn’t bird-dogged his intentions in the East for years, after all. As early as the first volume of Mein Kampf Hitler had proclaimed the need for Lebensraum for the German people, and identified the only place in Europe for that living space to be acquired. Although the National Socialists had originated as a garden-variety leftist party – the original name, which it still carried the night Hitler attended his first meeting in 1920, was the Deutsche Arbeiterpartei, the German Workers Party – no later than June 30, 1934 the few remaining leftish elements were killed off in Hitler’s orgy of retribution. The constant bogeyman the Nazis held up to the Germans scared stiff by the social and economic upheavals of the post-war period was the communist, red in tooth and claw. The skulls the Sturmabteilung cracked during the early 1930s were largely communist skulls. 

Oddly enough, it doesn’t seem as if Germany played nearly the role for Stalin that the Soviet Union did for Hitler. Russians in general and Stalin in particular were so over-the-top paranoid of everyone that I’ve never noticed in any history or biographies of the times or key players any especial pattern of concentration on Germany or Hitler. In fact, among the most frequent bogus allegations of espionage hurled against Stalin’s victims was spying for Japan and for Britain. Germany was lumped in with China, with Argentina, and other equally-improbable countries. 

The Comintern (which Stalin also ruthlessly purged in the 1930s) was a different story. Germany was very much a focus of their squawking. It was the communists and the socialists who were the first groups to go behind the barbed wire in the newly-created concentrations camps. They were the first who were systematically disappeared after the Gleichschaltung. It would have been curious indeed if the Comintern had not damned Hitler and his movement to all who would listen and most who wouldn’t (like the various fans of the Nazis elsewhere in the world . . . like Franklin Roosevelt, Charles Lindbergh, and the rest of them). 

The Comintern of course took its marching orders directly from Stalin. They screeched about what he told them to screech about, and about nothing else. That last is important to realize. The Western communists bewailed (properly, let it be remembered) the evils of the Nazi regime long and loud, from the time of its coming to power. All the way up, that is, until August, 1939 and the Molotov-Ribbentropp Pact. After that point the word went out that Germany was off-limits. 

And the commies the world over meekly took their marching orders and clammed up about the man and party who’d imprisoned and killed their comrades. 

Why is this important, Gentle Reader asks, and what does this not-quite two years of silence have to teach us today? It is important today because there is a straight line between the Comintern of August, 1939 – June 22, 1941, and the modern American left. For starts, the modern American left is much more radical than used to be the case. Once upon a time the left was all about not hanging people because they had the wrong skin color, or not allowing employers to view the female staff as random bed-mates. While the New Dealers were enthusiastic fans of socialism, both in its Soviet and Nazi manifestations, their socialism was very much softer around the edges. 

As inspector Clouseau would say, not any more. In today’s left the Alinskyites have triumphed, and are much closer to their 1930s communist ancestors than they are to the New Dealers.  The philosophy behind Cloward and Pivens’s “The Weight of the Poor” (about which I am working on a rather lengthy post . . . honestly I am) has now become the central pillar of the Democrat Party program, at least at the national level. That philosophy can be pretty neatly summed up as the use of transfer payments to cement electoral coalitions of people who otherwise haven’t the least affinity for each other. It is neither more nor less than the notion of spending other people’s money to maintain oneself in power. The mathematics of that approach are not without their outer limits, as Detroit and Illinois are discovering. 

Or at least the math is not unlimited so long as you cannot keep your population in place and under your thumb. There is a reason that all the various 19^th Century utopian settlements eventually blew up. Without coercive power to keep people living there, they leaders of those efforts had no way reliably over time to enforce the penny-ante socialism that was all those places’ organizing principle. Nowadays the tourists go and spend gobs of money eating over-priced food and staying in over-priced rooms to sleep on uncomfortable beds in New Harmony, Indiana. Nowhere does anyone point out the moral violence that was the foundation on which it was built. That “new harmony” was the harmony of the plantation, of the Kolyma, of the Belomor. 

But what if you could run an entire country like Detroit? Now there’s an idea. It’s much harder to get up and leave your country than to let your Camden, New Jersey tract house go up the pipes for unpaid real property taxes and move to New Hampshire. Millions of Europeans left for our shores during the 19th Century in order to escape the lash, the press gang, the tax collector.  But as great an influx of humanity as it was from America’s perspective as the destination country, I still don’t recall that a single European despot changed his manner of operating one iota because of losing population to the U.S.  The overwhelming majority of people stood still and took it (aside from the revolutions of 1830 and 1848), and at that level of population retention and growth (recall how explosively Europe grew in that century) there was simply no demographic incentive for the tyrants to change.

The current administration of Dear Leader has exactly such a transformation in mind for the entire country.  We are all to become Detroit writ large. He’s never made much of a secret of it, either.  While he was just a “community organizer” and all the while he was running for his various offices he kept trumpeting his intent of “fundamental transformation” of American society and polity. It is irrelevant to him and his supporters that in order to crush dissent you have to use the IRS as your political enforcer; that you use the ATF and OSHA to threaten the very livelihoods of people who too effectively oppose what you’re trying to do. Have the U.S. Attorney General sue every state and county he can find which looks like it’s making actual progress towards ensuring that all but only eligible voters vote in elections? Not a problem. It’s all in the service of a higher goal. 

And from the self-appointed Fourth Estate, the forever-patting-themselves-on-the-back watchdogs of democracy? Crickets. Nothing. They even accept instruction from the administration about what they can and cannot quote insiders as saying, meekly submitting their copy beforehand for approval of quotations. The DoJ decides to wiretap their phones in order to catch a leaker who let out secrets no worse than what the president himself brags about (remember it was Dear Leader who boasted that we were behind Stuxnet, the computer malware which came within a whisker of crashing the Iranian nuclear weapons program), and the press just makes propitiatory grimaces and promises to be even more subservient in the future.

These days in the press it’s no longer about truth, about things which you can say in fact happened or didn’t happen, and then go check it out for yourself.  Now it’s about “The Narrative,” a mind-set which gives us Journolist, and the expression “fake but true.”  The Narrative is, of course, what you want to be true, or perhaps more cynically expressed, what you want others to believe to be true.  “Truth” is what tends to establish The Narrative.  Gentle Reader will recognize the circularity of the dynamic: narrative is what is to be “true,” and “truth” is anything which confirms narrative. 

Once upon a time a paragon of the American left, Daniel P. Moynihan, famously observed that while everyone is entitled to his own opinion, he is not entitled to his own facts.  Poor Danny Boy; so behind the times.  Nowadays we have supposedly learned folks asserting, with all seriousness, that “we each have our own truth.”  By that standard the Holocaust deniers are not in fact deniers; they’re merely asserting “their own truth.”  In this connection it is not unhelpful to remind ourselves that one of the foundation stones of this mindset, “deconstructionism,” was the bastard offspring of a gentleman name of Paul de Man, who ended his days full of honor and years as a professor at Yale.  The essential assertion of deconstructionism, which has — by their fruits shall ye know them — further spawned such intellectual nonsense as “critical legal theory,” is that words, and therefore texts, mean what the beholder chooses they should mean. That of course is a suggestion pregnant with foreboding for the public sphere, because it then becomes vitally important to be the one who chooses the beholder, the actors whose office it is to behold texts like the constitution for all of us, and to command the application of that meaning upon all our backs.  Yes, dear Prof. de Man ended his days at Yale, but that’s not where he started out.  He wasn’t born American, you see; he was born in Antwerp.  And during the Nazi occupation of Belgium he wrote over 200 articles for a collaborationist newspaper.  Two hundred.  For a newspaper collaborating with a country that’s invaded and raped your country twice in as many generations.  Not exactly a youthful indiscretion, is it?  But if nothing has irreducible meaning, then it really didn’t count, did it? 

Fast forward from the Stalin-worshippers and Nazi collaborators.  How about all the lefty outfits that spent the entire eight years of the Bush 43 presidency weeping and lamenting the civil rights cataclysm of warrantless wiretapping of international communications? Now the FBI admits to using drones to spy on American soil and you can hear a pin drop in the meeting hall. It takes a filibuster on the U.S. Senate floor before the administration will state, in so many words, that it does not claim the authority to order the extra-judicial killing of American citizens on American soil. One of the most justly feared and historically abusive government agencies of all – the IRS – is unashamedly used as a tool to silence a great chunk of the American political spectrum, and from the liberty mavens we hear . . . nothing. Zero. 

It is so important to today’s left that the aspiration of breaking American society succeed that no hint of criticism may be allowed to disrupt it. The reduction of the citizen to become the tool of the state – which is the sine qua non of all leftist hope and ambition – is so important, so close to realization, that it is worth accepting anything, any violation of principle, any swallowing of pride to bring it off.

How again is this silence in the face of violence to the supposed pillars of the lefty faith not indistinguishable from the Comintern’s silence as Hitler rolled over Poland, and France, and the Low Countries, and Denmark, and Norway?  I assert that precisely the same philosophical mechanisms are at work now as were at work then.  The left, both then and now, demonstrates a remarkably consistent acceptance of outright evil if commanded by one’s political bosses.

But Gentle Reader will counter that this trait of the left is not peculiar to the left.  I do not think so.  Recall that it was senior Republicans on the Hill who went to Nixon and told him the game was up (recall also that one of the articles of impeachment was using the IRS in manners indistinguishable from Dear Leader’s deployment of it).  The American right has supported unsavory characters over the years, but if we look at those, the common thread is that they were unsavory characters who were actively engaged in combat against communist subversion of nations.  At the most you can accuse the right of having supported evil to fight evil (and in this connection we might remind ourselves of Churchill’s comment to the Commons that if the devil himself would ally himself in the fight against Nazi Germany, Churchill would find something good to say about him on the floor of the House).  I would challenge Gentle Reader to find a single instance in which large numbers of the American right have supported or held their peace in the face of someone or something as indefensible as Hitler.  Or have engaged in the organized suppression of information in the manner of the Journolistas.

No, conscious support of evil men and evil measures for purely political (as in partisan) purposes is a copyrighted trademark of the left.  All of which makes one wonder, with trepidation, whether there will occur another — mercifully, and as we piously hope, non-military — Barbarossa moment for today’s lefties.

Back in the day, in the 1500s and earlier, when Europe’s crowned heads got their financial butts in a crack, one of their favorite devices to raise a bunch of money without calling it a “tax” was the involuntary “loan,” which of course was typically never paid back.  Henry VIII, if my memory on the subject serves, was rather a fan of the method, since for all his absolutist yearnings he still had a Parliament that was very conscious of its control over taxation (itself a power wrested from Edward III in the course of his pouring money down the rat hole of the Hundred Years War).  Later on, in the early 1600s, when Charles I was falling out with Parliament, he attempted to use the ancient levy of “ship money” to raise general revenue.  It didn’t work for him.  Even later, in the 1860s, when Wilhelm I wanted to raise the length of conscripted service in the Prussian army from two years to three, the Landtag balked at raising the money for it.  A constitutional crisis threatened and in desperation Wilhelm summoned a previously-obscure Prussian Junker to Berlin.  Otto von Bismarck was Johnny-on-the-spot and got down to business, with results as known.

But O! what Henry, Charles, Wilhelm, and the rest of them could have done if only they’d thought up a single currency — call it the “Euro,” perhaps — and a continent-wide central bank, and a raft of bureaucrats to administer the whole show.  They all could have lived far above their means and then handed the bill to their neighbors.  They could agree to a “bail-out package” that makes the levy of ship money look like pocket change.  They could agree to deals which cut their troublesome parliaments, Landtag, and the like out of the picture.

Just like is happening in Cyprus, right now.  Cyprus, in addition to being the site of one of the Western world’s most ancient cultures — and most intriguing, with its as-yet undeciphered linear script and its cataclysmic destruction — as well as a bone fought over since the dawn of history — the Ottoman sultan’s flaying alive the commanders of captured garrisons was neither the first nor the last barbarity played out — is almost a self-parody of a nasty, corrupt little hell-hole of a country that is run more as an off-balance-sheet investment of international criminal circles than anything else.  Its banking and finance sector especially, we are told, has battened on money-laundering Russian kleptocrats and their ilk.  In one respect, however, it also resembles its other Mediterranean neighbors:  For years it’s been living beyond its means and now the piper must be paid.

And so once more the world gets a front-row seat as you have, on one side, the compulsive addict/alcoholic who demands that the rest of Europe cover not only his accumulated bar tab, but also negotiate a special all-day happy hour price for his continued tippling, which he adamantly refuses to cut back, and on the other side a bunch of deep pockets who can’t decide if they’re the Temperance League, a methadone clinic, a personal life coach, a bartender, AA, or some combination of all five.

There is this difference, though:  If Cyprus went bust and left the Euro, no one would really notice the difference one way or the other.  I mean, the total bail-out numbers being bandied about are in the €15 billion range, which is a rounding error in Spain, Italy, and Greece.  As one might expect, this point of distinction expresses itself, among other ways, in the conduct of the bargaining process, and the degree to which the Golden Rule (i.e., the man with the gold makes the rules) is applied.  In Greece and Italy there’s been a great deal of back-and-forth, and extensions of deadlines, and re-negotiations of terms, and so forth.  Cyprus is getting a whacking great dose of “Shut, they explained.”  Specifically, they’re having to come up with roughly a third of the cost of the total bail-out package, in cash, and do that from their own economy.  Five billion Euros might be a rounding error in Greece, but in Cyprus that’s a pretty big nut.

The original package contemplated a levy on all bank accounts (even the insured bank accounts), ranging from around 6.6% for smaller depositors to a figure just under 10% for the Russian kleptocrats.  That deal got shot out of the saddle by the Cypriot parliament.  The next idea floated was to nationalize the retirement funds of government employees into a “solidarity fund” that was to be secured by gas concessions to be granted; additional money was to come from the Cypriot Orthodox church’s assets.  That idea went nowhere as well.  Mind you, the banks are closed right now and have been for some days.  The country’s ATMs are letting people pull out as little as €100 per day, and the lines are getting longer by the hour.  After the “solidarity fund” notion tanked, the discussion turned back to a variant of the original deal, with some significant modifications.

On the sidelines is Vladimir Putin, whose kleptocrat buddies have over €24 billion on deposit in Cypriot banks, and have made a further €31 billion in loans to companies based (nominally cough! cough!>) in Cyprus.  In considering those numbers one must bear in mind that a good chunk of it represents money laundering and asset-hiding, and that the people doing it are Putin’s friends, political supporters, and very possibly undisclosed business partners.  So Vlad has has Gazprom, the slush fund piggy bank national hydrocarbon giant offer to restructure Cyprus’s debt in exchange for that seven trillion cubic feet of natural gas.  If not he’s toying with his options, including dumping some sizable portion of Russia’s Euro-denominated foreign reserves (wonder what that would do to the calculations of the savants in Brussels?).

I’m not sure whether I see it as a proxy fight between Germany and Russia, as this article does.  Nor do I necessarily fault Merkel for respectfully declining to use German taxpayers’ money to bail out Russian criminal enterprises.  But there’s no denying what’s going to happen when the banks open back up.  Everyone who can — including the small depositors — is going to bust a gut to put his money anywhere other than a Cypriot bank.  Lopping off a chunk of some people’s deposits is to let a horse out that cannot be re-stabled.  The Cypriots may be running a banana republic without the bananas, but they’re not stupid; they know that once you go down that road it’s just a question of time before some government does come after their money, or their retirement accounts.

Now the EU weenies and the Cypriot government have reached a deal.  It goes back to the original notion of a decapitation haircut for depositors and bondholders.  There are some differences.  Most importantly, deposits less than €100,000 are to remain untouched; they will, however, get a new banker: the Bank of Cyprus, the country’s largest bank.  Deposits above that sum are looking at a levy of up to 40% (although over at ZeroHedge they’re not buying that 40% limit for a moment), and being stuck at Laiki Bank, which will be wound up.  The whole deal has been structured so that it’s technically not a tax on the big depositors; were it otherwise the deal would have to be passed on by the Cypriot parliament.  Gentle Reader is invited to speculate on what is the likelihood that those folks, most of whom can be presumed to be directly or indirectly on the Russian payroll, and who’ve already rejected the much milder 9-odd percent levy, would approve a deal that essentially takes their party boat out over the continental shelf and blows scuttling charges all up and down its keel.

I haven’t seen anything on whether capital controls are also part of the deal but seriously, aren’t they almost inevitable?  I mean, why would a Cypriot small business owner continue to deposit his money at home when under EU rules he can dump it into a Deutsche Bank account in Frankfurt?  After the terms of the Greek bail-out began to take shape, billions of Euros left that country, large sums of it being transferred by senior politicians.  So let’s see where that leaves Joe Cypriot.  If you save your money by putting it in a bank account at home, you have no idea whether in the dead of night the government is going to lock down your bank and take as much of your account as pleases them for that night.  If you save for your retirement by putting your money into the Cypriot equivalent of a 401(k) or 403(b), your retirement nest egg might or might not be nationalized.  If you earn — on the books — more than bare subsistence, you have no place to put your money other than a fruit jar buried out back.  Since most if not all of your fellow-citizens will be able to figure the game out just as well as you, your local banker is going to be starved of depositors and thus liquidity, and so good luck on getting that bank loan to start/expand a business, or even earn a halfway decent return on what you do dare deposit.  If you’re a business looking to expand or invest overseas, exactly what positive incentive do you now have to consider, even for a fleeting, drunken moment, putting your money into Cyprus?

What is all that going to do to the Cypriot economy in the long term?  Well, for starts it’s going to drive a healthy part of it underground.  What the government can’t see it can’t expropriate and can’t tax.  Secondly it’s going to shrink the size even of that partially-underground economy.  Just about every history of the Scottish and English border marches ascribes its grinding, unending poverty to the structural uncertainty of limited land tenure, endemic public and private violence, and general inability to have any reasonable assurance that the fruits of today’s labor would not go up in smoke — quite literally — tomorrow.  Cyprus and the EU have just recreated that world, which James I in Britain crushed at the outset of the 17th Century, in a modern European island paradise.  True enough, the Russian criminal element will take a beating, but they’ll get theirs back from the skin of the patient, ever-oppressed narod of that unfortunate land.  But the true victims of all this are going to be exactly those small depositors in Cyprus who might, given enough generations, have made something of their homeland.  When economies collapse the already poor have nothing left to lose and the upper echelons have the ability to weather the storm.  It’s the middles who are destroyed.  Germany in the 1920s and 30s got to experience where that train takes you.  Will we see something like that in Cyprus?  Will Russia step into the shambles and set up shop?  Just a couple hundred miles from Syria, and less than 100 from the Turkish coast?  How’s that likely to work out?

Update [26 Mar 13]:  And sure enough, the Powers That Be are already wistfully wondering whether the Cyprus bail-out might become a template for future Eurozone bail-outs.  Immediate push-back, of course, arises, with the spokesman for the EU internal market commissioner emphasizing (a) that Cyprus is plainly (got that? plainly) a one-off case that cannot serve in any fashion as a precedent for any future situations, and (b) we need to figure out a way that taxpayers don’t keep getting stuck with the bill.  OK, as long as we’re clear about that.

The Luxemburg foreign minister is also quoted in the linked article.  He’s upset that Germany’s finance minister observed that Cyprus needs to alter its “business model.”  He objects to that expression, implying as it does that Cyprus (and other tiny European countries, such as . . . Luxemburg) has whored itself out as a haven for tax evasion and shady financial dealings.  The foreign minister accuses Germany, France, and Great Britain of seeking “hegemony” in the international finance markets.  It’s “un-European” for the big players to suggest that outfits like Cyprus ought to limit their financial sectors to ahem> legitimate financial business, and not serve the Putins of the world.  It bothers him that Germany is leading the charge in suggesting that those who benefit from playing in the shadows of places like Cyprus need to pony up when it’s time to bail out their benefactors.

Stand by to stand by, as we used to say in the navy.

Update [28 Mar 13]:  Well, here’s one for can’t-put-it-back-in-the-horse:  The EU internal markets minister is proposing to introduce a bill that will explicitly permit larger depositors (those above €100,000) to get shorn in the bank liquidation and/or bail-out process.  That didn’t take long.  So much for the Luxemburgers’ pronouncements that Cyprus is just obviously a one-off, no-precedent-here situation.

I have this problem.  Whenever I have time to get my hair cut, I forget that I need a haircut.  And when I remember that I need a haircut, I don’t have time to attend to it.  So I tend to go rather longer between haircuts than appropriate solicitude for my fellow humans’ aesthetic sensibilities would suggest.

But when I do get my haircut, I go to this little joint on Main Street.  It’s in an arcade-style building which is a converted movie theater.  There’s a long breeze-way style central hallway with small (generally less than 300 square feet) offices lining it on either side.  The barber shop has been there at least since we moved to town in 1968, and so far as I know Billy has been there cutting hair since Day One (I could be wrong about that, but after a long enough period, I don’t suppose it matters).  He’s well into his upper 70s now. 

The barber shop has a tile floor, alternating red and what used many years ago to be white tiles.  Two workstation chairs and a bench running along one wall.  The bench’s naugahyde covering is taped together in several places.  There’s a magazine rack along the window, which looks into the breeze-way.  That’s pretty much it.  For many years there was one of the old-style soft drink machines, the kind where you put your money in, opened a door, and reached in to pull out the desired (glass, of course) bottle.  It was an RC Cola machine, as I recall, and my world tottered on its foundations, a bit, when one day I came in and it was gone.  But the sun came up the next day and I learned to live without that tangible reminder of a tiny child’s thrill to be given fifteen cents by mommy and permitted to go up to this great, humming machine towering over one’s head, deposit the shiny coins, and reach in and select one’s own treat from a veritable cornucopia arrayed right there before one’s eyes.

The cash register Billy uses is so ancient it has the old manual typewriter-style keys and a wooden drawer.  But it still works just jim dandy and still makes the ca-ching!! sound that only comes from such a machine.

During election years, Billy will post a couple of pieces of posterboard on a wall, with all the local races and candidates on it.  Customers get to put an X in a box.  Billy once told me that as a predictor of wins and losses it proved pretty accurate, even if the actual margins may not have matched.

I’ve gone there to get my hair cut since moving back here after law skool.   I like going there because at 47 I’m still usually the youngest person present by anywhere from 25 to 40 years.  I shut up a lot while there, and listen to the old guys talk about who’s sick, who’s died, whose wife’s in the hospital, who brought in the biggest acorn squash anyone’s ever seen, what’s the word on the county commission’s latest shenanigans, and so forth.  Can’t say as I agree with every opinion I hear expressed but then that’s not why I’m listening. 

Another thing:  Almost everyone in the room, from the barbers to the other customers to myself, is a veteran.  It’s difficult to explain the sensibility that knowledge awakens.  It’s not like you’re buddies with everybody and his cousin just because you all wore a uniform at some point in your lives.  And as mentioned it sure doesn’t mean you think alike, or respond the same way to the same events.  Nonetheless, there is a basic awareness of having something in common with them that one does not have in common with most of the people with whom one shares one’s existence.

For many years the other barber there cutting hair with Billy was a gent name of Bob, who has now “retarded” and moved away to live closer to his children.  I was concerned when Bob retired for the obvious reason that it must have put similar thoughts in Billy’s head if they weren’t already there.  And then for several weeks Billy vanished.  I found out later that he’d had some pretty serious health issues, including getting badly “down in his back” (as we say around here) and of course for a barber that’s a career-ending injury.  Then one day the shop was open again and there was this younger guy working the second station.  Rather many tattoos on his arms for my taste, but then they’re not my arms.  Turns out he’s a National Guardsman (so sometimes the shop’s business hours have to shift to accommodate his drill schedule).  Gives a pretty decent cut, too.  He’s there for the long haul, he says, and in fact the shop now has a Facebook page (it’s the only page I’ve ever “liked” on Facebook).

And then one day there was Billy, back in harness.  He’s moving a bit slower now, of course, and I understand he’s not there every single day (given my haphazard grooming habits in that respect I wouldn’t know it if he were).  Sometimes when I go I get my cut from Billy and sometimes from the new fellow.  Other than the new barber I’m still the youngest guy present by decades.

This past week when I went in I saw that the price for a haircut, which had remained at $10 for years and years, was suddenly $12.  Twenty percent jump in price.  It’s still by far the cheapest cut around, though, and I’d always wondered how in the world they managed to pay the bills on $10 a head.  So I don’t begrudge them the increase even a tiny bit.  But that twenty percent is a measure of the pressures on the shop and the people who work there.  The younger guy is married and has children; he’s trying to raise a family from that chair and $10 a head just won’t get the job done any more.  To me at least that twenty percent says a great deal more about the state of the economy than all the government spin numbers you can quote to me.  Someone providing as basic and necessary a service as a haircut has to crank his prices up by twenty percent in order to keep his head above water.  What’s going to happen to them when those pressures are increased exponentially by the coming hyperinflation, and their customer base, most of whom live on fixed incomes and/or interest-based assets, sees its life savings go up in smoke in a matter of weeks?  The soccer moms will never take their precious little darlings to some nasty ol’ barber shop.  The young, the employed, will not have the time to come all the way downtown for a cut.  And the barbers will have to keep raising their prices, beyond what their customers can pay.

That’s the result of “quantitative easing.”  That’s the result of “stimulus” spending.  That’s result of the doctrine that no one who has ever drawn a government check should ever not get a government check any more.  Thank you Ben Bernanke.  Thank you Dear Leader.  Thank you all the Congresscritters who voted for the healthcare take-over without bothering to read the bill.  Thank you all the RINOs for meekly going along with the new-spending-is-the-answer-to-everything leitmotiv that has guided American governments since the 1930s.

Now where am I supposed to get my hair cut?