I have spent decades trying to turn political dirt into philosophic gold. I have yet to discover the alchemist’s trick, but I still have fun with the dirt. I was born in Iowa and raised in the mountains of Virginia. Wheeling and dealing with old coins as a teenager vaccinated me against trusting politicians long before I grew my first scruffy beard. Shortly after my fifteenth birthday, the U.S. government drove the final wooden stake into the nation’s currency when President Richard Nixon announced that the U.S. government would cease redeeming any dollars for gold. The dollar thus became a...
Secrecy and the Divine Right to Deceive
Secrecy and lying are two sides of the same political coin. The Supreme Court declared in 1936, “An informed public is the most potent of all restraints upon misgovernment.” Thus, conniving politicians have no choice but to drop an Iron Curtain around Washington. Politicians guarantee that Americans are left clueless on the most controversial or dangerous federal policies. The government is creating trillions of pages of new secrets every year. The total is equivalent to “20 million four-drawer filing cabinets filled with double-spaced text on paper,” according to The Washington Post. If...
The Greatest Tariff Speech in Congressional History
Donald Trump is bringing his idolatry of high tariffs back to the White House. Trump proclaims that “tariffs are the greatest!” and that “tariff” is “the most beautiful word in the dictionary.” Vast numbers of his Republican supporters will echo any dubious dogma that Trump sanctifies. In the coming months, Washington will be deluged with convoluted economic analyses vindicating or damning high tariffs. To vanquish the new protectionism, the friends of free trade should recall the lofty rhetoric from an era when the tariff was debated with far more clarity and passion. High tariffs became...
The ‘Will of the People’ Post-Election Horror Show
On the morning after elections, many voters wake up and instinctively quote Dorothy Parker: “What fresh hell is this?” “Will of the people!” is the correct answer—at least if a Democrat won the election. Actually, the notion that election results represent the “will of the people” is one of the most audacious triumphs of democratic propaganda. Ever since the Civil War era, presidents have periodically invoked “will of the people” to sanctify their own power. President Andrew Johnson declared in 1867 that “the appointing power”—i.e., himself—“represents the collective majesty and speaks the...
The “Freedom From Fear” Ticket for Tyranny
The Democratic Party is championing presidential candidate Kamala Harris as a born-again champion of freedom. Earlier this year, Democrats shifted their focus from democracy to freedom, convinced that the latter word would enthrall voters on Election Day. Providing “freedom from fear” has become one of their most frequent political promises this past century. Politicians routinely portray freedom from fear as the apex of freedom, higher than the initial freedoms buttressed by the Bill of Rights. While presidents have defined “freedom from fear” differently, the common thread is that it...
What I’ve Learned Covering Ten Depraved Presidential Elections
Presidential season is a time for Americans to restore their faith in democracy. How can folks not be filled with gratitude for being permitted a perfunctory choice of who will seize their paychecks and tyrannize them in the following four years? Actually, I’ve had a bad attitude on presidential elections going back to the end of the Reagan era. In a 1988 Detroit News piece headlined “Quadrennial Hunt for the Great Man,” I wrote, “Every four years or so, the absurdity of our current system becomes vivid. We have created a huge engine of government—even though there is no one even vaguely...
American Atrocity: Remembering the Shenandoah Burning
George Orwell wrote in 1945 that “the nationalist not only does not disapprove of atrocities committed by his own side, but he has a remarkable capacity for not even hearing about them.” This week is the 160th anniversary of one of the worst atrocities of the American Civil War, a barbarous episode that vanished long ago from history books. Union General Philip Sheridan laid waste to a hundred mile swath of the Shenandoah Valley, leaving vast numbers of women and children on the edge of starvation. Before the summer of 1864, the Civil War was primarily fought on battlefields. After failing...
Hillary Clinton’s Sordid History of Secrecy and Censorship
“You could drop Hillary into any trouble spot, come back in a month and…she will have made it better,” former President Bill Clinton declared in a 2016 speech championing his wife’s presidential candidacy. But Hillary’s entry into the brawls surrounding the 2024 presidential election will leave many Americans wishing to drop her elsewhere. As the race enters the home stretch, Hillary Clinton is riding in like Joan of Arc to rescue truth—or at least to call for hammering government critics. But Hillary has been a triple threat to American democracy for fifteen years. Last Monday evening,...