The wisdom of Fred Reed

Fred Reed is a favorite of mine. He's half blind. He's powered by Padre Kino, which, for those of you unfamiliar with it, is a Mexican wine. And he's among the most insightful people on the planet.

Fred's latest column has a description of our government, taxes, and the law, that I don't think can be topped.

What happens is that a government needs money, typically to do badly what it shouldn’t be doing in the first place, so Congress passes tax laws. These may at first inadvertently be simple, comprehensible, and tolerably light. Then the unscrupulous, and bureaucrats, who would be unscrupulous if they had the intelligence, discover that it is easier to have the government drain money from the people and give it to the sharpers than it is to work for a living. Taxes grow heavier to feed the growing number of trough-feeders.

The people who actually pay the taxes grow weary of playing udder to innumerable ticks and invent ingenious ways to avoid the taxation. Each new dodge inspires Congress to pass a new and more complex law to prevent people from keeping their money. Humans are ingenious when they feel someone else’s hand in their pockets. Thus regulations grow like kudzu on a Georgia road cut until you have three hundred shelf-feet of impenetrable law that no one understands, even the government. This is good for the ticks because when law metamorphoses into mysticism, the shifty can find loopholes. Meanwhile every special interest on the planet bribes Congress, which amounts to an inexplicably exalted garage-sale, to pass laws exempting the special interest. The result is an unworkable thicket infested with vipers, leeches, and hag fish. Hello.

There you have it. I can't think of a more apt description of the MCF that is Washington than Fred's vivid description.

But it's his last couple of paragraphs that put the exclamation mark on it.

These bureaucracies, like gunch plugging a coronary artery, like filth occluding a drain, get thicker and denser with time. The problems they were supposed to solve go away, but the bureaucrats remain, and hire more equally pointless crats so they can feel important, and the forms we have to fill multiply, and the administrative burden grows, and money and business leave the country.

More cosmetic bureaucracies spring up. We now have TSA, which couldn’t catch cholera in a sewage outfall in Mumbai, but it has a huge payroll and a degree of corruption that would make the sewage outfall a cause for nostalgia. And it will never go away. Nothing does in government.

I figure that what we need is to tear the whole sorry system down and see what comes next. The best hope is that a patriot will learn how to impel some unused interplanetary object, Phobos or Deimos or Ganymede maybe, into Washington at ninety percent of the speed of light. This would eliminate the teachers unions, the Pentagon, AIPAC, Fox News, Langley, the Washington Post, lobbies, and my mother-in-law. Cockroaches would doubtless survive, that being what they do best, and evolve into a civilization less degraded than ours, briefly.

Amen, brother. Amen.

Fred Reed: prophet

Fred Reed is one of my go-to reads.  He's an expatriate Gringo holed up in Mexico, a glass of Padre Kino in one hand, a cigar in the other.  He's half blind and half loco.  It must be the 'half-loco' part that makes him such a great writer.

His latest musings deal with how the American people should deal with opposing the degenerates in Washington.

Washington is out of control. It does as it likes, without restraint. It spends American money and American lives to fight remote wars for which it cannot provide a plausible reason. It determines what our children will be taught, who we can hire and fire, to whom we can sell our houses, whether we can defend ourselves, even what names we can call each other. The feds read our email and track the web sites we visit, make us hop around barefoot in airports at the command of surly unaccountable rentacops. They search us at random in train stations without even a pretense of probable cause. We have no influence over them, no way of resisting.

Except, perhaps, to ignore them.

He goes on to clarify.

The government doesn’t work. It is broken. It can’t be fixed. It can’t be fixed because only those within it could, and their interest lies in not fixing it.

The only remedy short of armed rebellion is civil disobedience at the level of the states. Clear constitutional justification for refusal to obey Washington lies in the Tenth Amendment:

“The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people.”

Hmmm. Intriguing. Do go on.

Now, if Idaho passes a law (I’m making this up) saying that no restrictions on the ownership of guns will be enforced within the state, Washington might choose discretion over valor and ignore it. Legalizing marijuana, however, or refusing to accept compulsory medical care, would be a direct if not necessarily intentional challenge to the power of the central government. The feds could not afford to let either of these things slide. The danger of the precedent to the grip of the governing classes would be too great. A deadly serious confrontation would ensue.

Now Fred has crossed over from writer to prophet. Because Idaho HAS, as point of fact, crossed that line, as has Virginia.

Idaho took the lead in a growing, nationwide fight against health care overhaul Wednesday when its governor became the first to sign a measure requiring the state attorney general to sue the federal government if residents are forced to buy health insurance.

A spokesman for Virginia Attorney General Ken Cuccinelli II (R) said this afternoon that Virginia will file suit against the federal government if the Democratic health care reform bill is approved by the U.S. Congress.

Well, Fred. What will Washington's answer to these challenges be?

What could, or would, the federal government do in response to defiance? Send the Marines to occupy Sacramento? Or the FBI to arrest Arnold and the legislature of California?

Or cut off California’s financial water? No bailout for the state’s tottering economy, no more fat subsidies to the universities, and so on?

The question is how ugly might things get. Washington may be able to make the states back down. It may not. The peril for the feds is that it might occur to the states that, while they get their money from Washington, Washington gets its money from the states. The central government depends absolutely on the states, whereas the states would get along swimmingly without the current central government.

That last couple of sentences tell the tale. Washington IS wholly reliant on the states for its parasitical sustenance. It should be very interesting watching this play out. Very interesting indeed.

Must be the Padre Kino

Fred Reed is an old curmudgeon. Like me. Only older. Naturally, I love the stuff he writes.

Fred was a reporter in some of the most dangerous places on Earth; Vietnam, Cambodia, the Middle East, Ward 8 in the District of Columbia. Fred has seen it all. So when Fred has a take that's 180 degrees tilted on its head from my take, I notice. And I listen.

Yesterday I went on ad nauseum about Fascism 2.0 Amerika. Fred sees it ever so differently. To him, this isn't textbook Fascism, Socialism, or any other "ism". No, this is something new and unique.

OK, a brief excursion into cosmic truth. First, socialism. Hard-line conservatives with little grasp of economics refer to anything they don’t like—Hillary, national health care, regulation of anything if it might cost them money—as “socialist.” It’s a utility pejorative, devoid of meaning, as “racist” and “elitist” are for political south-paws. Socialism is of course a system in which the government owns the means of production. Check your dictionary.

Ah! But in America, the means of production own the government. Inverted socialism it is. Here is a far better thing. If you are a means of production, anyway.

Okay, let me see if I get this. This isn't business in bed with government cooperating as a means of saving their skin. This is business DRIVING government. This is business as boss, not government.

Heavy stuff, man. Heavy.

Now, I'm not entirely sure I'm 100% with Fred, because I don't believe for a second that ANYONE tells Der Staat what to do. What I think is afoot is a situation where Big Business THINKS it has government by the tail and under its control. Only one day in the not-so-distant future, they'll awake to the reality that they've sold out their country and their very lives to the Almighty State for a few measly depreciating dollars, as Uncle rears his ugly head and lays waste to those who think to tell him what to do.

But then, my mother always told me I'm so full of crap my eyes are brown, so what do I know?

The Cult of Evolution

Fred Reed is a curmudgeonly old so-and-so. He's one of those writers: when he's good, he's very, VERY good, and when he's bad, he's still readable. This week he was very, VERY good.

He writes this week on the "science" of evolution and, more importantly, the zealots who subscribe to that faith. As an FYI, I'm going to be beating on "science" quite a bit this week, because it's becoming something of a fraud industry.

Anyway, Fred starts off his column with a bang.

I think it a shame that discussion of evolution usually boils down to a pledge of allegiance either to Darwin or to the handling of snakes. This view admirably distracts attention from the observation that much of Darwinism doesn’t square with observation or even make sense. Religion has nothing to do with it, being an innocent bystander.

Not bad, eh? And the guy's an atheist!

Later he adds this zinger.

The entire Darwinian structure rests on the willingness to accept wild theories without examination.

You've got to read the whole thing yourself -- I can't do it justice here.