Men Not Horses

The fraud being exposed across the country seems to be clearly built on the backs of the American people, at the behest of their government.

Note: I had an hour in between meetings yesterday, so I sat down to try to collect some thoughts on what has been exposed in the Minnesota Daycare debacle. In an ongoing attempt to play siren for my generation and others who will listen, what happened in Minnesota is another in a long list of things that have demoralized young men and women who try to play by the rules. I have watched this unfold from a unique seat. I have spent my life working with city, county, and state governments to try to operate small businesses and create new real estate opportunities. The process is cumbersome and hard. So you can imagine my skepticism that a group of people who have newly arrived here in our country can easily navigate what has taken me years to learn how to do. All of this does not make me resentful of them; it makes me look upstream as to how it was accomplished without any consultants or money, which is what I would have had to do in order to do much less complicated things.

I wanted to sit on this overnight and see if, after I reread it, I felt the same way I did yesterday, and the reality is that I do. I believe that a functional society requires participation by all adhering to the same set of rules. What has happened, and why young men and women are so frustrated and angry, is that it appears there is one set for average, everyday Americans, and another set for those who can advance the agendas of those in power. That collapses a society quickly — and from all appearances, it is what we are starting to see the beginnings of. People who speak for young men online and in their Instagram feeds are saying they don’t care how it comes down, but it all must. In many ways, I can hardly blame them. I sat in a meeting about taxes yesterday to make sure we as a family are complying with the latest regulations. At one point, one of the people said to the tax accountant, “I don’t like lawyers and complexity,” to which the accountant said, “If we don’t get it right, you will have a lot of lawyers and complexity.”

I have done business this way for nearly 25 years now. My father for much longer, and my grandfather, before his passing, even longer than that. We ask permission from the tax accountant for nearly everything. But strangely, in the corners of the government, people can live unimpeded by those same burdens. They can live in nicer homes than my children’s generation believes they ever will live in, drive nicer cars, and struggle for less because they cheated. That isnt a country, that’s something on the verge of collapse.

In other ways, the youth always lead revolutions. Our own was filled with men under 30 and a few older intellectual leaders who helped focus their energies on the singular vision of a free republic. The youth have not lived under the fear of IRS agents and audits, so their idealism has a much easier time seeing things than those of us who are more seasoned and aware of the penalties that could come from being disobedient. I might also agree with their generation, on a fundamental level, that we need to revisit a lot of how this all is structured. I look at the last election and see a lot of things that have happened that I like. I know the list of accomplishments is much longer than any other “Republican” president in my voting life. But I also recognize that for every one thing this administration accomplishes, ten other things surface, like the scam in Minneapolis. The youth aren’t counting the one good thing, because they see the cumulative totals as a hurricane of headwinds for them.

So this may sound negative and filled with frustration, but real things will never happen without some spark of agitation to begin to build fires with.

Men Not Horses

Just a week before his death, Thomas Jefferson wrote in a letter to his friend Roger C. Weightman about what he believed the American experiment meant:

“…may it be to the world what I believe it will be, (to some parts sooner, to others later, but finally to all,) the Signal of arousing men to burst the chains, under which monkish ignorance and superstition had persuaded them to bind themselves, and to assume the blessings & security of self government. That form which we have substituted restores the free right to the unbounded exercise of reason and freedom of opinion. all eyes are opened, or opening to the rights of man. The general spread of the light of science has already laid open to every view the palpable truth that the mass of mankind has not been born with saddles on their backs, nor a favored few booted and spurred, ready to ride them legitimately, by the grace of god.”

The recent developments across the country of the appearance of rampant fraud and corruption would seem to prove Mr. Jefferson wrong. A quick perusal through any form of social media, and the exhaustion is palpable on the faces and in the voices of the American people. They realized this past week that they have been the unwitting subjects of a class of men and women who have been booted and spurred by their own coronation, to rob and pilfer the work of the average man or woman in the country. Seemingly, as if it shoving a proverbial middle finger in the face of the citizen, the government blatantly enabled a scheme of fraud and stolen money that no average citizen would ever be capable of perpetrating. They used an unwitting and cloistered community of immigrants to make sure that their power and funding would never be threatened again. To be clear, the people doing the actual deed need to face the consequences of breaking the law, but this story is far deeper than some talented Somalis magically finding their way through the gauntlet of paperwork necessary to pull off the scam.

This is the full exercise of government officials believing that they are entitled to a life of luxury and power, afforded by the good grace and natural hard-working ethic of the American people. In the world of the politician, they believed that it was their right to saddle the men and women of this country with an unbearable burden. Clearly believing themselves to be made of better clay, the people at the top of this pyramid of awfulness divided the world into the most dangerous version of a society: one where the ultra wealthy and well connected, use the poorest of society to demoralize and steal from those who still believe themselves to playing by the rules of a game established at the inception of the county.

A good and worthwhile society depends upon people behaving in good faith. When a culture and country are healthy, it sees its ethics as the backbone of civilization. People attempt to do the right thing, and when the wrong thing happens, justice is applied equally, regardless of the social status or class of the violator. From the beginning of the country, at the confederation of the states in which they pledged themselves to one another in a compact for the general welfare, they agreed that the law would be the highest ethos of the land. There would be no king or divine holy men who could, as mankind has been predisposed to do, set themselves above others simply by divination, that they are the better men or women of a people. The premise of the United States was that a country could be formed that included a wide range of interests, ideals, denominational differences, and European cultures simply by appealing to the natural order of the world and an equal treatment under the law. Contrary to modern hopes and veneration of the terrible poem on the Statue of Liberty, it wasn’t created as a proposition nation. True, immigration has been part of our nation from the beginning; however, the nation, whatever that means, depends on people surrendering the old-world ways of kings and church structures to the law. It depends on each individual's adherence to a set of ethics based on the simple premise of loving a neighbor as oneself, and a set of laws that are derived from that, codifying what that actually means as a collective nation. There is no magic in the Constitution as a form of government. It must have the ethics, formed from people imbued with a Protestant worldview, in order to work.

Many have pointed out that the Liberian Constitution is nearly word-for-word the American version. But it hasn’t stopped that country from having an epic display of violence and poverty. As Mark Steyn wrote in his recent newsletter about Liberia, when someone confronted the idea of the “proposition nation”:

“Very true. And not just because, two or three Liberian "peaceful transfers of power" back, rebel warlord General Butt Naked (his nom de guerre) is said to have made outgoing president Samuel Doe eat his own ears, while the general himself chowed down on the late Mr Doe's genitalia in accordance with the widely held belief that that is how the old leader's powers are transferred to the new guy. Granted one would live in dread of being served the membrum virilis of such legendary strongmen as Joe Biden, Rishi Sunak, Justin Trudeau or Brigitte Macron at one's inaugural lunch, it does underline the basic point that, while the American and Liberian constitutions might be similar, the people are not.”

In order for the United States to work better than the one overseen by Butt Naked, it requires that the people adhere to a set of ethics that are undeniably rooted in Christianity. Without the underlying tension created in the soul when wrong is done to someone else, that comes from the God-tuned conscience, the road to the human version of Rocky Mountain oysters is only a bad leader away.

What happened in Minnesota is the equivalent of the mutilation of a society. And while that act of mutilation may not be surprising coming from a state enamored with such addadictomes for its citizens or its children, this version of Mr. Naked’s hors d’oeuvres is allegorical for the Minnesotan. The humiliation ritual of paying taxes in order to be bent over while your culture, people, and traditions are destroyed by the extraction of one’s own labor is no less humiliating than eating one’s own ears. The sullenness on the faces of average men and women who are just coming to the realization that they have played the court jester for a vindictive government that hates them is quickly turning from shock to sadness to rage. Talks of tax strikes and sitting out work are everywhere. The people are finally waking up to what has been done to them. It’s not because someone pointed out that a country has never survived a debt of 39 trillion. It isn’t because they were forced into their homes for 2 years under surveillance and mask nazis. It isn’t because elections were stolen or immigration overwhelmed the system. It’s because they could make the connection that they could never have the same luxuries and wealth afforded to them by hard work that a group of politicians bestowed upon a standoffish set of immigrants.

Anyone who has ever tried to do something new in America knows that the paperwork alone is a nightmare. It costs tens of thousands of dollars to fill out correctly. It takes years of back-and-forth with the desk dwellers at their county, state, or city. But somehow, through a cell phone video and a kid with a set bigger than Buck Naked’s, they saw what had happened to them. Their health care costs go up every year. Their groceries go up every month. Their gas, their power, and their new socks are all more than they were this time last year. They realized through a YouTuber’s willingness to knock on a few doors that their suspicions were accurate. Life got harder for them, while for others, the burdens were a whole lot lighter. They looked at themselves in the mirror and saw the saddles that had been placed there by awful people who had turned them into beasts of burden.

They realized that their labor was an elite group’s ATM. They became acutely aware that, as Dave Smith said today on X, “Taxes are the price we pay to destroy civilizations.” It may have taken them too long to put the pieces together, but they finally did, and it seems that the revolt may be coming. For far too long, the people in power have held the average American in disdain. They see them as rusty old trucks, stuck in some kind of Confederate flag museum, useful for nothing but their compliance with an old, dead civilization. They laughed at them as they saw the good people of the nation try to adhere to the ever-increasing rules and paperwork. They extorted more of their labor, more of their time, and would retreat to their penthouses to laugh at what rubes we all were. They saw compliance with the rules as a game, while the rest of us saw it as our duty to hold a civilization together. We took the idea of a great nation seriously, while they laughed at our Pollyanna versions of obedience.

They were Lucy and the football, or Eddie Haskell, or whatever allegory you want to name. Those in power needed nothing from us but our backs and our compliance. Like horses burdened by a saddle, bit, and bridle, we were theirs for the riding. Our labor and obedience gave them the tools to live well and advance an agenda to destroy the Christian roots of the civilization. They burdened the world with their debts, and their force, and they did it all based upon the GDP of the plebeians they lorded over. It was criminal — but only to those of us who still see the law as the foundation of a free society. To them, it was exactly what they hoped for. They got caught by a young kid, but they aren’t embarrassed by it. They have no ethics that say they should be. They see the entire episode as bad luck, and a storm they have to weather for a while until the next outrage captures our television-destroyed minds. So next week they will launch a war, or a terrorist event, or Jay-Z will be in a torrid affair that started on Faceflap. Something, anything to keep the people from ever unifying in a singular direction of ire at them.

We, the people, are left with a very difficult question. Will we do anything about it? Will we fear jail or prison or the IRS at our doors with guns? Will we fear the public scorn that will be heaped upon us for suggesting that the kings of our era should be tossed out on their ears? Will we realize that asking the people who write the rules, to be nicer to us, isn’t working any longer? Will we have the fortitude to toss the tea into the sea, or will we shirk under their saddles? Jefferson thought we might be past that…I guess we will see.