Chatter

     Here we are at the beginning of (ulp) tax-return preparation season, and our new president has floated the idea of doing away with the income tax! Marvelous! But that will require a corresponding reduction in federal spending. Will it happen? Will the fiscal-year 2026 budget be lower, in absolute terms, than that for fiscal-year 2025? Or are we being jollied along by talk of unicorns and rainbows?

     A dollar-denominated reduction in federal spending has never yet taken place in the history of these United States. If it happens – and yes, I know about DoGE and its efforts to root out waste, fraud, and abuse – it will be genuinely historic. But while “past performance is not a guarantee of future returns,” it’s a more reliable guide to what’s coming than any other. For as Damon Runyan has told us:

     “The race is not always to the swift, nor the battle to the strong – but that’s the way to bet.”

     J. D. Vance has shaken the proud towers of Europe’s elite:

     I believe that dismissing people, dismissing their concerns, or worse yet, shutting down media, shutting down elections, or shutting people out of the political process protects nothing. In fact, it is the most surefire way to destroy democracy. Speaking up and expressing opinions isn’t election interference.
     Even when people express views outside your own country, and even when those people are very influential.
     Trust me, I say this with all humor, if American democracy can survive 10 years of Greta Thunberg’s scolding, you guys can survive a few months of Elon Musk. But what no democracy, American, German, or European, will survive is telling millions of voters that their thoughts and concerns, their aspirations, their pleas for relief, are invalid or unworthy of even being considered. Democracy rests on the sacred principle that the voice of the people matters. There’s no room for firewalls. You either uphold the principle or you don’t.

     To what was our new vice-president referring? Why, the “firewall” that the political establishments of Europe used to keep seriously conservative voices and parties out of power. In Britain, the firewall excludes Nigel Farage’s Reform UK (formerly UKIP); in France, the outcast is the Le Pen-led National Rally (formerly the National Front); in Germany, it’s the Alliance for Deutschland (AfD). Despite the steady rise of those parties, all of which now command the allegiance of substantial numbers, the Establishment parties have succeeded in keeping Europe’s governing coalitions free of those “rogues.”

     Vice-President Vance, in a move that stunned the potentates of Europe, invited Alice Weidel, the leader of the AfD, to a chat. Europe’s elites are screaming “Unacceptable! Election interference! Has this upstart American no shame?”

     I’m loving it.

     Here in America, the Left appears determined to beclown itself by pushing forward its most ridiculous figures. Here’s the latest example:

JUST IN: Democrat Rep. Robert Garcia says Democrats need to fight Elon Musk with “actual weapons,” says it needs to be done for “democracy.”

“I think is really important, and what the American public wants is for us to bring actual weapons to this bar fight.”

“This is an actual… pic.twitter.com/8PYo16kNK9

— Collin Rugg (@CollinRugg) February 12, 2025

     This ridiculous man has the brass to call the world’s foremost innovator and industrialist a “dick?” Then to say that Marjorie Taylor Greene lacks “decorum” and is “not a serious legislator” — ?

     Words fail me.

     Isabel Paterson, in her landmark The God of the Machine, wrote of political power’s “ratchet action:”

     [P]olitical power has a ratchet action; it works only one way, to augment itself. A transfer occurs by which the power cannot be retracted, once it is bestowed…. The difficulty of taking back powers once granted is illustrated in the repeal of the Prohibition Amendment; although it was demanded and carried by overwhelming sentiment of the citizens, the article of repeal contained a proviso which would retain numerous Federal jobs; it was impossible to make a clean sweep of the pernicious usurped power.

     Which is how the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives (BATFe) came to be. The repeal of Prohibition by the Twenty-First Amendment could not do away with the bureaucratic edifice that was born due to the Eighteenth Amendment. The progressives of the early Twentieth Century had achieved a stronghold in the federal government and were dug in too deeply to be rooted out.

     Yet today, the BATFe’s abolition is on the table:

     On Jan. 7, 2025, Rep. Eric Burlison (R-MO) took the initiative by introducing H.R. 221, the “Abolish the ATF Act’’, a succinct, one-page bill that aims to abolish the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (BATFE). Burlison’s bill already has 27 co-sponsors, with Reps. Lauren Boebert (R-CO), Thomas Massie (R-KY), Paul Gosar (R-AZ), and Andy Biggs (R-AZ).
     In a statement to The National News Desk earlier in January, Burlison declared, “The ATF is emblematic of the deep-state bureaucracy that believes it can infringe on constitutional liberties without consequence. If this agency cannot uphold its duty to serve the people within the framework of the Constitution, it has no place in our government.” Burlison previously indicated that state governments should handle firearms issues without having the Feds butt in. He accused the ATF of “co-opting or commandeering [local] law enforcement to enforce laws” which elected officials in state legislation did not pass. The congressman suggested that states should be allowed to handle matters themselves, without federal interference.

     But the referenced article asks whether it would have any effect on the real target: federal firearms laws. Abolishing the BATFe would not change the laws already on the books. Would their enforcement simply be transferred to another federal agency, perhaps the FBI?

     Given what happened after the ratification of the Twenty-First Amendment, it’s a serious possibility… and, given the FBI’s blatant disregard for Americans’ civil rights, a dark one.

     For some time now, I’ve joshed with other writers and would-be writers about the inadvisability of answering a new acquaintance’s “What do you do?” query with “I’m a writer.” As I like to put it, no other announcement is more likely to send the acquaintance scurrying for the other end of the party. Of course, if that’s your aim, feel free to use it. But it occurred to me that there’s another consequence of that announcement: it summons the predators to you.

     Not long ago, I joined a group on Facebook called “The Writers’ Forum.” Yes, there are other writers there. Some of them even have something to say other than the inevitable self-promotions. But it’s become necessary to fend off certain parasitic life forms:

• Fly-by-night “publishers;”
• Folks who’ll format your book for you;
• Promoters and “marketing specialists;”
• New-born “agents;”
• Scammers supposedly interested in selling your “movie rights;”
• And saddest of all, other “writers” who are really fronts for the above vermin.

     They travel in packs and attack in waves.

     Remember what Arne Stromberg said: “Predators of all sorts will concentrate where the prey is fattest.” The sort of conversational watering hole where writers congregate attracts them reliably. Keep one hand on your wallet and the other over your genitals at all times.