Think and Stay Inside the Box

February 9th, 2024

It can be quite informative listening to the media chatter, the commentary from the publicly acclaimed great and wise.

One of the things you are constantly told is that to succeed you must "think outside the box.” Of course, one of the things you must never actually do, lest you ruffle feathers, is actually follow that advice or, Heavens forbid, try to get outside of the box.

The last few weeks have been an object lesson in this fact.

Watching President Trump try to change some things - and fixing the mess we find ourselves means changing some things - is to be bombarded by caterwauling whenever he actually tries to do something.

Trump insisted - as he had promised - on closing the border. So, he threatens tariffs. Canada and Mexico, not being stupid, responded within just a few days and are addressing the borders, which means addressing the flow of fentanyl. The nattering nabobs of negativism (Agnew’s labeling of certain politicians remains so accurate) are beside themselves as they talk about tariffs; after both Mexico and Canada acted, Trump withdrew the threats, the NNNs were quick to point out “Trump gave in on his tariffs.” 

Because many of them are clearly slow in the uptake, the tariffs weren’t the point: the border was, and is. And Fentanyl. And Child trafficking. And unvetted thousands. All that is now being addressed straight up.

Another issue: there is an incredible amount of waste in the US Government. Anyone who has ever worked in it knows this - and for those who have never worked inside the federal government (to include the military) and have not lived near Washington DC, you can (blissfully or unfortunately) have no appreciation for how much time and money and manpower the US Government can commit to doing the most foolish things. 

Anyone who cares to read a little history might take a look at the Grace Commission report from 1986 which identified that more than 15% of Federal spending in 1984 was waste. Note: we are not more efficient today. The Grace Commission identified more than $450 billion in savings over the course of 3 years of spending - in a $900 billion budget, 16.5% per year. 16.5% of the 2025 budget ($7.266 trillion) works out to $1.199 trillion. This makes the $40 billion from USAID in 2024 dollars look like pocket change.

And then there is Gaza and the Mid East…

For almost 80 years we have heard pundits come up with answers on Gaza. For most of the pundits - the ones who win Nobel prizes - the answer involves wiping out Israel (or to be less polite, killing Israelis. Every year, we get the same answer.

Suddenly a guy comes along, points out the obvious: the Palestinians are sitting on some of the - potentially - most beautiful land on the planet. He makes an out of the box suggestion just to get us thinking new thoughts - and is roundly condemned. Condemned by whom? By the folks who have come up with no idea over the last 80 years except, in fact, kill more Israelis. (Sure, they use other words, but that’s what they’re implying.)

Meanwhile, do any of these countries have any new ideas? Can anyone explain why Egypt, the most populous Arab country in the world, has fewer Palestinians than does the US? Anyone want to think outside the box on that one?

Trump wants to fix certain problems but also insists that there be some quid pro quo, that the US get something for it. In the words of my favorite Secretary of State, "the US is not a charity.” He insists, as does the President, that any foreign aid benefit US interests. 

And the President wants to trim the size of the USG. But to reduce the size of the USG you have to actually reduce the size of the USG. One idea is to buy folks out. It’s been done before, though called different things. The NNNs (Nattering Nabobs...) now tell us it's illegal. I am sure they will find a federal judge who will agree and they will stop it until some other lawyers come along and make it clear to other judges…

Let’s go back to the beginning. We, the American taxpayers, who, as you will recall are in charge, have funded a bunch of “stuff” that doesn’t work, but we are spending tremendous amounts of money on them. Giant windmills are pretty good at killing whales, but not at generating more electricity than was used to make them. So, stop building them. The NNNs scream: “NOOOOO!!!”

We have had trouble winning wars for 3 generations, Maybe we have the wrong folks being selected as admirals and generals. The NNNs scream: “NOOOOOO!!!”

We have a flood of fentanyl and child traffickers and a fair number of criminals coming across our borders. Maybe we should close the borders and enforce the laws.  The NNNs scream: “NOOOOO!!!”

We have a whole host of laws that either are not enforced or are very selectively enforced. Maybe we should apply the law, and fairly. “NOOOOOO!!!!"

To which the sane man Donald Trump responds, in essence: "Your Emperor has no clothes.”

The NNNs reply that Trump is a fascist! Trying to balance the budget, trying to rebuild the country, trying to treat everyone the same, trying to uphold the law… What a horrible idea.

And for the record, fascism is socialism with a national flavor… Are they suggesting Trump is a socialist? Maybe those words don’t mean what they think they mean...

In fact, Trump has done precious little except what most of us, even members on the far left, even some of the NNNs, have said needed to be done in quiet hours of honest frustration, when we have contemplated another foolishness perpetrated on the planet by the Nattering Nabobs who have been in charge for most of the last 115 years, have created the largest flood of debt anyone ever imagined, and built a bureaucracy that thinks it has the “right” to rule, that it knows better than the voters. People who believe that technocrats in central governments around the world should guide us, paying little to no attention to elections, constitutions, the law or the desires of the electorate. 

So, review quickly what the NNNs have given us over the past century: mountains of debt, deeper depressions and recessions, and greater anxiety, and bigger wars and more violent and intrusive governments than any in the previous 6000 years. 

One final comment on the Grace Commission; J. Peter Grace was on a talk show - I think it was William F. Buckley’s Firing Line, during the early 1990s, and Buckley asked him about his findings. Grace commented that two things struck him: the first was that beyond the obvious inefficiencies, there was simply an incredible amount of low level waste, of 10 people doing the work of five, of the more expensive option always being the one chosen, even if the government was just buying something trivial. He guessed, as I recall, that the USG, if properly organized and operated, could be reduced in size by 35 - 40% without losing any effectiveness (and probably gain some). He then added a second point: in the end he was sort of hoping (knowing that they would not, but…) that they would find that there is fellow, a Bond Villain sort of character, if you will, who was living on some island somewhere and had made off with trillions of dollars, that someone, somewhere had massively benefited from all the waste. But there really wasn’t. As he said, most of it was frittered away a dime at a time, every hour of every day in every office, a million tiny, never ending streams of waste.

That is the real legacy of the deep state, the legacy of the nattering nabobs, the legacy of staying inside the box. Meanwhile, as debt continues to mount, and as our de facto personal freedoms are eaten by the bureaucratic state, it is important to realize that with the debt eating our savings, the loss of freedom, the scoffing at the law and the Constitution for more than a century, the  last 115 years have been, by perhaps an order of magnitude, the most violent in history. That’s the box they want to keep us in.