How The Industry Works and Why [r]epublicanism Is Our Only Hope

Mandeville, LA – Exclusive Transcript – Politics today is an industry, it is a business, it is The Industry.  Why? Because it is an industry, my friends, that has a $3.8 trillion revenue stream, that’s right, $3.8 trillion, our Corporation of America.  Hardly anyone says these United States anymore.  I’m reading an article right now at The Imaginative Conservative that’s making way too much sense.  I wonder where is this discussion in our politics today?  Instead of having Obama and Romney and Ryan and Biden and the rest of them cavorting across the countryside, droning on endlessly, and whining and carping and complaining, like in Chicago for example, of why there isn’t sufficient funds to fund our schools. Check out the rest in today’s transcript…

Begin Mike Church Show Transcript

Mike:  Politics today is an industry, it is a business, it is The Industry.  Why? Because it is an industry, my friends, that has a $3.8 trillion revenue stream, that’s right, $3.8 trillion, our Corporation of America.  Hardly anyone says these United States anymore.  I’m reading an article right now at The Imaginative Conservative that’s making way too much sense.  I wonder where is this discussion in our politics today?  Instead of having Obama and Romney and Ryan and Biden and the rest of them cavorting across the countryside, droning on endlessly, and whining and carping and complaining, like in Chicago for example, of why there isn’t sufficient funds to fund our schools.  Instead of Obama making this a campaign issue, as if he has a solution to it, [mocking] “I’m just gonna go print more money or borrow more from the Chinese and then we’ll feed it back down to the local level.”  Maybe, maybe, maybe, if the general government, if its monopoly was ended and if it didn’t confiscate the money to start with and left it where it was, then there would be ample money for schools, should that locality decide that’s what they wanted to spend it on.

You see, folks, this is why [r]epublicanism offers you this radio show, as a conduit and way-back machine to the founding era and to all the great Western civilization that went into making the founding era great.  It’s not so much that it’s the founders.  It is their humility and it is in their use, their humble use, not their arrogant dismissal of the history that went before them that made them great.  They didn’t think they knew everything.  They did have an awful large historical catalogue of things that maybe we shouldn’t do.

Not only that, as Brad Birzer points out yesterday in his brilliant essay about Russell Kirk and the American conservative tradition, the roots of American order, this is where our fault is.  It’s not in our politicians, not in our politics, it’s in us.  The fault with this civilization today is you.  Look in the mirror as you’re driving in your car.  Take your eyes off the road for a second.  There you go, that’s you, it’s me, it’s us.  We’re the fault.  The reason why men of the founding era are perceived as these titans of intelligence and titans of philosophy and brilliant political scientists is because they drew from experience and they did not throw their traditions under the bus in favor of making up their own.  They deferred to them.

As soon as the first original American sin was committed, which was ratifying the Constitution, the wheels began to come off the proverbial bus.  It was the first sin against the spirit of ’76.  It’s why Patrick Henry spent his last great political capital trying to stop its ratification, because he knew that consolidation and creating a center would ultimately lead to the same tyranny they had just escaped from.  It is the natural order of things.  It’s the way it happens.  Now today, we are so possessed of it that the general government of these United States, The Industry, will burn through $3.8 trillion.

Think about that for a moment.  That is an impossible task for anyone, I don’t care who they are, to manage by counting paperclips better than the guy before.  This is a monopolistic, corrupt oligarchy.  If those words are too big, let me translate.  This is run by the people that collect the money for the benefit of the people that collect the money and their friends.  That’s what that means.  As Andrew just pointed out, the money that is in politics today is sick, absolutely sick.  This is why campaign finance reform and term limits are not going to work, because you’re just going to have different people going in there and spending the same loot, the same booty.

The scale is wrong.  It is too large.  It’s going to resist any attempt at reform.  It doesn’t matter who you are, yes, even Congressman Paul, although he could have put a dent in it.  The only real dent, the only real ding, the only real challenge to this leviathan, as Hobbs called it — and that’s what we have.  It is a monster arising off the banks of the Potomac River.  The only think that you can do, the only thing that is possible is a restoration of republicanism.  The only way that is possible is by a restoration of federalism, which will require large states to break up.  It will require a rethinking of the order of the union.  It will require us to make some very difficult decisions on how we order our government.  Will the Constitution still be in effect?  I think so.  Will this one look and act exactly as this one does today?  I think not.  The proof, as they say, is in the pudding.

Just think of this monopolistic behemoth, this hulking Mount Everest of a government that has guns, jails, people that run those guns, that man those guns, staff those jails.  It has judges that will order people into those jails.  It has politicians that will order men to take those guns up and point them at citizens.  We as citizens today are under assault, under review on a daily basis.  I didn’t ask for the FBI to face recognition scan me when I walk through a Wal-Mart.  Did you know that they’re doing that now?  Oh, but they’re only doing it to track the bad guys.  Things that the Bill of Rights is supposed to protect it can’t protect because it’s out of scale.  We are becoming the very thing that we decried that the Soviet Union became.  We are becoming a threat.  We are already a threat to ourselves.

If you think about it, the tax burden that is levied upon every state and about every citizen of every state, this is why there are problems that cannot be dealt with for local sewage plants, for local schools, fire departments, police departments and what have you.  Number one, there are too many people working in the endeavor, and number two, because there’s a middle man there collecting his take.  Well, then, the nonproductive are skimming substantial portions of the loot right off the top.  Folks, this is a recipe for disaster.  If this were happening in a business, every person involved would be in jail.  You’d be demanding they be thrown in jail.  But because they’re politicians, it’s government, it makes it okay.

As Bastiat wrote, you show up at someone’s house and tell them you’re going to take their property, they may kick your behind, may shoot you to stop you from taking your property.  You show up, though, with an officer of government and say you’re going to take their property but call it a tax, then if you shoot them, they lock you up for the rest of your life, or worse yet they kill you.  That’s where we’re at.  Sometimes people sugarcoat these things and like to make people feel warm and fuzzy all over that these things can be fixed and repaired and reformed.  Come on, people.  Seriously?  After 60 years of trying, give up, just quit.  Either you’re going to dismantle the monster or shut up and get used to it.

AG:  Is there no campaign finance reform that would limit —

Mike:  No, because I think you have to remove the money.  You pointed it out, that the money is there.  As long as you have The Industry divvying up $3.8 trillion now, you’re going to have people lobbying to get their share of it.  It’s just natural.  I don’t think you can remove human nature from that, do you?

AG:  No.  I think there’s definitely an aspect of human nature in it.  If the federal government had less power and the states had more, would you ultimately just be transferring that lobbying and campaign finance and money to the state level so you wouldn’t be fixing it?

Mike:  Here’s why that would actually work better than the feds, because the states will not have the capacity to print currency or borrow money like the general government can.  Let’s take a state like California, for example.

AG:  Sounds like they’re borrowing money.

Mike:  Let’s say we decided to kick California out of the union, which we should yesterday, or they decided to secede.  Who would tell them, “No, dude, you can’t go?”  Good riddance.  California is going to be its own sovereignty.  If it wants to print money, it’ll be able to.  We don’t have to accept it here.  We could say, “Your paper money is not good in the rest of the United States.  Since you’re the Republic of California now, you’re on your own.”  They would have very little choice, unless they could find suckers like Spain and Portugal have in Europe, designing men that will transfer the debts to other countries that are wealthy like your original homeland of Germany.

Why the Germans are going along with this is beyond me.  I keep waiting one morning to wake up and read some news headline that the great German spirit has been reawakened and there is somebody emerging saying, “I don’t think we ought to be giving any more money to the Spaniards.  I don’t think the Portuguese are worthy.  I don’t think the Greeks are worth of any more of our bailout dollars.”  It’s like when you’re in the restaurant business and you have a couple tough weeks or months and you’re behind in paying your suppliers.  They put you on cash.  When they show up with the cheese or the eggs or meat or whatever that day, you have to pay cash.  I keep waiting for the Germans to say to the Greeks, [mocking] “Yeah, we’ll sell you some beer and steins, dude, but you gotta pay cash.  None of that funny money Greek paper stuff, either.  We want gold and silver.”

So no, I don’t think that’s possible long term.  Somebody ultimately has to pay for all this.  I think that breaking it down into smaller sovereignties makes it much more manageable.  Does that mean it will be perfect?  Look, I’m not promising a utopia.  I don’t know.  It may be a dystopia, but we’re already in a dystopia.  As I said, this dystopia is becoming more threatening by the day.

End Mike Church Show Transcript