The Reign of Error

I was reading a piece at American Spectator about Soviet spies in the Roosevelt administration.

One of the things the spies did was get the US and Japan into a war. Why? Because the Soviets in 1941 were afraid of Japan attacking them "in the rear" and setting up a two-front war where they would be fighting against the Germans in the west and the Japanese in the east. They called it "Operation Snow."

The goal of Operation Snow was to influence U.S. policy in a way that would maintain Washington and Tokyo on a collision course. [Harry Dexter] White was told to draft policy and negotiating positions for the administration designed to further antagonize the Japanese government...

Yes, yes. I know. Roosevelt and World War II were the most glorious thing since sliced bread. I mean: Hitler! The Holocaust!

But if Pearl Harbor happened because the Soviets were stirring up trouble, with agents of influence encouraging the US to beat up Japan...

I know I shouldn't feel this, not as an ex-Brit. But I have been coming to feel that the US should have stayed the heck out of World War I. And let the Brits and the Krauts and the Frogs fight each other to a standstill.

Then we wouldn't have had the Treaty of Versailles that punished the Germans, and maybe not the hyperinflation in Germany after WWI and maybe not the opening for the Nazis to rally all Germans together, and maybe that would have meant no World War II and maybe...

Maybe in the 1940s we would have backed the non-Nazi Germans and the Japs in holding Stalin's murderous regime in check. Wow. Imagine that! Think of the movies!

There's another thing too, that you can see if you look at this chart of 20th century federal spending.

Notice how federal spending was about 3 percent of GDP before WWI? And about 5 percent in the 1920s. And then up to 10 percent of GDP in he 1930s after the failure of the federal government to deal effectively with the Crash of 1929 led, inexplicably to a doubling of federal spending. And then after the spending orgy of WWII, it was Katie bar the door, and now here we are with federal spending at 20 percent of GDP for the last 70 years.

Except for the temporary blip in spending in the late COVID disaster. I'm sure that won't result in permanent increases in federal spending. Could it?

Yes, but Social Security! OK, suppose that a wise federal government legislated a mandatory savings program that every private employer had to set up a retirement savings program for their employees, in which, we'll say, employer and employee each kicked in 50 percent. Imagine that!

See, with savings from that older people could mostly finance their own end-of-live health care and nursing care. So no Medicare.

Education? Well, how about the mothers in the neighborhood organize the 3 Rs. I'm sure they are all literate and numerate and qualified to do that. And I'm sure that public-spirited people could organize education for the children of aspiring rappers. And anyway, as soon as kids reached puberty they would bust out of schools and start apprenticeships, and eevil corporations would be legally bound to supplement work training with additional education.

But we don't have that system, do we? And I think there is a fairly simple reason why. It is that the whole point of the Progressive movement a hundred years and more ago was that the point of government was to provide scope for the education and intelligence and status of the educated class. Jobs for Gentry, you might say.

But the problem is that our educated class is really not that good at figuring out what the people need. That's why they got us into two world wars and a Cold War and a war against Muslims, and now a war against climate change. And why they built up an administrative full of Jobs for Gentry.

Actually, they are not that good at anything.

I'd say that World War I was a strategic error. I'd say that the New Deal was a strategic error. I'd say that World War II was a consequence of the follies of the previous 20 years and more. I'd say that the administrative state is a strategic error.

In fact I'd say that the rule of the educated class for the last century has been a Reign of Error, that has Made Things Worse, and will continue to Make Things Worse in the years to come.

But what do I know. I'm just a guy who has read too many books.