17A015 Politics Cannot Cut It by Jim Davies, 4/11/2017    

Fresh evidence is hardly needed, but some came anyway last week: there is no way that a zero government society can be brought about by participating in the political arena.

Trump is vastly preferable to his only credible rival last year, and I remain very glad he beat her in the election; but as I showed in March 2016, he's no libertarian. After writing that I did notice his stated intention to work for a rapprochement with Russia, which was much to his credit, but after he ordered the missile strike against Russia's ally Syria even that merit is now in doubt. We shall see; currently the situation is more foggy than the media suggest, as suggested below, and "if you're not confused, you don't know what is going on."

Trump won because he tapped in to a growing tide of discontent with the established "liberal" elite, which has for decades been thrusting political rectitude down our throats, making trade deals with other governments favorable more to them than to Americans, so taxing and regulating the work force as to arrest growth in its living standards while favoring the already rich and well connected, waging foreign wars so as to stimulate a growing flow of Muslim refugees, and doing nothing to stem the flow of incoming cheap labor from Mexico and elsewhere. His supporters have been called "right wing populists" and while we can agree with some of their points, they are not libertarians.

His most attractive feature to me was that he declared war on the Establishment and peace on other countries, notably Russia. Under Bush and Obama, the US has provoked Russia by supporting Ukraine and opposing the wishes of Crimeans to reunite with Russia, even organizing a rack of sanctions by European governments against Russia; also, by opposing Russia's ally Assad of Syria. The prospect of ending all that aggression made his election worthwhile on its own. Now, however, it's in peril.

The Establishment has struck back, first by accusing him of having won last November only with support from the Russian government, and now by rejoicing at his decision to bomb the Syrian air force following its alleged strike against Al Q'eda rebels with chemical weapons (CWs.) Some are celebrating his conversion to the pro-war Establishment in D.C. So this is a key moment.

Here's an alternative account of what happened in Syria in the last couple of weeks. Unfortunately there's no way yet to prove it, any more than it's possible to verify the version reported by the MSM; but I suggest it makes better sense.

1. The Establishment (Democrats, rump-Republicans and bureaucrats) quietly arranged with their pals in Saudi or Israel or possibly Turkey or Iran to furnish the Al Q'eda rebels in Syria with some CWs, then saw to it that Assad learned there was a weapons cache in their location.

2. Assad then, not unreasonably, dispatched bombers to destroy the cache. He was probably not told that it included CWs. His report of the raid, and Moscow's, said that poison gas was released - not from his bombs, but from the cache.

3. The MSM all indignantly accused him of using CWs he was not supposed to have, and so tricked Trump into a knee-jerk responsive attack on the airfield used for Assad's raid. One of his weaknesses is to be impulsive, and they played on it very cleverly.

This version has the primary merit of explaining why Assad should commit the astonishing blunder of revealing that he had cheated on the 2013 deal to surrender all his CWs and to deploy them, at the very time that Trump had indicated régime change was off the table. All government is irrational, but self-destructive stupidity of that order is beyond credible.

Can the rapprochement be put back on track? - Tillerson travels to Moscow today. If he tries, perhaps he can do it. His success or failure will set the tone for the next four years.

The purpose of this ZGBlog is not to encourage government to improve, but to show again that even a modest improvement in its character can and will be bitterly opposed by the wielders of power, and that they may very well succeed. Would a President Browne withstand such hostility, while Trump may not? - he would certainly be fortified by a solid set of good principles, and would do nothing to interfere with a withdrawal of all US forces overseas.

But then, a President Browne would never be elected in the first place. He'd not campaign on "making America great again" but on making it free again. He'd not promise to erect protectionist barriers to low-cost imports, he'd sweep away the government supports that make American ones expensive. He'd not resolve to build a wall to deter immigrants, but welcome anyone willing to work and earn. Voters, today, would reject all of that - as they have done, for the last 45 years since the LP opened its doors.

There is therefore no alternative to universal re-education. And once voters have learned which way is up, there will be no need for a vote; to adapt Tandy's famous dictum that if a violent revolution could be won, it need never be started: if an election could be won, there would be no need to hold it. Ballots are, after all, merely bullets in drag. All that will be needed is for everyone to withdraw the support of their labor.