A Big Beautiful Fourth of July

for ever and ever, we hope

I’m not much of a Yankee Doodle Dandy. For one thing, I was born at the end of July, not on the Fourth.

And you know, I’m not much for celebrating the glories of the Declaration of Independence.

What I celebrate is that our Founders ended up creating a pretty decent regime, after the War of Independence and the financial help from France, and the Constitutional Convention. It’s the normal thing to celebrate the ideas of the Founders, but honestly, I don’t know which of them we have really to thank. It’s just that when it was all over we had a pretty decent regime and we had My Guy Alexander Hamilton as Secretary of the Treasury, and he was a guy really up to speed on the financial possibilities in 1793. Could it be that Scott Bessent is really up to speed on the financial possibilities in 2025?

Look we got through the Civil War without breaking the place apart. And we got through the imperial century from the Spanish American War through a couple of world wars to the Middle East bungling to the meltdown on Biden’s watch.

And yet here we are. And the flag is still here. I love this country.

My love for America began my first morning in America in December 1965 when I woke up in my parents’ Denver apartment to a dawn where you could see a hundred miles eastward to the dawn. Here’s the photo I took.

Coming from England I had never seen anything like that in my 19-year-old-life. I think I decided right there, that this is where I belong.

I started out like everyone else believing the all Narratives. But now I realize that they are all lies: lies to teach the little kiddies; lies to get young men to go to war; lies to get poor people to vote for more bennies; lies for educated people to think they are noble activists.

Yet, with all the lies, the flag is still here. And we Americans are still Americans.

But there’s a problem:

Over the past century or so, government spending in the US has gone from 10 percent of GDP to the present 40 percent of GDP. It was cruising along in the mid 30s from the 1980s to the 2010s. But then we had COVID and the climate crisis and the vital importance of shoveling money at the government grantees of the nation.

I don’t care what your Narrative is, whether it’s saving the Earth or saving the poor. Taking 40 percent of GDP from the people and giving it out in benefits is too much.

Today, President Trump is signing his Big Beautiful Bill and starting the job of taking bennies away from the educated class. If you listened to his speech from the White House you get the feeling that someone has been thinking carefully about how to shovel benefits at the ordinary middle class without making the rich and the poor too angry. So it’s politics as usual.

What I would love is for some movement to begin the process of changing the culture and selling the American people on the idea that pensions, and health care and education work best when government has nothing to do with the case, and that ordinary Americans can do a lot better at pensions and health care and education — a lot better — than government employees and educated activists.

But whatever that movement looks like, and whenever it comes into being, it still has to deal with the Three Facts of Politics.

1. Schmitt: the political is the distinction between friend and enemy.

2. Yarvin: there is no politics without an enemy.

3. Chantrill: there is no politics without handouts.

You tell me how we get out of that spiral dive, so that we and our children and grandchildren can continue to enjoy Big Beautiful Fourths of July.