Beware Political Nonsense: Shun the Frumious Bandersnatch!

The Alice in Wonderland books used to be the epitome of nonsense. No longer.

Now it’s politics.

’Twas brillig, and the slithy toves
Did gyre and gimble in the wabe:
All mimsy were the borogoves,
And the mome raths outgrabe.

While America confronted real problems the political parties served up nonsense, not solutions, for 2022.

“Beware the Jabberwock, my son!
The jaws that bite, the claws that catch!
Beware the Jubjub bird, and shun
The frumious Bandersnatch!”

Putting aside political shibboleths and dogmas, America confronted inflation, the economy, crime and the border. Now what?

Inflation?

Based on the work of virtuoso economist Steve Hanke, I warned Newsmax readers that inflation was about to surge. It did.

The tell? As Prof. Milton Friedman famously observed, “Inflation is always and everywhere a monetary phenomenon.” If the Fed persists in “printing” too many dollars their value will decline, leading to … inflation!

Back here in reality, this was borne out with inflation surging under Johnson, Nixon, Ford and Carter. Nicely bipartisan!

Then Volcker under Reagan crushed inflation. How?

Stop the presses!

President Trump relentlessly bullied Fed Chairman Jerome Powell into depreciating the dollar. It takes one and two years from tanking the dollar for inflation to kick in.

Which it did. Right on schedule.

The dollar is the world’s legal reserve currency. Other nations' central banks hold dollars as the asset against which they “print” their own currencies.

Hence: our current worldwide inflation! QED.

The Republicans, loathe to blame the titular leader of their own party, attempted to “pin the tail on the donkey” by blaming profligate Democratic spending (in which, of course, many Republicans gleefully connived).

Profligate government spending is Bad. Yet it’s not the cause of inflation.

The Democrats blamed inflation on greedy corporations. Hello?

Practically every economist since Adam Smith has noted that merchants have been greedy since the dawn of merchandize. Competition, not Big Government — handmaiden of Big Business and Big Labor — keeps business from raising prices.

The economy?

Biden had an easy act to follow. Three acts, in fact.

Reagan, after wringing out inflation and cutting marginal tax rates from the economy-strangling top rate of 70% to a sensible 28% grew the economy at roughly 4%.

Clinton, although regrettable raising the top rate from 28% to 39.6%, cut the capital gains rate from 28% to 20% and by reforming welfare, more than making up for his rate-raising blunder. The economy boomed.

Since then the economic growth rate slumped badly: George W. Bush (1.5%), Barack Obama (2.2%), and Donald Trump (1.8%). For the benefit of Trump loyalists pleading “pandemic” … Trump’s 2017 growth rate (under a slightly different metric) was 2.3%; 2018, 2.9%; 2019, 2.3%.

Enjoy Trump’s 2020 boast that his economy was “the best it has ever been.” Great showmanship but a beyond-dubious claim.

Biden, per the Washington Post: 3.3%.

Assume (as I do) that voters are not stupid and elected a president whose economic growth rate is almost 25% better than the average, pre-pandemic, rate of his immediate predecessor. Hmmmm?

Crime?

Yes, there was voter agitation about crime. Meanwhile, violent crime had dropped from almost 80 victimizations per 1,000 Americans in 1993 to around 16.5 in 2021. And, also per Pew, “Annual government surveys from the Bureau of Justice Statistics show no recent increase in the U.S. violent crime rate.” Facepalm!

Let’s not even get into America’s massive incarceration rate, the highest in the world! We’re Number One, easily beating out runners-up Rwanda, Turkmenistan, El Salvador, and communist Cuba! Incarceration rates flattened in the 2000s. Crime kept dropping.

“Lock 'em up!” is more a performative speech act than a way to reduce crime. Noted in passing? It’s anti-liberty.

Border troubles?

Welcome to the club! Per the Migration Policy Institute, “The number of people worldwide living outside their origin countries as of 2020 was at its historical high — almost quadruple the level in 1960.”

This doesn’t mean our woes at the southern border aren’t real. They are!

That said, it’s part of a worldwide phenomenon. Let’s treat it accordingly.

No evidence of malfeasance or incompetence by America’s Director of Homeland Security, Alejandro Nicholas Mayorkas. Certainly nothing warranting his impeachment.

There’s nothing new under the sun. Mencken wrote in 1918:

“Civilization, in fact, grows more and more maudlin and hysterical; especially under democracy it tends to degenerate into a mere combat of crazes; the whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, most of them imaginary.”

Still. There are real problems. To which there are real solutions.

Immersed in politics and government for the better part of a half a century I’ve never encountered such nonsense as 2022.

And can but warn my readers: shun the frumious Bandersnatch!”