People Should Know When They Are Being Conned!

This evocative line in the opening scenes of Gladiator, when the German barbarians are about to be annihilated yet again by the Roman legions, begs to be endlessly adapted:

Quintus: People should know when they are conquered.

For example, the US military’s recent bombing raid on Baghdad made you wonder. Are the citizens of the once and former site of Washington’s “shock and awe” campaign to rid them of Saddam Hussein’s evil-doings ungrateful or what?

People should know when they have been liberated!

The same thing happened this week in conjunction with the publication of our new book, Trump’s War on Capitalism. One hour before our scheduled interview time we were “cancelled” by a nationally syndicated conservative radio and TV host, who, upon belatedly reading the first chapter, concluded the book is way too anti-Trump.

Well……..people should know when they are being conned!

Yes, the conservative agenda is not just about taming the Leviathan on the Potomac, but surely that’s the heart of it. All the consequent anti-freedom evils of Big Government ultimately feast upon an open-ended call on the peoples’ money and property.

So how can “conservatives” possibly explain the graph below? To wit, the dramatically evident fact that the Donald waded into Washington’s overflowing swamp in 2017 and proceeded to fill it deeper than ever before.

In fact, whether Washington taxes or borrows its fiscal wherewithal, the ultimate metric on the size and intrusiveness of government is the spending share of GDP. That telltale ratio had been steadily marching uphill during the entire post-war period, but it literally went into rocket-ship mode during the Donald’s disastrous last year in office.