Jules Breton: The Song of the Lark (1884)

"Let us choose more wisely going forward after we finally impeach this bastard."

The problem with monarchies must be that they require vast numbers of peasants. All that idling demands many waitpeople, cooks, gardeners, butlers, maids, footmen, and vast numbers of serfs, peasant farmers who live at or slightly below subsistence so that their monarchs might live as kings. The overhead involved seems unreasonable to us raised in more liberal circumstances. How much better might it be if everybody could become more self-sufficient and at least earn and pay a living wage? People could trade rather than indenture, choose instead of becoming chattel. This tension between the monarchial and liberal worlds has peaked lately, with a self-proclaimed dictator elected to lead the world's oldest liberal democracy. Conservatives, traditionally those most enamoured of market traditionalism, for some unknown reason, embraced him who became our first self-proclaimed dictator. Dictatorships and monarchies seem identical at some level, for they both require unreasonable numbers to perform as peasants.

The Road To Serfdom, a popular book from the 1940s by Austrian economist Friedrich Hayek, described how excessive government control of economic decision-making and central planning inevitably lead to tyranny. For my entire economic life, conservatives have railed against any government program as evidence of another inevitable road to serfdom. Government control of anything was characterized as a loss of essential freedom. The belief seemed to be that a free market was the cure for pretty much anything that might ail an economy or country. If government administration seemed bloated and wasteful, then putting that function in private hands would necessarily produce greater efficiency, whatever that might mean. In practice, such "privatization" usually resulted in somebody making millions while the once-reliable services went to Hell. The road to serfdom might have been paved with government regulation and control, but the free market alternative seemed to offer a road to Hell as the viable alternative.

Conservatives invented Trickle-Down Economics under the Road To Serfdom aegis, presuming that if taxes were reduced for the wealthiest, they would spend their excess profits where they would do the most economic good, unlike choices made by any tax-collecting government. The wealthiest mainly chose to sit on their largesse, which didn't benefit anyone but the wealthiest. So much for that free market, which ended up being much more self-centered than any vaunted Viennese economist ever expected. Income distribution skewed alarmingly under the Road To Serfdom trance. Regular Joes who earned wages found their share steadily shrinking while the super wealthy complained about a shortage of high-yielding tax havens to stockpile their takings. This resulted in a bifurcated economy where a very few extraordinarily wealthy controlled something on the order of ninety percent of the money. Housing prices became outrageous. Health care, widely out of reach.

Worship of a mythical free market and the widespread revulsion toward government resulted in a candidate for president who tried to represent both poles of the widely divided economy. He was a self-proclaimed billionaire as well as a wildly popular television performer. These credentials gave him credibility both among the more persuadable investors as well as with hillbillies. He promised a dictatorship as an alternative to a pluralistic society. He promised tariffs as the key to economic equality. In practice, he quickly crashed the markets, simultaneously bringing down stocks, bonds, and the dollar, something that had never been done before. He continued preaching free market populism while noisily installing even greater government control. He even tried to redefine the number of genders.

He was paving a Road To Serfdom as everyone in the society took a fleecing under his wacky economic policies. No free market, however unencumbered, could adapt to his whim-based proclamations. He quickly transformed the country into one where serfdom became the norm. Everyone became captive to his capricious commands. Investors fled. Retirees bled. Young families were left without alternatives. Jobs and whole careers dried up under his command. He assumed the role of first monarch, and like monarchies throughout history, his required an inordinate number of serfs to keep it working. We're in the streets protesting while he fritters away his incumbency implementing things that do not matter except to inflict damage on those he imagines once slighted him. Let us long remember how frivolous belief in a free market paves a more certain road to serfdom than any government program ever can. Let us choose more wisely going forward after we finally impeach this bastard.

©2025 by David A. Schmaltz - all rights reserved

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