One of my all-time favorite quotes:
“Much of the social history of the Western world over the past three decades has involved replacing what worked with what sounded good.”
― Thomas Sowell
How are we doing lately? Let’s dig.
Western civilization has elevated the standard of living for literally BILLIONS of people in the last few centuries. Yes, it had its problems, especially in the 1800s with slavery, and mid-1900s, with rampant race discrimination (slavery’s little brother). But Western civilization constantly tries to correct its errors, and does so from a legal and judicial standpoint. While the argument can be made that it only does the right thing after exhausting all other options (paraphrasing Winston Churchill), it eventually adjusts to benefit the most folks possible. Compare Western civilization to ANY other group, in any place, in any time, and I like its results. When you include advances in medicine, science, architecture, standard of living, social safety net, working conditions, political freedom, economic freedom, and such, the results speak for themselves. While some countries may excel at one or two of these comparison points, Western civilization, the United States specifically, has done well in nearly all of them. An ongoing work in progress, always adapting? Sure. But lately, Dr. Sowell’s quote is manifesting itself quite dramatically here. While I think Dr. Sowell’s intent was viewing things from the 1960s forward, let’s focus upon the last year.
Prior to the administration change from Donald Trump to Joe Biden, even in a pandemic-flavored world, we still had a few things going in our favor. The US was a petroleum exporter, for the first time in decades. Our military and foreign policy were forceful enough to not only assist Israel with several historic treaties with Arab States, we also avoided entering new conflicts for the first time in memory. Trump’s State Department had negotiated a realistic withdraw plan from Afghanistan, with real consequences for the Taliban for breaking the terms of that agreement. Interest rates were low. We were only a year removed from the strongest economy, with the smallest unemployment figures (regardless of the minority sector viewed) in at least 50 years. Pre-COVID, the US had real wage growth for the first time in decades. Illegal immigration, while still a problem, was down considerably, with the ongoing construction of a real border wall, along with realistic enforcement of current immigration law. Note that even with the booming 2019 economy, which would be a natural magnet for illegal immigration, border crossings were DOWN compared to earlier years.
Fast forward to January 2021. Via Executive Orders, President Biden has reversed nearly all of former President Trump’s policies. He immediately cancelled the Keystone Pipeline project, even though millions of dollars had already been committed by many parties, via signed contracts. While that pipeline would have just eased the price of transporting shale oil from Canada to refineries on the Gulf Coast, the cancellation, along with reversing ANWAR drilling and stopping fracking on Federal lands, all caused a distinct signal to world petroleum markets: the US is cutting back production, or increasing the cost of transport to Canada. Such signals hit oil futures hard and fast. The higher energy prices have the expected cascading effect on prices of virtually everything shipped. Inflation is now at a nine-year high, eliminating the wage growth gains. Biden’s State and military officials decided to quickly evacuate Afghanistan, regardless of any impact to US personnel and advisors there. They completely ignored the consequences for the Afghan compliance that Trump had negotiated. Crazier still, they evacuated Bagram Air Force Base FIRST, removing the ability to provide any type of military cover for those assets to leave! Just to put icing on the cake, they also abandoned BILLIONS of dollars of military hardware, including helicopters and vehicles. One cannot imagine a worse withdraw execution, maybe the worst such withdraw in modern military history. By the end of such actions, it was hard to identify which group was the strongest military on Earth, and which were 6th century terrorists. Also via EO, Biden stopped Trump’s immigration policing, along with discontinuing construction of the border wall. We have had a record number of border crossings since, and that only will intensify if the Biden administration follows through on a massive payout of ‘separated immigrants’ settlements, up to $450K per person. Not only will we encourage more illegal immigration, we will make it a potential lottery winning for those involved—taxpayer funded, of course. The Biden administration has also green-lighted massive spending bills, even to the tune of $1T in additional spending for ‘climate change’. While such bills have passed the House, they have not passed the Senate (as of this writing), so they are still projected spending, rather than actual. But the trend is obvious: the amount of funds that will be spent, regardless of reason, will have no basis in fact, or bear no correlation to taxes collected.
In the last two paragraphs, we see Dr. Sowell’s quote live. We have replaced policies that actually WORKED with new policies that sound good (to some), but are failing miserably. This is not a surprise, as such policies have failed everywhere and any time they have been attempted. Why change from something obviously working? I can only guess, but two major motivations seem apparent: the desire to get away from anything Trump (even if it worked), and the desire to bring the US down to the level of other countries. Note that we are only within the first year of this administration. I truly regret the truth of Dr. Sowell’s quote—it is to the detriment of all of us.
Thank you for taking the time to read my article! Feel free to add comments (good or bad) in the box below. In addition, there is a link at the bottom of the article to view other items I’ve written at Global Liberty Media. Enjoy!
