The new inflation numbers are out. It’s 8 percent on consumer prices, or so they say. Not even that is believable. More likely, it’s already double digit. The U.S. president blames Russia, clearly hoping the Americans are too dull to understand timelines or economics.
Let’s look at the bigger picture. The United States has imposed absolutely brutal sanctions on a country whose freedom from Soviet domination it celebrated only 30 years ago. These sanctions are typical of the type; they harm average people in all countries, while the ruling class in all countries is given an opportunity to scapegoat foreigners for domestic problems.
What they otherwise achieve is never clear. History gives us precious few examples of economic sanctions that inspire domestic reform that wasn’t already in progress. Still, we impose them, if only to “Do something.” We’ve been here most recently with this model of policy. “Do something” seems to mean to do something damaging that does not address the underlying problem. See: Covid.
Meanwhile, our information flows are being severely restricted. Russia Today America, with its expansive offices in D.C. and mostly-American staff, has been shut down completely. By whom, and the exact circumstances, is still not clear.
It was a hugely popular station. Very high quality. You can say “Oh it was Putin propaganda” but I never experienced that. I appeared often, and have for years, on the financial show “Boom Bust” along with some very good reporters and commentators, including my friends Ben Swann and Rachel Blevins.
It was one of the few independent journalistic outlets that offered alternative points of view. I was never censored, not once. Some shows offered extended discussions that allowed me to debate and speak for 20 minutes or more, which is basically unheard of in American media. “Boom Bust” in particular reported on subjects that others don’t cover, like the crypto industry and the real status of inflation, and other subjects.
YouTube has quickly followed up, censoring all content from Russia Today on its U.S. platform. You are not even allowed to know. That action is emblematic of Big Tech generally. It’s been a stunning reversal. The libertarian ethos that informed the founding and building of these companies has flipped to the point that the censorship has become brazen, ruthless, and relentless. What government cannot get away due to judicial checks has been effectively outsourced to ostensibly private companies that take their marching orders from the powers that be.
In foreign relations, here we are today: the United States is in a de facto but undeclared war with Russia. No one calls it that, but that’s what it amounts to when the United States is providing armaments through intermediaries to the forces that Russia is battling on its border. This intensifies and escalates conflict, same as sanctions. The dangers right now are intense, on all fronts. It’s not clear that decision makers even understand what they are doing.
Or maybe they do. Since the end of the Cold War, the U.S. military-industrial complex has been searching for a reliable enemy that the U.S. population could hate, as a way to distract from the misdeeds of the political elite at home. After decades of cycling through them, it appears that the old enemy was the best enemy. And with a small turn of a dial, vast swaths of high-end opinion are exclusively focused on the terrible plight of Ukraine.
Meanwhile, gas prices are at a 40-year high. Inflation is now arguably higher than in a century. The U.S. president blames it all on Putin, even though the Biden administration itself has worked since taking office to curb U.S. fossil fuel production. Today, the same administration is blaming the U.S. oil industry for not producing enough!
It appears that the prosperity and relatively low inflation plus economic growth—never as great as it could have been but not entirely shabby—of the last 40 years has come to an end. Even more than that, we can go back 70 years and observe that the ethos of policy reform has taken a dramatic shift in a different direction. It seems more obvious in retrospect to what happened here, even if it wasn’t entirely visible until now.
Here are the important dates in the briefest possible form.
Decade after decade, the system produced fabulous prosperity, even in the midst of the Cold War. The nuclear standoff between the United States and Russia, mostly mediated through diplomacy, paradoxically forestalled World War Three, and assured that most conflicts were regional. The secular trend in the U.S. was toward rising stocks and rising wealth.
I asked a historian last week how previous empires dealt with decline, speaking in particular of Spain and England. He said that it is never obvious in the generation that most directly experiences the new chapter in history. Everyone pretends that the glory is still there and that nothing has really changed. It can take a century or more before the realization sets in that the empire and the good-old days are fully gone.
The history I just summarized pretty much covers the life of almost all Americans alive. We truly did not know how good we had it. The world we are entering now is unlike anything we’ve previously experienced. Maybe two years ago, there was a chance to dig our way out of this pit of hell, but that seems ever less likely with each passing day.
Or perhaps I’m too pessimistic. History does not have a single trajectory. As quickly as the descent into madness occurred, there remains a chance that popular opinion could force a reversal, a renewal of human rights, an appreciation for international cooperation and diplomacy, new limits on government, and the application of reason instead of frenzy and propaganda in matters of policy.
We must hope, pray, and work to make it so.
