From the Tom Woods Letter:

I didn’t watch the State of the Union last night. I knew it would be lies and impossible promises from start to finish.

However, our friend Col. Douglas Macgregor did. Col. Macgregor has been a guest on the Tom Woods Show, and of course was senior adviser to the Secretary of Defense under Donald Trump.

I will note, first of all, that at the link above I asked Col. Macgregor about Trump’s weird deviations from his own stated foreign-policy principles, and Macgregor replied, as politely as possible, that he respects him but that Trump is unfortunately being influenced by bad people. The Puppeteers: The Pe... Chaffetz, Jason Best Price: $2.00 Buy New $12.44 (as of 07:27 UTC - Details)

At any rate, it’s at least something to hear someone with Col. Macgregor’s profile say things like this:

The current administration claims the gross domestic product is booming, but much of it comes from government spending and employment. The government share of gross domestic product in the United States today is 42%, including federal, state and local spending. This outrageous share is similar to what it was in the Soviet Union in the late 1980s, before the collapse….

Today, the government employs an estimated 2.87 million people. If we include federal contractors, this number balloons to between 12 and 25 million. All of these events occur against the backdrop of a national sovereign debt that has skyrocketed to 34 trillion. Even worse, we are currently adding another trillion dollars to national debt, roughly every three months. It is impossible to drain the swamp with unsound money and a colossal debt that we cannot sustain.

Tragically, DC Beltway politicians are controlled by the so-called donor class. This form of corruption is enabled by a cancerous central banking system with privileged access to capital. This ruling class orchestrates endless wars, enriching themselves and their cronies while sending our soldiers, sailors, airmen and Marines to serve in foreign lands of marginal strategic interest to the United States….

States’ Rights a... McDonald, Forrest Best Price: $3.18 Buy New $21.32 (as of 01:51 UTC - Details) Trillions were also wasted in the aftermath of the engineered Covid disaster, enriching the laptop class, Silicon Valley, Wall Street and big business.

While American workers, small business owners and independent contractors were destroyed, trillions have been wasted on unreliable green energy, with metals mined in Africa and processed in China while destroying American jobs and ignoring our domestic resources. The bottom line is the state of the Union is not strong. In fact, it is fragile and deteriorating….

Col. Macgregor goes on to offer some solutions to these problems, although in each case we have to reckon with this: a small minority benefits from the way the system currently operates, and a large portion of the majority who are being fleeced have decided that this minority consists of wonderful people working for the public’s best interests.

This is actually one of the worst ways the regime’s schools shape people’s minds: the political class is uncritically portrayed as the bringer of prosperity and righteousness.

That’s a story for another day.

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