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Let's Not Have a Constitutional Convention
Our DSA friends want to rip up the Constitution — “Workers Deserve More” — and replace the three branches of government with a single legislature that runs the show.
The key proposals include eliminating the U.S. Senate, abolishing the Electoral College, and making the executive and judiciary subordinate to a single legislative chamber.
Then there in E. Donald Elliott, former Yale law professor that writes “Our Worst Problem? Our Antiquated Constitution.” He cites a number of problems:
The deficit/debt.
Supreme Court under attack.
Presidential war powers.
Guns, violence.
Central banking.
Use of “lawfare” on the opposition.
Policy flip-flops from one administration to the next.
Rigged elections.
I would say that right now is absolutely the wrong time to have a constitutional convention to solve all our problems. We are in the middle of a soft civil war, with the DSA on one side and MAGA on the other, and each side is using the current political system to steal a march on the other side.
The time to have a constitutional convention would be after the current war has ended in victory for our side.
And, more important, the constitutional convention should take place after our side has decided what kind of a state we want and how we think it could work. And that means a political culture that has achieved agreement on the Big Political Issues raised by Donald Elliott.
Taxes and spending. How to we get away from the current situation where, as Milton Friedman said, “History shows that over a long period of time government will spend whatever the tax system raises plus as much more as it can get away with.”
Supreme Court. It wouldn’t be a problem after the current regime had been replaced.
War Powers. I haven’t seen any serious discussion of where we want to be.
Central Banking. Right now, nobody has a clue about central banking and its glorious product, inflation.
Lawfare, Flip-flops, Rigged Elections. These are all a feature of the current 50-50 politics, where everyone cheats to get a momentary advantage.
Let’s review Milton Friedman’s quote. He says that governments spend and tax as much as they can get away with. As far as I know, it was ever thus. The basic theme of history is its wars and its governments running out of other peoples’ money.
But Lee Kuan Yew brought the government spending of Singapore down to about 15% of GDP. How did he do it? In 1965 constant GDP per capita was $4,125, versus US at $22,526. Today it’s $70,384, versus US at $67,946. All numbers in 2010 dollars.
How do we even start to figure out how to do all that, never mind encode it in the Constitution?
Then there’s central banking. The Dutch invented it to finance their war of independence against Spain, or Eighty Years War from 1568 to 1648. I call it Dutch Finance. Then the Dutch took it to Britland in 1688 and the Brits founded the Bank of England in 1692. That’s when the British Empire really got going.
In the US, our central bank is the Federal Reserve System that was set up in 1913 just in time for World War I and World War II a generation later. Central banks operate by inflating the currency — debasing the monetary assets of citizens — and using the proceeds to fight wars.
How we would be able to end the Federal Reserve, end inflation, and return to a stable currency is beyond me. And everyone else.
So, first of all we need experts to figure out how to end the Inflation Epoch, and then successfully refigure the Federal Reserve System without causing a major depression. And then we have to figure out how to encode it in the Constitution.
And hovering above all this hopeful thought is the brute fact of the political distinction, as made Real Simple by two expert philosophers:
Curtis Yarvin: There is no politics without an enemy.
Christopher Chantrill: There is no politics without a handout.
Whatever regime we have in the United States, it is still a political regime, and it still needs an enemy. And it still needs to reward its supporters.
Go figure.
| Fri, 24 Jul 2026 22:23:58 GMT |
Finally, Some Sense on Nolan's "Odyssey"
One thing you gotta hand to Christopher Nolan. He’s got everyone talking about his mega-movie The Odyssey.
And I finally read an article about The Odyssey that has half a clue: “You Don’t Really Get Homer.” It comes down to the definition of “intelligence”, if you want to understand what is going on with Odysseus:
In Plato and Aristotle, for example, the usual abstractions of choice are nous, logos and episteme
In other words, knowledge is an abstract thing: ideas, logic, and reason.
But, in the olden time,
Homer, by contrast, tends to use the word metis, which denotes a more practical kind of intelligence.
So, the whole point of The Odyssey is a tale of the cunning and practical Odysseus as he bonks his way home to Ithaca and his faithful wife and faithful dog.
All through the Odyssey, Homer lingers over Odysseus’s feats of knowhow and craft every bit as lovingly as he does the feats of martial strength performed by Achilles, Hector, and Ajax in the Iliad.
Let’s bring it into the present. Mayor Mamdani, son of a college professor and a filmmaker is famous for his quote:
We will replace the frigidity of rugged individualism with the warmth of collectivism.
What the heck does that mean? Actually, it’s a lie. Because in the market economy and the world of interacting individuals, there is a warmth of cooperation, of give and take. But in government collectivism there is nothing but force and fraud.
The practical Elon Musk is building an actual rocket to take humans To The Moon, Alice, and beyond to Mars. The collectivist Mamdani will open a government food market. In a couple of years.
You can say that Mamdani is a man of “nous, logos and episteme” — which I think is Greek for mumble and fumble. Musk is a man of “metis.” He is a Maker. Here’s an example of Musk at work:
A SpaceX intern once described eating lunch next to Elon Musk in the company cafeteria.
The intern said Elon sat down at a regular table with a regular tray of food. No entourage. No reserved section. He sat next to two junior engineers who were clearly terrified. One of them was explaining a problem with a valve component to the other.
Elon listened without introducing himself or interrupting. After about three minutes he turned to the engineer and said “have you tried running it at a lower pressure gradient first.” The engineer stared at him. Then realized the CEO of the company had just casually solved a problem his team had been stuck on for a week.
There are endless stories like this.
According to UnHerd, in the modern age
[“we” have] decided that the Greek ideal means top-down planning, rational bureaucracy, vast sovereign efforts to make the world conform as neatly to abstract standards as possible.
But did you know that Metis “was the name given to Athena’s mother — the Oceanid nymph who marries Zeus”. And guess what. Zeus end up swallowing Metis whole.
[I]f you want to be King of the Gods, you gulp down metis, the most mysterious, unrepresentable form of intelligence of all.
I am so glad that the US gulped down Elon Musk. Because we need his metis — that’s Μῆτις to the Greeks. But now let’s go to the source. What does Elon’s Grok say about metis?
It denotes an adaptive, opportunistic kind of intelligence effective in fluid, uncertain, or competitive situations—combining foresight, subtlety, deception when needed, technical know-how, and the ability to find a way out of difficulties.
…
Nestor praises skill (mētis) over force in contexts like chariot-racing, woodcutting, or seamanship.
It seems to me that Nietzsche was talking about something close this in his notion of Übermensch, self-overcoming, getting away from the logic and reason of the Enlightenment.
| Thu, 23 Jul 2026 22:46:25 GMT |
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Christopher Chantrill
He runs usgovernmentspending.com, the go-to resource for government finance data, and is a frequent contributor to the American Thinker. He lives in Seattle, Washington. Click for more.
“I love this guy.” — Steve Ballmer
A Commoner Manifesto
Commoners have nothing to lose but their shame
Politics and government are all about force; law is all about private property; religion is all about morality.
Taleb: Never virtue-signal; never rent-seek; you must start a business. Chantrill: We are all virtue-signallers; we are all rent-seekers; we never quite got to start our own business.
The simplest way to understand human society is as Three Layers such as Nobles, Yeomen, and Serfs.
My take on Three Layers is my Three Peoples Theory of Creatives, Responsibles, and Subordinates.
I believe that we moderns live in Three Worlds: the War World of politics, the Market World of the economy, and the Life World of family and neighborhood.
And the trouble with politics is that it reduces human society to a war against the enemy, as determined by Nazi jurist Carl Schmitt.
The world that we all live in today is the one created by the German Turn in philosophy, psychology, science, and meaning.
But our modern elite, the educated elite, has taken, I believe, a Wrong Turn and has imposed a cultural Great Reaction on the world, a lurch back to the primitive. This manifests in the elite’s conceited Activism Culture and its patronage of Subordinate people as its Little Darlings.
The principal reason for the elite’s Wrong Turn has been that it does not understand and does not want to understand how the Three Peoples’ Religions are necessarily different.
The root of the educated elite’s Wrong Turn is its conceit that it knows what the world needs. I think there is a better way; I call it “A Good Life Better than the Left”.
ABC of Politics – Activism Culture – “Anatomy of Revolution” – Allyism – Critical Theory – Downstream-ism – Dutch Finance – German Turn – Good Life – Great Reaction – Little Darlings – Perfect Plan – Women in the Public Square – Ruling Class – Three Layers – Three Peoples – Three Peoples Religion – Tribalism – Two Cultures – Wrong Turn
Today’s topic: The Great Rebellion of the Commoners
