Christopher Chantrill - Writer, conservative, government spending taxes debt deficit

Christopher Chantrill

Welcome!

WELCOME. I am Christopher Chantrill @chrischantrill, writer and conservative. You can see my work at the following sites:

Road to the Middle Class contains the eponymous book and my daily blog. It investigates and celebrates the cultural artefacts that ordinary people appropriate as they struggle to adapt from country ways to the demands of life in the city. Start here.

An American Manifesto is the site for my book and blog. I am writing this book about "life after liberalism" and blogging about it as I go. All are invited to comment. Start here.

USgovernmentspending.com is a resource on government spending in the United States. It presents tables and charts on federal, state, and local government expenditure in the United States from 1902 to the present. Spending data are sourced from US budget data and US Census reports. Start here.

US Spending 101 is a “university” of government spending. It features several walks through the pages of the usgovernmentspending.com suite of websites. And the learning never stops. But it is not a real university, nor does it offer credits for courses completed. Start here.

USgovernmentrevenue.com is a resource on government taxes and receipts in the United States. It presents tables and charts on federal, state, and local government taxes, charges, use fees, and business revenue in the United States from 1902 to the present. Revenue data are sourced from US budget data and US Census reports. Start here.

UKpublicspending.co.uk is a resource on public spending in the United Kingdom. It presents tables and charts on public expenditure by central government, local authorities, and public corporations in the United Kingdom from 1900 to the present. Spending data is sourced from UK government Public Expenditure Statistical Analyses, the UK National Statistics “Blue Book,” and academic studies. Start here.

UKpublicrevenue.co.uk is a resource on public revenue in the United Kingdom. It presents tables and charts on public revenues by central government, and local authorities in the United Kingdom from 1900 to the present. Revenue data is sourced from UK Office for Budget Responsibility, the UK National Statistics and academic studies. Start here.

American Thinker publishes my op-eds most weeks. Click here.

US Stuck on Stupid analyzes the perfect storm of political bungling in the years from 1929 to 1939 that plunged the American people into untold misery during the Great Depression. Start here.

US Presidential Elections tabulates the results of presidential elections going back to 1788. Start here.

US Midterm Elections tabulates the history of midterm elections for the US Senate and the US House of Representatives going back to 1790. You can sort the elections by year, by party strength, and by party gains and losses. Start here.

Biography

I AM CHRISTOPHER CHANTRILL, a member of the international capitalist conspiracy. Both my grandfathers owned and operated import/export businesses in the early twentieth century, one in St. Petersburg, Russia, where my father was born, and the other in Kobe, Japan, where my mother was born.

I was born in India and raised and educated in England. I immigrated to the United States in 1968 and worked for many years designing and implementing utility control systems and software in Seattle.

Soon after moving to Seattle, I instinctively revolted against the suffocating left-coast culture of the Soviet of Washington, and soon came to revere the four great Germans who helped inspire the Reagan revolution: Ludwig von Mises, F.A. Hayek, Leo Strauss, and Eric Voegelin. Since then I have broadened my appreciation of “The German Turn” that has transformed the world over the last 200 years.

I have written for Liberty, FrontPageMag.com, and The American Thinker. My book Road to the Middle Class celebrates the self-governing culture of the United States in which enthusiastic Christianity, education, mutual aid, and living under law have taught generations of immigrants to rise from indigence in the countryside to a life of competence and prosperity in the city. My book An American Manifesto: Life after Liberalism tries to imagine what America would look like after the end of left-wing politics and big government.

Disclaimer and Transparency

WE make no respresentation about the accuracy of the data presented in these websites. Nor does Christopher Chantrill represent himself to possess any formal qualifications to select, evaluate or present the information. Users are urged to check all data against the published data sources and to report any errors or inconsistencies.

The websites have no relationship with any government institution, or any other institution. They are supported solely by advertising and by the life, fortune, and sacred honor of Christopher Chantrill.

Daily Blogging

WE BLOG DAILY, Monday to Friday, chiefly on national US politics, religion, education, mutual aid, and law. We also look at our junior partners in the global Anglospheric hegemony, the British. It is hard to say why, but very often our blogging zeroes in like a laser on liberal hypocrisies, monopolies, and sinecures. Of course, we love our liberal friends to bits, but we do not take them quite as seriously as they do. If we get too pompous and serious, please get in touch and tell us to lighten up.

We love to get email from our readers. And you can follow on Twitter .

Enjoy.

LATEST BLOG

Marx vs. Dante, Nietzsche, Jung, Campbell

I tell you, the world out there is full of useful knowledge. Like this piece about a book by Robert Orlando about Marx, arguing that Marx’s vision was a descent into Hell and no way back.

Marx and his long-time confidant Engels filled their pages with hell and its torments, with the march of history as purgation, but nowhere did they speak of paradise,” writes Orlando. “There was no ascent, no final vision of harmony — only struggle without end, revolution without transcendence.

Orlando compares this with Dante’s Divine Comedy, which has three parts: Inferno, Purgatorio, and Paradiso. Marx never gets out of the Hell of Inferno.

Of course, Marxism as a political faith does have a happy ending. First the Hell of capitalism, then the purgatory of revolution, and finally the paradise of socialism. So there is that, alongside the 100 million deaths of the Black Book of Communism, which seems to confirm Marx’s world view that there was no way out of Marx’s Hell.

The idea of Marx seeing no way out of Hell made me think. Maybe Marxism is not the way to go. It’s not a if there aren’t modern alternatives if you assume, like Marx, that God is Dead.

Instead there is Nietzsche, interpreted from Grok:

Descent into Hell: “God is dead. God remains dead. And we have killed him.”
Purgatory: Decadence and Nihilism.
Ascent:
Revaluation of All Values.
Úbermensch
Eternal Recurrence (Groundhog Day)
Will to Power: “expansion, growth, self-overcoming, and creative power.”

Then there is Jung, His journey is into the underworld of the unconscious, connecting with Greek mythology. Grok:

Confronting the Shadow: “dark twin.”
Facing Archetypes: “Wise Old Man, Anima/Animus, or the Terrible Mother.”
Integration and Rebirth: back out of the underworld

Or Joseph Campbell and his Hero’s Journey. Reduced to three stages, Grok:

Departure (Leaving the Ordinary World)
Initiation (The Adventure and Transformation)
Return (Coming Back with the Elixir)

Or you can represent The Hero’s Journey thus:

Leaving safety and comfort
Facing your deepest fears
Dying to your old self
Being reborn wiser and stronger
Sharing what you’ve learned

Grok notes that this process is echoed in Star Wars, Lord of the Rings, Harry Potter, The Matrix. Experts agree that it is not comprehended in Wokism.

However, here’s a theology instructor saying that the Kidz are converting back from secular ideology to traditional religion.

Whereas they used to be prone to dismissing religion as antiquated and oppressive, the majority of them now deem religion to be interesting or “based.” My sense of a religious vibe shift has been confirmed in recent reporting and in the record increase of zoomers converting or reverting over the past year or so. For many of the religious zoomers I meet, faith is a beacon of hope in an otherwise chaotic world.

But all is not well:

Few of my students are capable of formulating an opinion on their own without regurgitating something they heard on a TikTok reel.

Really, how many of us have anything in our brains except what we heard in church, in school, in the university, in legacy media, or in social media?

But at least the Kidz are trying.

Ed, a cradle Catholic and current college junior, tells me that many of his peers are prone to conflating religion with “some mode of anti-establishment political ideology, which they view as necessary in order to save the West.” A classmate who identifies as a monarchist told him that “culture, tradition, and the things that give humans meaning are dying under the current paradigm,” to which he believes Catholic integralism functions as an antidote. He believes many of his very online, middle-class peers are drawn to such ideas due to their “feeling of social isolation and sense of directionlessness.”

The writer, Stephen G. Adubato, seems to be sneering at the kids. But I say that at least they are trying; they want some sort of foundation and meaning to their lives.

I call it a start. And to heck with Chuckie von Marx.

| Fri, 22 May 2026 22:26:13 GMT |

Forget Thucydides; Think "Rigidity Trap"

All the best people are nodding wisely about President Xi’s wise warning to President Trump about “The Thucydides Trap.” That’s the idea that established powers often get dumped by a rising power. E.g., the US is an established power and China is a rising power.

A word to President Xi: If only that were true, old chap. Experts agree that you can’t be a rising power with a fertility rate of 1.0 children per woman.

I wonder what would persuade Chinese women to have more children so that their boys could be sacrificed to the CCP gods in a war to squeeze the US in a Thucydides Trap.

But I am here to tell President Xi and his experts that the big problem is not Thucydides but the Rigidity Trap.

What do I mean by the Rigidity Trap?

Simply this.

The natural instinct of every political regime is to bleed the economy and spend the money on its supporters.

But the more you milk the economy with taxes and regulations, the more you reduce the ability of your people and the economy to adapt to change in markets and create new technologies and opportunities.

Every political regimes tends to make the economy rigid.

Obviously, the extreme case is the Soviet Union where the entire economy was rigidified into bureaucratically administered Five Year Plans. When you rigidify the economy like that and subject it to the expertise of the Planners, you kill opportunity and growth.

(I’d say that Mao’s Great Leap Forward was not rigidity but just economic madness.)

The next step down from the Five Year Plan economy is the “Curley Effect” economy of the large corrupt city that I discussed yesterday. The natural arc of a large city is to start as a rapidly expanding center of economic growth and then mature into a spoils system where the politicians fund their supporters and drive out their opponents.

Then we come to the modern administrative state economy. Decade after decade, the administrative state comes up with new programs to entice voters with free stuff. Typically, everything government does rigidifies the economy and prevents it from adapting and growing. Thus:

Pension programs typically substitute administrative rules for simple savings programs where you retire when you have saved up enough money. But the rigid rules for taxation and benefits means that the system can’t adapt.
Health care programs mandate free care for some people and regulated care for everyone else. The system cannot adapt because of government regulation.
Education programs impose the rulers’ notion of education on everyone. It follows elite fashion rather than educational improvement.
Regulation prevents change and adaption and ends up favoring special interests.
Urban zoning licenses NIMBYism.
Environmental protection ends up as a Save the Planet Green New Deal.

Each of these efforts are inflexible and rigid and prevent people from implementing new ideas and fixing problems and adapting to changing conditions: the Rigidity Trap.

In the context of a great power, it gets into the Rigidity Trap as it matures. It usually starts as an expanding empire that has wiped away all the corrupt rigidities of the old regime. But as time passes it mobilizes the people to fight real and imagined enemies and milks the economy to fund its supporters, whether existing or new. It rigidifies the economy, because that is what governments do.

And so, an established empire tends to fail not because it is challenged by a rising empire but because it has rigidified itself into economic bankruptcy. It has fallen into the Rigidity Trap.

| Thu, 21 May 2026 22:29:11 GMT |

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US GOVERNMENT EXPENDITURE

At usgovernmentspending.com we have assembled a record of government spending in the United States for the last century. You can view government spending, federal, state, and local, for every year from 1902 to the present. And you can generate charts of that spending. more>>

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US GOVERNMENT RECEIPTS

At usgovernmentrevenue.com we have assembled a record of government revenue in the United States for the last century. You can view government receipts, federal, state, and local, for every year from 1902 to the present. And you can generate charts of that revenue. more>>

UK PUBLIC EXPENDITURE

At ukpublicspending.co.uk we have assembled a record of public spending in the United Kingdom for the last century. You can view British public spending, central government and local authority, for every year from 1983 to the present. And you can generate charts of that spending. more>>

ROAD TO THE MIDDLE CLASS

The Road to the Middle Class is a journey from a world of power to a world of trust and love. In religion, it is a journey from power gods that respond to sacrifice and augury to the God who makes a covenant with mankind. In education, it is a journey from the world of the spoken word to the world of the written word. In community, it is the journey from dependence on blood kin and upon clientage under a great lord to the mutual aid and the rules of the self-governing fraternal association. In law it is the journey from the violence of force and feud to the king’s peace, the law of contract, and private property.

Road to the Middle Class: The Book

Contents

Chapter One

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AN AMERICAN MANIFESTO

With the failure of the welfare state, it is time to consider what comes next. In "An American Manifesto: Life After Liberalism" I develop a narrative about where we are and where we should go to redeem the American experiment.

An American Manifesto: The Book

Contents

Chapter One

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