The Yankee Empire

Every society has a segment of its population that obsesses over totalitarian control of others.  They are called “politicians” or “political activists.”  (There are one or two exceptions, every now and then, such as former Congressman Ron Paul).  These are people who just cannot stand the fact that many others prefer to live their own lives, abiding by the basic laws protecting life, liberty and property, and the moral codes that help to enforce such behavior.  They just cannot stand the fact that so many others prefer to plan their own lives instead of having the political authorities plan their lives for them.  They are often more than willing to use the coercive forces of government – including deadly force, including war – to get their way.  They think of themselves as Our Superiors, God’s chosen people, or just plain smarter and more moral than everyone else.   Or they are con-men and con-women out to plunder their fellow citizens to enrich themselves under the phony guise of “public service,” “democracy,” and myriad other grandiose-sounding scams.

In a lecture on institutionalized lying by government delivered at the Mises Institute, Judge Andrew Napolitano introduced his audience to the Latin phrase “libido dominande” that describes such attitudes.  In Latin, it means “lust to dominate.”  Now along comes Clyde Wilson with his new book, The Yankee Problem: An American Dilemma, that describes in great detail the peculiar American version of “libido dominande” that has plagued America (and the world) ever since the Pilgrims landed. realistic causes of the war were “an impulse toward national greatness”; “the rise of an aggressive class of industrial and banking moguls” in the North; the “arrival in the Midwest of radical, power-worshipping Germans fleeing the failed revolutions of 1848” in Europe; and “Lincoln’s clever manipulation of a phony but powerful issue: the ‘extension of slavery.’”

Crony capitalism run amok has been the end game of the Yankee way of government ever since 1865.   This involves not only the millions of secret (and not-so-secret) corrupt political deals that enrich the politically-connected at the expense of everyone else (i.e., protectionist tariffs, bailouts of billionaire investment bankers, etc.) but also aggressive, imperialistic wars that have the exact same purpose and effect.  This all began with the Lincoln administration’s introduction of corporate welfare for railroad corporations, and is of course many orders of magnitude larger today with bankster bailouts, the never-ending explosion of spending on the military/industrial complex, and myriad other examples of government of the crony capitalists, by the crony capitalists, for the crony capitalists.  There is no better example of this today than that “museum-quality” specimen of a Yankee, Hillary Rodham Clinton, and her pay-to-play Clinton Foundation.  Read Clyde Wilson’s new book if you wish to learn the real problem with government in America today.

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