Jefferson was one of the richest men in the new United States. He had a 5,000-acre plantation worked by hundreds of slaves, a splendid mansion in Virginia that he had designed himself, one of the biggest wine collections in America, and one of the greatest private libraries in the world — it became the foundation of the Library of Congress. But despite his wealth and status his home was so cold in winter that the ink in his pen sometimes froze, making it difficult for him to write to complain about the chill.
Jefferson was rich and sophisticated, but his life was closer to the lives of people in the Iron Age than it was to ours. This is true literally, in that modern forms of steel and other metal alloys hadn’t been invented. But it is most true in the staggering fact that everyone at the rehearsal dinner was born and raised in luxury unimaginable in Jefferson’s time.
The young people at my table were anxious about money: starter-job salaries, high rents, student loans. But they never worried about freezing in their home. They could go to the sink and get a glass of clean water without fear of getting sick. Most of all, they were alive. In 1800, when Jefferson was elected president, more than one out of four children died before the age of five. Today, it is a shocking tragedy if a child dies. To Jefferson, these circumstances would have represented wealth and power beyond the dreams of avarice. The young people at my table had debts, but they were the debts of kings.
Jefferson lived in a world of horse-drawn carriages, blazing fireplaces, and yellow fever. But what most separates our day from his is not our automobiles, airplanes, and high-rise apartments — it is that today vast systems provide abundant food, water, energy, and health to most people, including everyone at the rehearsal dinner. In Jefferson’s time, not even the president of the United States had what we have. But few of us are aware of that, or of what it means.
Mitch Daniels remembers the late, great P.J. O’Rourke, who died three years ago. A slice:
Politics has always involved a degree of pretension, but never like today, when “performative” has become perhaps the sector’s most-apt adjective. The puncturing of pretensions is a noble profession, and nobody could puncture one like P.J. As in, “Politicians are interested in people. Not that this is always a virtue. Fleas are interested in dogs.”
A college-age leftist turned libertarian, P.J. landed some of his best body shots on the soft underbelly of Big Government. “Giving money and power to government is like giving whiskey and car keys to teenage boys.” Or: “It is a popular delusion that the government wastes vast amounts of money through inefficiency and sloth. Enormous effort and elaborate planning are required to waste this much money.” Or: “If you think health care is expensive now, wait until you see what it costs when it’s free.”
James Meigs says that it’s “time to pull the plug on ‘environmental justice.'”
The Wall Street Journal‘s Editorial Board offers evidence of government fraud. A slice:
No proof of fraud? How much do you want?
A Government Accountability Office report last spring estimated the “federal government could lose between $233 billion and $521 billion annually to fraud.” The federal auditor said “a government-wide approach is required to address it,” and recommended that the Treasury “leverage data-analytics capabilities” to stop questionable payments. That’s what DOGE is trying to do.
GAO earlier estimated that 11% to 15% of unemployment benefits during the pandemic were fraudulent, totalling between $100 billion and $135 billion. Some went to transnational gangs, prisoners and state-sponsored hackers. The Labor Department inspector general estimated at least $191 billion in improper pandemic unemployment payments.
Jeff Jacoby is rightly appalled by Trump’s lust for the U.S. government to grab more territory. A slice:
‘I NEVER imagined,” former NATO secretary general Anders Rasmussen wrote in a Wall Street Journal column last week, that “I would hear a US president declare his intentions to ‘expand our territory,’ as Donald Trump did in his inaugural address.”
Many things about President Trump’s inaugural address were unusual, but his unabashed call for enlarging the United States was indeed startling. (He also proclaimed, in reference to the Panama Canal, that “we’re taking it back.”) It was a jolting departure from the norm of the past century, when American presidents have often used their inaugural addresses to renounce any claim on other nations’ lands.
Upon taking the oath of office in 1949, for example, Harry Truman — contrasting America with the Soviet Union — emphasized that “we have sought no territory.” Herbert Hoover assured the world in 1929 that Americans “have no desire for territorial expansion.” Nearly a decade earlier, Warren Harding had stressed that the United States “never has sought territorial aggrandizement through force.” Even William McKinley, on whose watch the Spanish possessions of Guam, Puerto Rico, and the Philippines would be acquired by the United States, insisted in his inaugural address that Americans “want no wars of conquest” and “must avoid the temptation of territorial aggression.”
