“I Am the State”

From Bill Bonner, chairman, Bonner & Partners: “I am the state,” said Louis XIV, who ruled France for 72 years.

“The government is all of us,” says Hillary Clinton, who hopes to become the next president of the United States.

Neither is true.

Louis, for all his big talk, could do nothing without the support of thousands of apparatchiks, fixers, and functionaries… not to mention his bone-breakers and executioners.

At any moment, his entourage could have cut him down… his army could have turned against him… or the plain people could have revolted and upset the whole apple cart.

Hillary, if she is elected, will be in roughly the same position, but much more powerful.

Louis had no spy agency capable of monitoring everyone’s movements and conversations. He could send no drones to murder people. He couldn’t imagine going on TV and lying to the whole world at once… or confiscating half his subjects’ wages… or invading countries half way around the world.

Hillary (or Donald Trump, for that matter) will have more people working for her in the Department of Energy than Sun King’s entire bureaucracy.

If elected, she will become the most powerful person in the history of the world… backed by the planet’s most lethal army, its most productive economy, and its biggest, most aggressive bureaucracy.

Shotguns, Drones, and Bombs

In fact, a single agency, the Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service (APHIS), one of many under the umbrella of the U.S. Department of Agriculture, would be a good match for Louis’s whole army.

According to the Wall Street Journal, between 2004 and 2015, APHIS spent $4.8 million buying “shotguns, .308 caliber rifles, night-vision goggles, propane cannons, liquid explosives, pyro supplies, buckshot, LP gas cannons, drones, remote-control helicopters, thermal cameras, military waterproof thermal infrared scopes, and more.”

(If the rutabagas go on the attack, the APHIS is ready for them!)

And contrary to popular myth, Hillary won’t be backed by “all of us.” Nor will “all of us” decide the important issues that affect all of us.

We will not all govern, in other words. Only some of us will. The rest will be governed.

The idea of the “government is all of us” is absurd. We can’t all tell each other what to do. And if we all agreed, there would be no need for government.

As it is, you could argue that there may be a need for it. But government fast reaches the point of declining marginal utility.

That was the subject of our last book, Hormegeddon. [You can pick up a copy on Amazon here.] And it is why Thomas Jefferson noted that “the government that governs least, governs best.”

Hillary’s governors will be the same sort of people who backed the fourteenth Louis… and every other monarch, dictator, president, emperor, jackleg, and jingo-slinging commander-in-chief from Nebuchadnezzar to Barack Obama.

The nomenklatura… the insiders… the elite… the Parasitocracy—Hillary will be backed by the people who matter… the real deciders… and the Deep State.

Those are the people who really control the government and most of our largest institutions.

Together, they will shakedown the rest of us from sea to shining sea.

But the racket works even better when people think it is their civic duty to cooperate.

That is the advantage of “participatory democracy”: It makes it easier for the governors to squeeze more blood out of a population of turnips.

HRC put some lipstick on it on Saturday:

The power of American democracy comes from the fact that no one is left behind—no matter where they come from, what they look like, or who they love. That’s what I mean when I say that we’re stronger together.

What she really means: The deciders are better off when they are able to dupe the masses into complicity.

Useful Idiots

That’s how Napoleon was able to conquer 10 times as much territory as Louis IX.

Louis had subjects; they grudgingly went off to fight their monarch’s battles.

Napoleon had citizens who were willing to sacrifice lives and property for La Patrie.

Participatory democracy draws almost everyone into the spectacle. (Here in Argentina, for example, voting is compulsory, if you want to receive welfare and other benefits.) But 95% of the participants are what Lenin called “useful idiots.”

Either they have no idea what is going on. Or like trustees in a concentration camp, they keep each other in line, and hope to get an extra crust.

Naturally, sensible and honest men “everywhere and always” despise government.

They have contempt for democratic politics, too.

They know is it nothing but manipulation and grandstanding—a sad, but greatly entertaining, spectacle of mountebanks and scoundrels, each pretending to be less bad than the other.

Nevertheless, it was to the government we turned to protect our ranch when the originarios invaded. Cynical readers may detect a whiff of hypocrisy

We deny it. More tomorrow…

Reeves’ Note: The USDA’s massive weapons-buying program is just another disturbing example of the Deep State’s plan to bring every aspect of American life under its control. And the whole sinister plot is uncovered in an urgent message from Bill, which you can watch here.