Brexit for All of Us

Today, as Roger Kimball writes, “perhaps for the last time in a generation, the British voters have a choice” about how they will be governed.  I have not followed the matter with sufficient attention to have anything more than hope about the outcome, and I hope our fellow Anglospherians will put the brakes on progressive internationalism before it falls to hard reality to stop it.

Last week, I noted a similarity of the “government town” concept I’ve described multiple times in this space on either side of the Atlantic.  Kimball brings forward another disconcerting echo:

A couple of years ago when an earlier chapter in this saga was unfolding, I was chatting with an Italian friend, a former Italian senator, who employed the word to describe the ascension of Mario Monti to the Italian premiership in 2012. “Super Mario” was technically appointed by the Italian president; in reality, he was foisted upon Italy by the European Union. As it happens, that same day Lucas Papademos was sworn in as Greece’s prime minister.

How did that happen? Well might you ask. That day, we received a plaintive email from a journalist friend in London:

Today, two modern European democracies installed prime ministers who had been elected by nobody. This is what we have come to. It is roughly the equivalent of the federal government stepping in to appoint an unelected governor of California when the state went broke — which is beyond inconceivable. Pray for us.

I’m not sure whether Kimball’s friend was serious or sarcastic with that “beyond inconceivable,” but it clearly is an accurate description.  We’ve seen this in Rhode Island, for example, with our quick resort to municipal dictators when communities began driving themselves off the financial road.

As states find it increasingly difficult to continue the gambit of putting people (often imported) on government-service rolls and under generous government contracts in order to demand that others pay for the government’s activities, they’ll turn to the federal government to extract more wealth from areas of the country that are still doing well.  In some state, somewhere, the strategy will not work, whether because of reckless pension promises or a demographic balance that tips the scales.  As Rhode Island municipalities have done, the ruling classes of that state will gladly hand over their people’s sovereignty for a federal bailout.

Maybe we’ll call that person a “receiver” rather than a “governor,” but it will amount to the same thing.

Human beings have always wanted the power to tell others what to do (especially when the command is to give them money and power), and a certain faction of humanity is relentlessly consolidating into a movement meant to cover the entire planet.  The sooner we shatter the movement, the less painful it will be.

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