A Threat to Bureaucracy

The chainsaw comes to Mar-a-Lago, slippery polls get it wrong (again) and plenty more...

“SHUT IT DOWN!”

~ Vivek Ramaswamy on the Bureaucratic State

Joel Bowman with today’s Note From the End of the World: Buenos Aires, Argentina...

Psychopathic war hawks... ¡Afuera! 

Gender “reassignment” surgery for our precious children... ¡Afuera!

The Federal Department of Education Indoctrination... ¡Afuera!

The Censorship Industrial Complex... ¡Afuera!

My, oh my! It’s beginning to sound as though president-elect Trump is taking a few leaves out of the Javier Milei playbook. As a reminder, here’s the original, making short work of the overfed ministries down here at the End of the World. This one never gets old...

Barely a week after the American people delivered The Donald a resounding mandate, the 45th and soon-to-be 47th president committed to shuttering the United States Department of Education, saying the country would suffer “No more education out of Washington.”

When 2+2=5

It was President Carter who first established the department, back in 1979. At the time, the US led the world in high school test scores, including math and science. After almost half a century of government meddling and untold trillions of dollars squandered on sub-average administrators, DEI grifters and bloviating bureaucrats, the US has slid to 24th spot in math... and 38th in science.

That’s hardly surprising, given that faculty lounges across the nation are stuffed to the pocket protectors with guidance counselors who believe that feelz matter more than facts, that 2+2=5 and that science is merely a weapon of the oppressive, white patriarchy. It’s also about what you’d expect when the coercive monopoly of the state involves itself in a market for which there is already a thriving, natural, real world demand. 

One wonders, as long as our imagination is running free, what other government-shaped detritus could be jettisoned? The Department of Transportation? The Department of Agriculture? The Federal Communications Commission?

The Federal Reserve? 

As Vivek Ramaswamy, a key member of Trump’s transition team who promised he would be a “threat to bureaucracy,” posted rather unambiguously on X yesterday:

“SHUT IT DOWN!”

Even a few short years ago, it would have sounded like pie-in-the-sky delusion to suggest lancing these rancid bureauboils, the kind of utopian rhetoric proffered by die-hard libertarians, ne’er-do-well anarchists and fringe-dwelling newsletter writers. (We know... we wrote the letters!) 

Carry on Chainsaw

But now, as the ripples of the Greatest Political Experiment of Our Age reach foreign shores, one dares to hope. We hear rumors circulating, for example, that Elon Musk may be teaming up with Dr. Ron Paul to take a Milei-style chainsaw to the tumefied US government, hacking a reported $2 trillion dollars out of the annual federal budget. 

Hey, if it can happen in a country like Argentina... which has endured 75 long years of Peronist-Socialist contamination prior to Sr. Milei coming to office, perhaps it can happen elsewhere, too. As it happens, Milei is presently en route to the US, where he will meet Messrs. Trump, Musk, Ramaswamy et al. at the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) in Mar-a-Lago this week. We hope he packed his motosierra.

Of course, a lot can happen between now and January 20, 2025. We’ve heard assurances that Ross Ulbricht will be freed... Edward Snowden and Julian Assange will be pardoned... that the senseless bloodshed in the Ukraine will finally be brought to an end. 

Hope springs eternal, as they say, but let us set that aside for a moment and return to a theme we ended on last week... when it comes to information, what – if any – can you trust? 

There’s been a lot of post-election hand-wringing over the past week. Many were surprised, if not positively gobsmacked, by just how one-sided the outcome was, with Republicans taking the Presidency, the House, the Senate and winning the popular vote for the first time since 2004. 

By any stretch, this was a drubbing. Setting aside the predictably irrational meltdowns from the Blue Hair Platoon, who simply cannot believe screaming “Nazi” and “white supremacist” at voters didn’t win more of them over, there are some on the so-called “sensible, center left” who feel suddenly orphaned by a party that lied to them about its vibrant future and the ground swell of joyous, next generation enthusiasm... then blew $1 billion throwing itself a lavish suicide party. 

These were the same Democratic party operatives – along with their comrades in the legacy media, in captured academia and amidst the noxious smug hanging over the Hollywood Hills – who assured us that Biden was as “sharp as ever”... that videos of him meandering off-piste at international political summits were “deep fakes”... that Kamala Harris had nothing whatsoever to do with the border (sadly, that one was true... only not in the way they meant it)... and too many other flagrant lies, egregious distortions and meaty pork pies to mention in one pithy penning. 

Celebritools and Slippery Polls

Friendly advice to those who thought the ‘24 election was going to be close, that it was “on a razor’s edge”: stop watching CNN, MSNBC and ABC... cancel your subscriptions to The New York Times, The Washington Post and The Atlantic... bin the late night “comedians” and their canned laughter crowds... so too race-baiters like Joyless Reid, Michael Less-is-Moore, Whoopie Cushion and the rest of the bleating flock. 

As for the slippery pollsters... they, too, appeared reliably greased. 

Nate Silver, Real Clear Politics, and FiveThirtyEight all had Harris for the win on game day, as did polls by HarrisX/Forbes, ABC, Ipsos, Morning Consult, The Economist, CBS, The Guardian and, naturally, the “widely-followed” Times/Siena polls. A 50,000-person poll by the Cooperative Election Study taken throughout the first 25 days of October had Harris up 51%–47%. One could go on...

On the bright side, let us be thankful these bean misscounters aren’t diagnosing cancers, designing nuclear submarines or launching satellites into space; we’d soon be deep underwater, riddled with tumors and dodging radioactive torpedoes.  

Of course, it’s hard to gauge a nation’s political pulse when you’re using a bullhorn and a riding crop. As usual, it was the free market – not the “experts” – that was on the money. And therein lies a lesson in spontaneous order, market wisdom and decentralized information. 

We’ll have that for you in your next Note From the End of the World...

Cheers,

Joel Bowman

P.S. Happily for liberty lovers (and chainsaw enthusiasts!), freedom is in the ascendency in many places around the world, including right here in Argentina.

In fact, it seems like barely a day goes by down here at the End of the World where some nonsensical collectivist weed is not uprooted. And slowly but surely, people are catching on, thanks in large part to independent reporting.

Right here on Substack, for instance, tens of thousands of independent authors, journalists, investigators and opinion columnists are sharing their own perspectives on everything from politics to economics, financial markets to crypto investing, corporatist malfeasance and individual triumphs alike.

We may be small… but we are legion. And we are bringing down the mainstream narrative… one brick at a time.

As always, we are especially grateful to our generous Notes members, whose dues allow us to pursue this humble publication. If you would like to join our growing Notes community and help support the ideas of free markets, free minds and free people, please consider becoming a member today. Thanks in advance ~ JB