Why I Write This Blog

Are societies of men capable of establishing good government from reflection and choice, or are they forever destined to depend on accident and force?  (Hamilton)
Why I Write This Blog
By: George Noga – January 28, 2018

      This personal narrative is the first of several intermittent posts on the relationship of man and the state. Periodically, I must remind myself and my readers why I have spent thousands of hours over 10 years writing 400 posts filling 1,000 pages. This post answers that question. The Hamilton quote (above) from the Federalist poses an eternal question – the answer to which, my friends, still is blowin’ in the wind.

       Whether any society of men gets its politics right or wrong affects every aspect of life, and even life itself. If we get politics right, we live our lives in freedom, prosperity and pursuit of our dreams. If we get politics wrong, liberty, happiness and property are forfeit and life is brutish and brief. Since man first walked upright, there have been 110 billion homo sapiens of whom less than 1% lived their lives in liberty. Even today, only about 10% of the 8 billion humans extant live in relative freedom.

       I promised a personal narrative and here it is. Following are but some of the ways my life has been directly impacted by failure to get our politics right.

* Both world wars and Korea resulted from political ineptitude, appeasement and failure to heed existential threats. I was fatherless during WWII and Korea.

* I was the victim of an execrable education in government schools for 12 years.

* I was subject to a mind-numbing array of taxes including income taxes of 94%.

* Throughout my lifetime and continuing to the present, the Federal Reserve unleashed numerous cycles, bubbles, panics, meltdowns and economic disasters.

* The politically micromanaged Vietnam War totally discombobulated my life for many years including 6 years I served in the military. I could have been killed.

* Government-spawned inflation reached 14% and interest rates exceeded 20%. That and the ensuing correction massively disrupted my personal and financial life.

* It requires $20,000 today to buy what cost $1,000 when I was born due to intentional currency debasement by the government.

* Unnecessary hyper regulation made owning my regulated business for 35 years a living hell. Instead of protecting the public, regulation caused them great harm.

* A lifetime of hard work and thrift has been diminished by chronic negative real interest rates to protect a feckless government from its ongoing debt and deficit binge.

There is more – much more – but you get the drift. Unfortunately, it doesn’t end with me. My children are doomed to a poorer and more dangerous future; they will be a lost generation leading lives of quiet desperation. They will pay for our debt binge and intergenerational theft with vastly reduced opportunity. They will inhabit a Clockwork Orange world where nuclear arms proliferate in places committed to our destruction. The gods of the copybook headings, with terror and slaughter, will return.

The horrors listed herein occurred during my lifetime. They were promulgated by a government most consider to be among the best in the world and one of the best in history. Although government has wrought great harm to me throughout my life, the root cause is not a failure of government; it is simply government being government. History teaches it is foolish to believe we can control government; we can only limit it.

The solution therefore lies not in more government or even in better government. The solution lies in more liberty and less government. And that is why I write.


The next post traces my epiphany resulting from the Alar mass hysteria.