As we grow in age and wisdom, we begin to perceive that we are taxed and regulated by maniacs. Each group of them begins slowly, paying some passing obeisance to common sense. Then, as they become entrenched and divert steady streams of cash flowing into their agencies and departments, their inner desires emerge and they begin to take the bribes for which they lust.
We go through several stages during the growth of our understanding. At first, we have a hard time believing that anyone could worry about something as trivial as, say, spotted owls. Then, we find that every such issue being raised by agencies and their associates in the “free” press is only a surface concern. We understand that politicians and agencies have been bribed to pass laws creating, expanding, or protecting the cash flows of the bribing groups, and have selected some small facet of nature to use as the wedge of an attack on the incomes of other people.
If we are wise, we begin to understand that this process is subordinate to yet another, darker force. Those who push for favored treatment have that same process turned against themselves. As the coal and natural gas lobbies, for instance, make it impossible to build nuclear reactors that provide the cheapest, cleanest energy of all, the regulations they impose on the nuclear power groups are available to be used against them. Soon, fantasies of wind, tide, and solar power generate enough funding to bribe legislators to attack the coal and natural gas interests. Power costs are increased, and everyone grows poorer.
While this enriches a few, it impoverishes billions. One can imagine, for example, what building a dozen or so new nuclear reactors would do for Africa, where the only power for many is that which is supplied by their own muscles.
Then, we may reconsider some of the earlier columns this month that mentioned The Didascalicon of Hugh of St. Victor, the Saxon monk who, in the 1100s, described those who chose to do evil as “parts of the body of the apostate angel”. Considering his description helps us see that those we thought were merely mistaken fanatics are actually part of a great, coordinated, living body of evil that seeks to destroy life, truth, freedom, and any system that works.
Those involved in those great evils wrap themselves in lies, bits of which they swallow whole, a reverse of the Catholic’s Communion, every day absorbing more corruption from the body of the apostate angel. They may prosper greatly during their days in the clay, but are condemned in the next life’s endlessness to the most painful pits of Hell.
So, maybe “lunacy” is the best way to describe the thought processes that would lead them to give up so much for so long for so little. Understanding them merely requires that we realize just how bad “lunacy” can be.
