What is the single thread that winds through Ferguson, Staten Island, and the UVA “rape” case? I will tell you. It is not police racial profiling or police brutality. It is not a “rape culture.” It is liberals.

Now, I am not proposing that there is a conspiracy of liberals out to do us in. Nothing like that. I am just drawing attention to the fact that liberals, starting in the Progressive Era a century ago, are the ruling class in America. Liberals rule the culture; it is a liberal cultural world that you encounter when you turn on your TV or go to the movies, or go to school. Liberals rule our politics. I do not mean that Republicans never get into office. It's just that when Republicans do gain the presidency they don't get to rule; they just get to run the government for a while. And liberals mostly rule the economy; the rules that govern the workplace and the marketplace were fashioned by liberals.

With all that power, you'd expect that liberals would have abused it. With all that power for over a century, you'd expect that liberals would have abused their power damnably. It's not that liberals are worse than any other ruling class; it's just that government is force. When you've dominated government for a century then you will have imposed your worldview by force in dozens of different ways, and many people will experience your worldview as nothing less than oppression and injustice. Just like today.

Let us look at the world that has been illuminated for us by the killing of Mike Brown and Eric Garner. Why was a young black holding up a convenience store 50 years after the Civil Rights Act? Why did Officer Wilson believe that the area where he encountered Mike Brown was a dangerous area with crime and gang activity? How come that African Americans hadn't left all that behind as they moved from inner St. Louis to the suburb of Ferguson?

And what about Eric Garner? Why was Garner selling “loosies” on the street? Why was he working “in the shadows” of the informal economy? Why didn't he have a proper job?

The answer, of course, is: liberals. It's liberals that have boxed in the African American community so that the only life they know is gangs and Swisher Sweets and working for chump change in the informal economy.

The first liberal oppression is welfare. “Why do I need a job; I already got a check,” says the African American woman in the ads that keeping turning up on my browser.

The definitive story about welfare was told 30 years ago by George Gilder in Visible Man. Disabled Marine gets home from Vietnam, knocks up a girl and they live together with the baby while he works at entry-level jobs. But as soon as she gets to be 16 she dumps the father of her child and goes on welfare.

The second liberal oppression is the taxes and regulations on work. I wrote about this a couple of years ago. Given the payroll taxes and the unemployment taxes and the workers comp. and disability premiums it's really not worth employing unskilled workers in the formal economy. And if you are getting welfare benefits then you can't work in the formal sector without losing your benefits and/or paying a marginal tax rate over 50 percent. I wrote about that too.

Then we get to Rolling Stone and its rape story about “Jackie” at the University of Virginia. It's hard to know the truth behind the story, but I'm prepared to put my nickel on this. At some point “Jackie” got treated like a piece of meat, and she got angry, as women do when they have been mistreated, and she told her friends. But the story she told couldn't be merely about an upperclassman bullying her into sex and then dumping her; hey, that happens all the time, get over it, kid. It had to be gang rape in a frat house with glass tables. So here there's a double liberal oppression. First there were the feminists and liberals bullying us into the sexual revolution on the absurd idea that women could experience sex like men; it gave us the campus hook-up culture. Now, two generations later, liberals are bullying us into “teaching men not to rape.” Can we just rewind to 1960 and start over, without the liberals in charge?

Why do we put up with this oppression that's tearing our nation apart, America?

German sociologist Georg Simmel wrote that all oppression, except the most violent physical coercion, is voluntary. If we put up with it, we tell the world that for us, right now, the price of freedom is too high.

Christopher Chantrill @chrischantrill runs the go-to site on US government finances, usgovernmentspending.com. Also see his American Manifesto and get his Road to the Middle Class.