I don't know if inflation is transitory or if recession is baked into the cake for 2023. But it doesn't take too much brainpower to imagine a staggering mess this winter on the energy front. "Inflation" and "recession" are just polite technical words used by regime scientists to elide staggering messes created by the usual Keystone Kops Krew of politicians and activists. And it doesn't take too much imagination to judge that just about everything that the Biden administration has done since January 20, 2021, from 12 percent increase in M2 in 2021 to trillion-dollar stimulus programs and green energy boondoggles as far as the eye can see amounts to a staggering mess.

Earth to ruling classes: just about everything that rulers do ends up in a staggering mess. That's why wise rulers do almost nothing.

If Talleyrand really said of the French Bourbon monarchs after the fall of Napoleon "they have learned nothing and forgotten nothing" what would he say about our Bidenoid friends?

How about "they learn nothing and deny everything."

Or "they promise everything and deliver nothing."

They promised Heaven on Earth and delivered Hell on Wheels.

They insist on teaching us, but deny that they ever made a mistake.

For instance, there's no doubt that the Republican Herbert Hoover and his banker Treasury secretary Andrew Mellon absolutely whiffed the stock market crash of 1929, as in bank failures: 1929: 659 failures; 1930: 1350 failures; 1931: 2293 failures; 1932: 1453 failures. But then FDR and his New Deal basically kept the economy in the doldrums until rearmament for World War II. How many of our liberal friends are aware of that?

Liberals thought that their Great Society programs were going to transform America. So they did; they Made Things Worse. I blogged about it in 2005, twenty years after Charles Murray published the details in Losing Ground. Ever met a liberal who admitted that government social programs could maybe, possibly, Make Things Worse?

Or the70s, with Richard Nixon (R) and Jimmy Carter (D) presiding over inflation and wage and price controls and soaring gas prices and stagflation. Ever read a liberal analyzing the follies of the 70s? Then Ronald Reagan and Paul Volcker killed inflation dead in the 1980s and liberals to this day talk about nothing but "trickle-down economics." Please.

Then in the 2000s we had the real-estate meltdown in 2008 from liberal policies that encouraged low-down mortgages and relaxed credit standards on borrowers. Liberals blamed the meltdown on "greedy bankers."

Now we have the absolutely mad cult of climate change and systemic racism, and there are no cool heads in Liberal Land telling the crazies to cool their jets. I suppose that is because all the cool heads are almost 80 and are hanging onto office for one more term while they retreat from moderate liberalism to whatever the crazies and the activists demand this week.

Probably the way we avoid a total meltdown is for all the moderate Democrats to lose their seats to MAGA semi-fascists and then the remaining semi-wokies decide that they have to compromise with the resurgent Republicans if they expect to get a share of the earmarks in the latest omnibus spending bill.

Hey, they are politicians, and all politicians care about is staying in office and paying off their supporters. If they are in power then it is trillions in mega-spending bills. If they are out of power it is getting goodies for their besties in return for a vote or two.

But really, Talleyrand was too generous. It is not that our liberal friends have learned nothing: they know nothing except pushing the latest cult thing on America. And as for forgetting nothing, who cares if liberals are still all wigged out about McCarthyism and the Hollywood Ten?

They really do not have a clue. They cannot understand that Trump is a thing because they have been beating up on the white middle and working class for a generation. They are using their cultural and political power to beat up on Christians and pro-lifers and Trumpers as though they are existential enemies to America. They turn the economy upside down to fight COVID and to fight climate change without a clue about how it ruins the lives of millions of ordinary people here in America and probably starves tens of millions of people elsewhere in the world.

You and I, we have a daunting task: to repair America's politics and its economy from the madness of wokeness; to reform and normalize our schools; to recenter our culture. And we need to do all that without blowing the place up, or letting our liberal friends blow the place up in their rage as all their idols crash to Earth.

But what else can we do?

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

Image: Public Domain Pictures