I&I Editorial

All through the coming new year, an election year, the American people should remember the Christmas “gift” the Washington establishment has carefully wrapped and dumped under the tree as we gather with family. Thanks to House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, the increasingly radical left to whose tune she must dance, and the permanent bureaucratic apparatus devoted to resisting most of what the Trump administration is doing, we find an illegitimate impeachment in our stocking.

Millions in this country will sit at their Christmas dinners, or take flame to their menorah, and instead of experiencing the peace of the Child in the manger, or a welcome respite from the travails of the workaday routine of the rest of the year, they’ll hear from amidst their assembled loved ones grousing and moaning about the civil war in the nation’s capital. Those inclined to argue politics have plenty of ammo courtesy of Democratic leaders to play Grinch or Scrooge.

It’s bad enough to hear this during the rest of the year, but for politicians, by design, to shove their strategies for more power alongside the holly and the mistletoe is a step too far for a politics-weary public.

In the first chapter of “The Road To Serfdom,” that prescient warning of the malevolence of a too-powerful state, Friedrich Hayek cited Britain’s 1929 MacMillan Committee Report on how to respond to the financial crisis. It pointed to Westminster’s relatively recent “growing preoccupation, irrespective of party, with the management of the life of the people … its conscious aim the regulation of the day-to-day affairs of the community,” and how government “now intervenes in matters formerly thought to be entirely outside its scope” – demonstrating that the totalitarian horrors of the 20th century, both communism and fascism, were recognized before they fully materialized.

The people’s lives, our daily business, are not safe from those who would lord over us even here, even now, as they all the while invoke the freedom championed by the Founding Fathers.

Now we know they’re willing even to ruin our Christmas.

— Written by Thomas McArdle

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