“David J. Rush, 49, of Ashburn, Virginia,” the US Department of Justice informs us, “pleaded guilty today [October 6] to executing a scheme to defraud the federal government relating to the misuse of his government position, resulting in a loss of approximately $194 million.”

Rush faces a sentence of up to 20 years in prison, in addition to three years of “supervised release, forfeiture, restitution, and a fine.”

I’m glad to see that restitution may be part of the sentence. Sure, it only maximally amounts to about $1.75 for each American, and we’re unlikely to see the maximum, but it’s the thought that counts, right?

Oh, wait … apparently the “restitution” isn’t to the Americans the money came from, but rather to the crime ring which stole it from us before Rush got his double-crossing hands on it.

Make no mistake, Rush is small potatoes.

Because I’m lazy, I asked Google’s Gemini “how long does it take the federal government to spend $194 million?”

The answer: “[R]oughly 14.6 minutes (about 874 seconds) … based on recent annual federal spending of approximately $7 trillion” (I checked the spending number and the math — not an AI hallucination).

I guess it’s the principle of the thing. If the feds let even one of their hirelings get away with stealing from the gang itself, even  just a measly 14.6 minutes’ worth of the annual loot, more of those hirelings might decide they’d like a taste too, and next thing you know the gang’s leaders migh have to give up the thug life and get real jobs serving caffeinated beverages or pumping out septic tanks. Can’t have that!

But it’s also the principle of the thing  working from the other direction: If it’s not theft for the feds to steal the money from you, how is it theft for Rush to steal the money from them?

And Rush’s form of theft was arguably less violent than his bosses’ preferred way of doing things.

All Rush did was “create fictitious government authorities … to obtain US government funds for his own benefit.”

He didn’t point his gun at anyone else’s head and tell them to cough up or go to jail like the IRS branch of the fed gang does.

He didn’t take out huge loans and fraudulently list other people as the guarantors out of whose hides the principal and interest would be taken like the Congress chapter of the fed gang does.

He just created fake paperwork and raked off 14.6 minutes’ worth of already stolen money.

And he probably didn’t spend any of it on missiles to murder Iranian schoolgirls with. Heck, whatever part of it he didn’t sock away for later likely went into the productive economy for luxury vacations, cool sportscars, erotic massages, etc.

Maybe that’s not commendable as such, but it beats the money getting spent on concentration camps for immigrants, SWAT teams to take out recreational pharmaceuticals dealers, etc.

And now the federal gang will steal another million bucks or so from the rest of us to keep Rush in a cage for 20 years, instead of just handling the problem the way smaller, more efficient crime rings do (cement shoes don’t cost nearly as much, even if there’s a missing persons report filed).

I’ve heard the current administration described as “the Sopranos, DC chapter.” If only. It’s the mafia version of “too big to fail.” Its protection rackets and heist schemes are poorly planned and inefficiently executed, and when one of its rogues goes rogue it puts on a show trial instead of ordering a hit.

“This thing of theirs” makes The Gang That Couldn’t Shoot Straight look like a well-oiled crime machine.

Thomas L. Knapp (X: @thomaslknapp | Bluesky: @knappster.bsky.social | Mastodon: @knappster) is director and senior news analyst at the William Lloyd Garrison Center for Libertarian Advocacy Journalism (thegarrisoncenter.org). He lives and works in north central Florida.

PUBLICATION/CITATION HISTORY

Wall Street Journal columnist Barton Swaim’s “A Suggestion for Young Radicals” to embrace moderation (October 1) might seem to bring the second least appealing news hook for a commentator whose outlet is named after the abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison who famously asserted that he would rather “tell a man whose house is on fire to give a moderate alarm” than “use moderation in a cause like the present … I will not equivocate — I will not excuse — I will not retreat a single inch — AND I WILL BE HEARD.”

At least Swaim’s contribution keeps the Journal‘s op-ed page going when even the New York Times has moved on to so-called “guest essays.”  P.J. O’Rourke, in contrast, opened A Cry From the Far Middle with a proposal for “an opinion-free news media source” called “Happy Medium” — and while Swaim commends Aurelian Craiutu’s Why Not Moderation? for how it “distinguishes moderation from ‘lukewarm wishy-washiness,'” O’Rourke would happily “bring the Wishy and the Washy back together … The extreme moderates’ non-negotiable demand? Negotiation.”

While O’Rourke made his lack of regret for moving from his hippie Maoist youth to middle-aged rock-ribbed-yet-still-hip conservatism clear with titles like Republican Party Reptile or Age and Guile Beat Youth, Innocence, and a Bad Haircut, his idea of mellowing in old age was writing a follow-up to a humor piece whose title infamously began “How to Drive Fast on Drugs” with one on “How to Drive Fast When the Drugs Are Mostly Lipitor …” (both reprinted in a 2009 book whose subtitle boasts that his ideal post-recession economy would be one “With an Oil Well in Every Backyard, a Cadillac Escalade in Every Carport, and the Chairman of the Federal Reserve Mowing Our Lawn”).

In contrast, Swaim seeks refuge in “institutions that require political actors to reason, argue and compromise with one another.” The Freeman founder Leonard Read anticipated Swaim’s invocation of Aristotelian moderation as an inherent good, writing in a 1956 article for that magazine that “the golden-mean theory cannot properly be applied indiscriminately … it is patently unsound when deciding between stealing nothing or stealing $1,000.”

Swaim paints a picture of a “hard left, from the French Revolution to the collapse of the Soviet Union” which always “tried to explain life’s complexities in terms of class warfare” (which makes it almost redundant for him to note that he “regard[s] socialism as itself a form of extremism”).

In the wake of that collapse, The Freeman ran an account about how “it is good to remember that from the beginning—not just among conservatives but among democratic socialists—there were many who saw clearly that Marxism was a weird mystique set forth by an egotistical crank” by democratic socialist Martin Gardner, who related how “[H.G.] Wells tried to convince Russian leaders that in England there were at least 200 different classes.”

Gardner could then point to Bertrand Russell’s The Practice and Theory of Bolshevism as a book-length exposé of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics from the perspective of a less doctrinaire socialist “widely known” enough compared to Wells’s Russia in the Shadows to not need popularization (a category for which he could have also mentioned John Spargo’s Bolshevism: The Enemy of Political and Industrial Democracy).

As for actually existing capitalism, it includes not only such deviations from clichéd socialist theory as individuals like Wells’s “works foreman who is being taken in a train by an engine-driver to see how the house he is having built for him by a building society is getting on.” The editors of In These Times, which to Swaim exemplifies far-left “periodicals that might fairly be termed immoderate,” observed in 1980 that “federal regulation of the economy has been welcomed or sought by American business leaders” while being sold as a populist imposition on them — and thus socialism would involve “dismantling the highly centralized agencies created to insulate corporate power from popular control.”

New Yorker Joel Schlosberg is a senior news analyst at The William Lloyd Garrison Center for Libertarian Advocacy Journalism.

PUBLICATION/CITATION HISTORY

“A vote for the Libertarian,” Madison Cercy tells the Washington Times, “or a protest vote from any Republican who sits this one out, is a vote to hand the U.S. Senate to the democratic socialists.”

Cercy, a spokeswoman for Ken Paxton’s US Senate campaign in Texas, is responding to a Rasmussen poll that shows Paxton trailing Democratic candidate James Talarico by 1%, with 5% of likely voters undecided … and 4% planning to support Libertarian Ted Brown.

It’s not just Texas. In Kansas’s Senate race, Libertarian David Graham also draws 4% in polling, with incumbent Republican Roger Marshall trailing Democrat Adam Hamilton by 2%. In Montana’s 1st US House district, Libertarian Nick Sheedy enjoys 5% support, with Republican Aaron Flint enjoying a razor-thin 1% lead over Democrat Sam Forstag.

In every election cycle, Republicans and Democrats start playing the “spoiler” card whenever a race looks uncomfortably close.

Usually it’s Republicans griping about Libertarians and Democrats grousing about Green Party candidates, on the supposition that those two “minor” parties’ voters would, in the “normal” course of things, vote Republican and Democrat respectively.

That supposition is probably incorrect — many third party voters simply won’t vote if they don’t see options they prefer on their ballots, and others might vote opposite the assumptions of the big players’ strategists.

The incorrectness doesn’t bug me nearly as much as the arrogance.

For more than a century, the Republican and Democratic parties have used ballot access laws and debate exclusion criteria to rig elections, making it as difficult and expensive as possible for “third party” and independent candidates to even appear on ballots.

Then when Republicans and Democrats lose, or look like they may lose, the whining begins.

“Why, the nerve! How dare anyone but us seek political office? Those other guys can’t win — we’ve busted our butts to make sure of that! But here they come, ‘stealing’ our votes and ‘spoiling’ the rightful outcomes! There oughta be a law! Oh, wait, there is … why isn’t it working?”

Note to political candidates:

Votes don’t belong to you, and aren’t “stolen” by other candidates.

Votes belong to voters and have to be earned — in those voters’ judgment — by you or by those other candidates.

Additional note to the Texas GOP:

You nominated a guy who was impeached on 20 counts by a legislature controlled by your own party. Those counts included abuse of office and accepting bribes. You nominated a guy who plea-bargained his way out of a felony indictment for securities fraud. You nominated a guy who committed voter fraud at least twice by voting “from”  an address he didn’t live at.

Stop blaming the Libertarian for your nominee’s deservedly poor standing with the voters. James Talarico may not deserve to win the race, but Ken Paxton definitely deserves to lose it. Texas could, and  unfortunately almost certainly will, do a lot worse than Ted Brown. If he saves you from six years of Paxton, he deserves a medal.

Stop whining about “spoilers” already and start trying to earn support instead of just demanding it.

Thomas L. Knapp (X: @thomaslknapp | Bluesky: @knappster.bsky.social | Mastodon: @knappster) is director and senior news analyst at the William Lloyd Garrison Center for Libertarian Advocacy Journalism (thegarrisoncenter.org). He lives and works in north central Florida.

PUBLICATION/CITATION HISTORY