History is littered with social and political movements which, while failing to survive as movements, largely achieved their goals.

The Prohibition Party’s national conventions could take place in a phone booth these days, but its disastrous single policy proposal was adopted as a constitutional amendment, mutated into the equally disastrous war on drugs, and continues to torment the modern marketplace with draconian regulation.

Most “socialist” parties have either disappeared into the dustbin of history, or find themselves reduced to glorified supper clubs featuring loud arguments over whether the Soviet Union was a bureaucratic deformation or a degenerated workers’ state. But Socialist Party candidate Norman Thomas’s 885,000 votes in the 1932 presidential election arguably led to FDR’s “New Deal” and the modern welfare state.

Few people remember, or ever learned about, the technocracy movement of the 1930s. That movement failed in its formal goal of replacing democratic legislatures with boards of “experts” to run society (including the economy) in accordance with “science.”

But over time, the concept took root in America’s regulatory apparatus. Nearly every aspect of our lives has, for several decades, been subject to scrutiny and oversight by “experts.” The food we eat. The drugs we take. The cars we drive. The securities we invest in. You name it, there’s a government bureau somewhere full of whirring computers and nerds with slide rules, figuring out what we may or may not do, or  in what way we may do it.

While most of us gripe about particular technocratic edicts, few question the premise itself. It’s just taken as obvious that the man in the lab coat knows more about air bags and crop yields than the Honorable Representative from Minnesota.

Technocracy took root. And with the COVID-19 pandemic, it blossomed … into the man-eating plant from Little Shop of Horrors.

Starting last year, “public health” technocrats (with, of course, the assistance of opportunistic politicians) seized control over huge parts of our lives — mass house arrests without charge or trial, mask mandates, vaccine mandate and “passport” schemes, etc. — then proceeded to vacillate and scrap among themselves over the divvying up of their new power, as more than 600,000 Americans died and the economy tanked.

To add insult to injury, the parts of the country where the “experts” enjoyed less deference seem to have fared no worse, and in some cases better, than areas where politicians slavishly and without question enforced every technocratic edict.

Technocracy finally got its big shot at proving itself, and failed miserably. Why? Because “public health”  technocracy isn’t about the health of the public. It’s about policy, which is about politics, which is about power.

The technocrats exercised their power abusively — and ineffectually too boot. It’s time to take that power away.

Thomas L. Knapp (Twitter: @thomaslknapp) 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.

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“What Drove 9 Moderate House Democrats To Hold Up Their Party’s Agenda?” Nathaniel Rakich asks at FiveThirtyEight.  “[N]ine moderate Democrats threatened to vote no on moving forward with Democrats’ $3.5 trillion budget resolution, unless the House first voted to pass the Senate’s bipartisan $1 trillion infrastructure package.”

Though the word “moderate” appears 14 times in the story’s body (and three times in a graphic outlining “ideological measures and electoral statistics” for the nine Democrats in question), Rakich never explicitly defines the term other than implicitly as describing “centrist” politicians who sometimes cross party lines on contentious issues.

Webster’s offers a clue as to what might constitute a real moderate: “[O]bserving reasonable limits; not excessive, extreme, violent, or rigorous; limited; restrained.”

In other words, the exact opposite of Congress.

Congress is by definition — for example, the powers it claims under the US Constitution, even if it bothered to abide by that document’s limits, which it seldom does — an extremist organization.

Congress claims the power to seize the fruits of your labor — or, in the form of military conscription, that labor itself — for whatever projects it happens to fantasize into existence, and the power to cage or murder you should you resist.

For example, take the budget resolution and infrastructure bill that these “moderates” quibbled with the order of voting on.

In 2020, the Gross Domestic Product of the United States, according to the World Bank, came to about $21 trillion. That’s probably quite high given that government spending is treated as “production,” but it’s the best number I have.

If the World Bank is correct, the two bills in question alone —  excluding any and all other congressional spending, of which there will be plenty — presume to dispose of 21.4% of the wealth you created by busting your hump at work last year.

On the bright side, the Senate version of the bill did away with $80 billion in proposed funding for the IRS to bulk up the aforementioned caging/murdering of people who don’t fork over.

The nine supposed “moderates” Rakich analyzes have almost certainly voted during their terms in Congress to, by several orders of magnitude, steal more money than the Mafia and kill more people than al Qaeda.

The pretense that Congress is anything other than the most powerful combination of death cult and organized crime syndicate on the planet is even less convincing than that Bigfoot video your uncle brought back from his hunting trip in Idaho.

Thomas L. Knapp (Twitter: @thomaslknapp) 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.

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More than seven months after the fatal shooting of Ashli Babbitt during the January 6 riot, the Capitol Police Department officer who shot her is speaking out. “I know that day I saved countless lives,” Lt. Michael Byrd tells NBC News’s Lester Holt.

Maybe he’s right, maybe not, but he’s going farther than he has to go. The standard for use of deadly force — not just in the Capitol Police Department but generally — is not certain knowledge but rather, as the department’s policy puts it, a reasonable belief that said use of force “is in the defense of human life, including the officer’s own life, or in the defense of any person in immediate danger of serious physical injury.”

Did Byrd’s actions meet that standard? The events of the day, and the video record of the shooting, say yes.

Even setting aside the question of whether the 2020 presidential election was “stolen,” as many Trump supporters believe, and the bizarre theories of “QAnon,” with which she seems to have been affiliated, the story of Babbitt’s death is a story of  reasonable versus unreasonable beliefs.

It was unreasonable for Babbitt — especially given her description in online biographies as a 14-year Air Force veteran and former security guard at a nuclear power plant — to believe that she and the mob she joined could walk into the US Capitol and violently prevent Congress’s certification of the election without armed Capitol Police officers contesting the matter.

It was even more unreasonable for Babbitt to believe that when her fellow rioters began smashing the windows of the barricaded doors to the Speaker’s Lobby, and that when she attempted to crawl through one of those windows, the armed officers charged with protecting Congress wouldn’t respond with deadly force. Frankly it’s surprising that they didn’t do so as soon as the window-smashing began.

On the other hand, whether or not one likes the Capitol Police, or Lt. Byrd, or Congress, or the outcome of the election, it was entirely — and obviously — reasonable for Lt. Byrd to believe that members of a mob attempting to force their way through those barricaded doors represented a danger of “immediate danger of serious physical injury” or even death to himself and those he guarded.

Ashli Babbitt is neither a martyr nor an innocent victim of police abuse (of which there are far too many). She willingly joined a violent mob. She willingly took part in that mob’s violent actions. She willingly went an extra foot or two beyond the actions of most of that mob’s members. And that extra foot or two was fatal.

Had Ashli Babbitt not put her unreasonable beliefs into motion against Michael Byrd’s reasonable beliefs, she’d almost certainly still be alive.

Thomas L. Knapp (Twitter: @thomaslknapp) 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.

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