Suppose that you wanted government to, shall we say, really mess things up.

What would you suggest?

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First you might suggest inflation.

No one born in the United States since 1960 has any adult memory of significant inflation sustained for several years.

So it’s particularly worth recalling that inflation isn’t just an increase in prices. It’s also a devaluation of your income and your savings, whatever your savings are for.

Annual inflation at whatever rate devalues your income and your savings by that rate.

In that sense, inflation is like a tax on top of the taxes you already pay.

So annual inflation at just above 8 percent decreases in one year the value of your paycheck and your savings by one-twelfth.

All other things being equal, that’s the equivalent of government’s taking one month of your income plus 8 percent of your savings.

And that’s just in the first year of 8 percent inflation. It continues after that.

It doesn’t take a Nobel laureate in economics to figure out that while this impacts everyone, the impact is entirely different on the poor than on the wealthy.

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To stoke inflation what might you do?

You might have the federal government spend even further beyond its means than it has in recent decades. By the trillions. To paraphrase the late U.S. Sen. Everett Dirksen, who spoke of billions, a trillion here and a trillion there, and pretty soon you’re talking about real money.

You might also curtail domestic-energy production, particularly oil production and the related production of natural gas.

Energy-related inflation, of course, doesn’t affect people only at the gas pump or when they receive their home-energy bills. The increases spread throughout the economy. Think of it this way. What did you typically spend at, for example, the grocery store two years ago? What do you spend for the same items now, if you can afford them?

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What else might you do? You might make criminal law more lenient, defund the police, and then express bewilderment that crime has risen. Anyone thinking such crime stops at the borders of large metropolitan areas might want to think again.

You might also legalize marijuana to whatever extent while pretending it’s not a gateway drug.

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What else might you do? You might let people – five million and counting – cross the southern border and enter the United States illegally.

What do you, faithful reader of this column, suppose would have happened if you had tried – at various times during the last two years – to cross the Peace Bridge without showing a passport or an enhanced driver’s license, or without demonstrating Corona Virus Disease 2019 vaccination status?

Does anyone believe the federal government has applied the same standards to all – or even a significant number of – the five million and counting?

And those who have entered the country illegally aren’t all Eagle Scouts. With some of them have come more illegal drugs than anyone can know.

The United States owes its citizens way, way, way better than this.

And, no, it’s not bigotry, much less incitement of anything, to say so in this way.

Nevertheless, some who have dared to question the wisdom of such policy have been the target of such false accusations.

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What else might you do? Looking beyond America’s border, you might have a commander in chief who, regardless of whether you agree with his political philosophy, has time and again demonstrated, even to the untrained eye, significant cognitive impairment.

As this column said on Oct. 9, 2020, this, at a personal level, is sad and, at the national level, is serious.

No matter how tempting it might be to laugh at the video clips, this is sad and serious, not funny.

Those who don’t wish America well, and have little regard for ordered liberty here or elsewhere in the world, have noticed.

And they’re taking advantage of the weakness that the significant cognitive impairment projects.

Such weakness is good for neither America nor the world.

Randy Elf’s speech to the 2018 New York Conservative Political Action Conference, with an introduction by Livingston County Conservative Party Chairman Jason McGuire is at https://works.bepress.com/elf/175.

ç 2022 BY RANDY ELF