At last.

At last.

Free at last.

After nearly 250 years of tyrannical rule, we have finally broken the chains of bondage clamped upon us by the class of so-called ‘professional’ economists, and their patron saint, that scoundrel Scotsman, Adam Smith.

Wealth of Nations indeed.

Nations are not wealthy. Individuals are. The wealth of nations is nothing more than the plundering of hard-earned income created by visionaries, founders, innovators and rentiers.

Liberation Day, as it will be now known for posterity, has brought us full circle, back to the glory days of feudalism and the rule of lordly whimsy.

As it should be.

As God Himself intended.

For Man did not come into existence by his own volition. God breathéd life into Man. Just as the Potentates of Commerce breathe life into the economy, chart its course and dictate its terms with instincts infallible. As it is in Heaven, so it shall be here on Earth.

Yet still, as the markets justly churn and roil, shedding the false idolatry of a fools’ gold, re-righting the natural economic order, set into motion by the wily Man Who Would Be King, practitioners of the aptly named Dismal Science desperately seek to compute it, to measure and reckon with it, furiously clattering on their abaci, worry beads and slide rulers, tools of a diviners trade. Where’s the logic in this? they bid. This makes no economic sense! they augur.

Of course it makes no economic sense (if such a sense there could be and I, for one, deem it null and void, this notion of some quantifiable economic ‘sense’). The sense of it lies solely in the fact that he could do it, that he has done it, struck out in a wild, blind fury of retribution and vengeance, not to level the playing field but to tilt it propitiously in his direction. That’s what the powerful and all-mighty do. That is the sense of it, the only sense of it. Flip the board game if you see that it’s rigged, rigged against the possibility of you winning, rigged if you don’t fully understand how the game’s to be played.

Flip it!

Scatter the pieces!

Wreak havoc, and the let the dogs and curs, the mongrels and ingrates, come crawling on their ill-gotten fattened bellies to you, begging to be allowed back into the game. Under new rules, your rules, capricious rules that only you dictate and enforce.

The Command Economy, it is known as.

Word down from on high.

You want in? Want in on the game? You want a piece of the action, do you?

How much do you want it, do you want in? How much are you willing to put up to get in, to get in on the ground floor, to get in while the getting in’s good?

Money for access.

As it should be.

Free markets have never been free, comraids, despite what the Marxist-Socialist-Anarchists like Adam Smith, that lanky fellow, Keenes, and the intellectual comical duo, Hayek and Friedman, tried to inculcate into our body politic. Self-interest of the rational man is of no consequence to the overweening self-interest of the irrational Great Man. He is the piper that plays the tune, and the piper must be paid. In cash money at a price point that he, and he alone, determines.

Absolutism is back in vogue, after more than two centuries in the wilderness, out among the baying wolves of free traders (free loafers, more like), supply-and-demanders and WTPers. Willingness To Pay!? You will pay what you’re told to pay and buy what you’re told to buy and sell what you’re told to sell. Barter?! Barter with your life or, as Mars is my witness, you will pay with your life!

This is not up for negotiation.

This is all about capitulation.

They are not referred to as the Thundersticks of Tariffs because of their even-handedness. Tariffs are not constructed from foam rubber (imported from China, no doubt, duty-free) as some sort of child’s tickle toy. They are mighty bludgeons, used to beat the world into submission. Submission to the one willing, happily willing, gleeful even, to apply them, apply them hard, indiscriminately, without rhyme nor reason.

Just because. He can. Just because he can. And you will submit. Or else.

Just as it was in the good old days of the Louies and the first couple Charles’s.

Pure gangster ‘shit’, as the good lady of the house, in tune with the vernacular of the youth as she is, puts it. His bottom line supersedes your bottom line. Every time. If you play along nicely and kick up no fuss, maybe, just maybe, there’ll be crumbs enough left over for you.

That is the new Age of Absolutism.