Mr. Connor O’Keeffe over at Mises Wire asks the obvious question: Biden Is Not Running the Government. So, Who Is?
Of course, there are weirdos who still think the President “presides”.
To quote a funny old Republican speechwriter-ess:
The president’s rationalizers point out that he’s fine from 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. I am sure presidents Xi of China and Putin of Russia will only decide to take back Taiwan or move on Poland at lunch time EST, to keep things fair. Why wouldn’t they schedule their aggressions around the president’s needs?
The operative excerpt:
Every four years, we’re supposed to pretend that a single individual, who we collectively choose at the ballot box, takes charge of the federal government and acts as we would to address the problems we face at home and abroad.
Biden’s inability to get through a debate and a sit-down interview without issues shatters the illusion that he is the one running things in Washington and across America’s globe-spanning sphere of influence.
So, if Biden is not actually running the government, who is?
The short answer:
Court intellectuals use their establishment-sanctioned “expertise” to argue that society’s problems must be solved with government interventions. Politicians offer to enact these interventions in exchange for votes and donations. Plutocrats work to warp the interventions to their own benefit and then lobby and pay politicians to legislate even more lucrative interventions. After they are enacted, the easily predicted bad consequences of the interventions are used by court intellectuals and politicians to justify even more interventions.
Meanwhile, the bureaucratic group gains jobs, money, and power that it works with court intellectuals to protect and expand. The ever-growing interventions build up more government power that is then offered up to interested plutocratic buyers. All the while, politicians put on their sham fights with each other over minor policy differences along with their electoral and legislative rituals to obscure the scam and to keep us all believing that we live in a representative democratic republic.
(I’m not saying it’s exactly this way, no simplifications or complexities, but this does give us the general picture nicely.)