How Biden administration is mocking ancient wisdom

Human nature stays the same across time and space. That is why there used to be predictable political, economic and social behavior that all countries understood.

The supply of money governs inflation. Print it without either greater productivity or more goods and services and the currency cheapens. Yet America rejects that primordial truism.

The United States is more than $28 trillion in debt. The government will run up a $2.3 trillion budget deficit for 2021.

The Biden administration wants to borrow more — another $2 trillion.

In the crazy last 100 days, the price of everything from lumber, food and gas to cars and houses has soared. Yet many interest rates are still stuck at or below 3%.

Is it a surprise when government handouts discourage the unemployed from taking a pay cut to go back to work?

Americans are splurging. But this pent-up demand is causing shortages. Producers fear the Biden administration’s loose talk of higher taxes, greater regulation and cutbacks in energy development.

Are the old principles really obsolete? Should we be printing money while expanding government debt? Is it wise to keep interest rates close to zero and to discourage employment, production and thrift?

Opponents such as Iran, North Korea, China and Russia expect that the Biden administration will ignore their brinkmanship. They assume the administration will cut American defenses. And Biden sounds to them more critical of Trump foreign policy than of America’s enemies.

So, Russian troops mass on the Ukrainian border. China steps up its harassment of Taiwan. North Korea launches more missiles, Iran hazes U.S. ships in the Persian Gulf. Rockets from Gaza pour into Israel.

Apparently, the Biden administration did not believe that dictatorships and theocracies would interpret its virtue signaling as weakness to be exploited rather than as magnanimity to be returned in kind.

The old dictum of the Roman writer Vegetius

— if you want peace, prepare for war — was just too much of a downer.

In the old days, the greater the impediments to crossing a nation’s border, the less likely was illegal immigration. Here too, the Biden administration apparently rejected the ancient warnings.

Stopping construction of the border wall, promising amnesties in advance has only led to more illegal immigration.

Refusing to call the chaos at the southern border a “crisis” did not mean it was not a disaster.

Wisdom of the ages also warned that humans’ first allegiance was to their own tribe, as defined by race, ethnicity or religion. That existential danger is why multiracial nations always wisely sought to tamp down tribal differences and to emphasize common ties of citizenship and transcendent common interests.

Yet for three months, the Biden administration has emphasized racial differences rather than our melting-pot commonalities. It has stereotyped America’s White population as somehow uniformly enjoying unearned privileged.

The danger is that racial tensions will increase, hate crimes will spike and tribal solidarity will replace it. And the ancient idea of America will unwind.

When an arrogant present dismisses the wisdom of the past, then an all too predictable future becomes terrifying.