Last month, the Consolidated Appropriations Act of 2023, or Omnibus package, demonstrated that the majority of politicians have one-track minds. They identify problems, pass legislation, and send the consequences down the line.
In “The Coming Slavery” (1884), Herbert Spencer observed that legislators often fail to perceive that they have set in motion a train on a destructive course. Given the political momentum, he argues, “The question of questions for the politician should ever be—’What type of social structure am I tending to produce?’”
If most of our politicians have failed to ask this question, citizens should remind them of it now. Who benefits from the $1.65 trillion omnibus package? How does it enhance or restrict freedom? And how do spending programs affect the mindset of future generations? The answers should make everyone reach for the brakes.
An Equitable Platform
One problem is that the current appropriations package is full of programs that redistribute wealth to advance a target moving faster than a bullet train: “equity.” Voters’ race, geographical location, and employment significantly shape their benefits.
Consider the beneficiary of one of Senator Sheldon Whitehouse’s earmarks: $477,000 to the Equity Institute in Rhode Island. This “education-based nonprofit organization” works to “cultivate antiracist, people-centered communities for all learners.” To do so, the institute advances “an evolving definition of education equity,” insisting, “criteria for success when advancing Educational Equity must be based on the quality of individual and community life as opposed to standardized test scores.” If those criteria are opaque, the government’s criteria are more so.
The “Unleashing American Innovators Act of 2022,” for instance, amends existing legislation to enable the Undersecretary of Commerce for Intellectual Property and Director of the US Patent and Trademark Office to encourage innovation and new patents among particular groups. It ends the preferred list with “any geographic group of innovators that the Director may determine to be underrepresented in patent filings.” The Director may spend your tax dollars based less on the quality of invention than on who innovates and where.
Senator Bernie Sanders is also focused on a particular group in his $50 million Worker Ownership and Readiness and Knowledge Act. Sanders introduced the legislation in 2009. His colleagues then balked, but this year nearly everyone boarded the omnitrain.
Under this act, “The secretary shall establish with the Department of Labor an Employee Ownership Initiative to promote employee ownership.” Sanders calls it “modest but effective legislation” that will “go a long way to ensuring workers have the tools they need to have a seat at the table they worked to build.”
The program identifies “key groups, such as retiring business owners, senior managers, labor organizations, trade associations, community organizations, and economic development organizations,” all of which it educates on the means and benefits of employee ownership. But what are the long-term consequences of promoting this shift, apart from, of course, solidifying a voter bloc?
In its current format, this legislation seems innocuous because it is voluntary: there is outreach, education, and assistance. What Spencer emphasizes, however, is that what begins modestly expands into massive programming with increasing legislation and escalating costs: a runaway train with no brakes.
Tracks to Serfdom
Perhaps the future beneficiaries of the innovation grants will be delighted to share the metaphorical tables they invent with their employees, who then become owners. Or, perhaps Spencer was right that the more the government does, the less incentive people have to invent:
Each generation is made less familiar with the attainment of desired ends by individual actions or private combinations, and more familiar with the attainment of them by governmental agencies; until, eventually, governmental agencies come to be thought of as the only available agencies.
Will the next generation simply plod down the well-worn tracks of government assistance for every endeavor? And how much will that funding increase over the next decades?
Such a trend has long-term consequences financially as well as intellectually. As the government’s gravy train gains momentum, so does government’s incentive to raise taxes to fuel it. Individuals have less money to apply to their own interests and must work more hours every day to pay for socialism. This was, for Spencer, “the coming slavery”:
it matters not whether his master is a single person or a society. If, without option, he has to labour for the society, and receives from the general stock such portion as the society awards him, he becomes a slave to the society. Socialistic arrangements necessitate an enslavement of this kind, and towards such an enslavement many recent measures, and still more the measures advocated, are carrying us.
Without claiming “enslavement” today, we can acknowledge that the Consolidated Appropriations Act of 2023 will increase the national debt, as well as the political momentum toward the governmentalization of social affairs.
Halting that process requires taxpayers to exhibit the same savvy shown by Agatha Christie’s legendary Hercule Poirot. The detective, faced with a body on the Orient Express, finally realized that literally all the passengers on that train had a hand in the murder. Likewise, voters must accept that the majority of our elected representatives supported the passage of the omnibus, whether openly or through earmarks.
It’s time for us to acknowledge the society they are creating and to hold them accountable. If our current legislators won’t apply the brakes on this train, we need to do so in the next election.
Article cross-posted from AIER.
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Two Storms, One Harvest
Every food crisis in living memory has been a one-shock event. The 2008 price spike was a commodity bubble. The 2020 shortages were a logistics failure. The 2022 grain scare was a war on one exporter’s ports. Each time, the system bent, adjusted, and recovered, and each time the experts assured us afterward that global markets are simply too big and too diversified to fail.
What nobody in Washington seems eager to discuss is that 2026 is shaping up to be something the modern food system has never actually faced. Two independent shocks, one climatic and one geopolitical, are converging on the same harvest cycle at the same time. Not sequentially. Simultaneously.
Start with the weather. The Pacific Ocean is currently building toward what forecasters now openly call a record event. NOAA’s Climate Prediction Center puts the odds of at least a strong El Niño near 88 percent, with roughly two in three odds it reaches “very strong” status, the tier reserved for perhaps three or four events in the entire satellite era. Every major global model now projects a median peak in Super El Niño territory, and most of them project it exceeding the 2015-16 event, which until now held the modern record. Sea surface anomalies were already brushing the super threshold in mid-July, months before these events normally peak. The atmosphere has already shifted into El Niño mode, and the event is forecast to crest in late fall and early winter.
This is not about “climate change.” It’s about the standard cycles of weather, and the cycle we’re currently in is one that has likely devastated societies in the past. We’re better prepared as a society today, but not all Americans are equally prepared.
Serious households have started doing the quiet math on their own. Grocery bills tell part of the story, and the forecast maps tell the rest, which is why long-term food storage has moved from fringe hobby to mainstream line item in the family budget, with established suppliers like Heaven’s Harvest seeing demand from people who five years ago would have rolled their eyes at the idea. That instinct is not paranoia. It is pattern recognition, and the pattern is worth walking through carefully.
Editor’s Note: Heaven’s Harvest IS a sponsor, but the warnings of this article are real and would be written even if we didn’t have a survival food sponsor. With that said, those who take advantage of what they offer can use promo code “Patriot” for 15% off.
The Fertilizer Clock Is Already Running
While the Pacific warms, the second shock has been unfolding in the Strait of Hormuz. The conflict with Iran turned the world’s most important energy chokepoint into a contested waterway, and the consequences reach far beyond the gas pump. Roughly a third of global fertilizer trade moves through Hormuz, and the disruption sent urea prices up 86 percent year over year by March, with a 53 percent jump in a single month.
The World Bank projects energy prices rising about 24 percent in 2026 and fertilizer about 31 percent. By its own accounting, fertilizer prices ran 35 percent higher in the first five months of this year than the same period last year.
Here is the mechanism the nightly news will not explain. Fertilizer is not a grocery item. It is a time-delayed input. The nitrogen a farmer in Iowa or Punjab could not afford to apply this spring does not show up as a problem this spring. It shows up as a thinner harvest six to twelve months later.
The World Bank’s own food security brief concedes that the effects of reduced applications earlier this season “are likely to become visible only later in harvest outcomes.” Translate that from institutional language into plain English and it means this. The damage is already done, it is already in the ground, and we are simply waiting for it to arrive on the shelf.
Now check the calendar. Six to twelve months from the spring planting season lands us squarely in late 2026 and early 2027. Which is precisely when the strongest El Niño in the instrumental record is forecast to peak, bringing its signature droughts to Southeast Asia, Australia, southern Africa, northern Brazil, and South Asia, the very regions that grow the world’s rice, sugar, and oilseeds.
The World Bank warns openly that a strong El Niño “could disrupt multiple crop belts simultaneously” on top of the conflict-driven input costs. Their baseline projection assumes the Middle East disruptions ease by autumn. What in the last two years of Middle East history suggests that assumption is safe?
The System Has No Slack Left
The comfortable answer is that global markets always adjust. But adjustment requires slack, and the slack is gone. Global cereal production is expected to decline from last year’s records even before El Niño does its work. The UN World Food Programme, hardly a den of right-wing preppers, is calling this the most significant disruption to its supply chains since Covid and the invasion of Ukraine, and its supply chain director put the stakes bluntly.
Today’s supply chain challenges are tomorrow’s hunger crisis.
There is also a political dimension that markets cannot price. When food gets scarce, governments do not behave like economists. They behave like politicians. Export bans, hoarding mandates, and panic buying at the national level turned the modest rice shortfall of 2008 into a global crisis, and analysts are already warning that import-dependent nations are the first dominoes.
The 2015-16 Super El Niño, a far weaker event than what is now forecast, threw tens of millions into food stress across Africa and Asia. This one is projected to be stronger, and it arrives with fertilizer already rationed by price and shipping lanes already contested by missiles.
What Joseph Knew
Scripture does not treat preparation for lean years as faithlessness. It treats it as wisdom delivered in advance to those willing to act on it.
Behold, there come seven years of great plenty throughout all the land of Egypt: And there shall arise after them seven years of famine; and all the plenty shall be forgotten in the land of Egypt.
Joseph did not respond to that warning with a hashtag or a committee. He stored grain during the years of abundance, and when the famine came, Egypt stood while its neighbors begged. The lesson is not that famine is certain. It is that the time to prepare is precisely when preparation still looks optional.
Nobody who filled a pantry in a year of plenty has ever regretted it, and nobody standing in an empty aisle has ever been glad he waited for certainty.
None of this calls for panic, and panic is the enemy of sound judgment anyway. It calls for the same unglamorous prudence our grandparents considered ordinary. Keep some cash margin, know your local growers, and put real food in deep storage while it is cheap and available, because the entire arc of this story is that cheap and available is a closing window.
Families looking for a straightforward place to start can visit Heaven’s Harvest and use promo code Patriot for 15 percent off long-term storable food. The forecasts may yet soften, the strait may yet reopen, and we should pray they do. But hope is a fine thing to hold and a foolish thing to eat.