John Thune, Judge Andrew Napolitano, Black Elk: The pig is dead

The great anthropologist Joseph Campbell said one of the legendary moments in the spirit life of America was when the Lakota shaman, Black Elk, turning and pointing north to northwest, said to the poet Flaming Rainbow, “There is the center of the world.” Then he said, “but wherever you are is the center of the world.” He might have been right the first time, because Black Elk’s Dakotas are awakening. Just as the rest of us up here in the northeast seem to be falling into a deep post-industrial slumber.

This current recession in no way resembles the Great Depression when “world economy” basically consisted of England, Germany and the U.S. as historian Niall Ferguson has been saying. Much of the world is not in recession and they will grow at the disadvantage of others. Germany is doing well and Brazil is at 7%. China and Germany are creditor nations and as Jim Rogers says, the U.S. is now the “greatest debtor nation in history.” But for our purposes here in the Land of the Free, we can see that the U.S. economy is REGIONALIZING in this recession. The red states are bountiful with commodities and agricultural products and are generally very healthy. There is, says Rogers, “a definite shift from financial centers to the producers of real goods.” One size government no longer fits all in politics and in economy. In a word, blue is on the wane, red is on the rise. And the post-industrial urban blue asks – demands – a pension from the rural and agricultural red.

“If you look at current unemployment rates by state, it appears that Nebraska, South Dakota, and North Dakota have the lowest unemployment rates in the country,” says Laura Ebke, editor of Red State Eclectic. “Those three states, of course, depend very little on industrial/manufacturing employment, and significantly on agriculture related business. Iowa and Kansas also have comparatively low rates.” While The Bureau of Labor Statistics indicates that industrial and post-industrial states like California at 12.4, Rhode Island at 11.5 and Michigan at 13.0 are among the highest.

And creative business is heading to places like South Dakota, ranked one of the best pro-business states by Ronald Pollina’s Corporate Top 10, fleeing CA. Utah, Wyoming, Nebraska, Kansas and Missouri are also ranked in the top ten, while California finishes last for the seventh straight year. They can and should protect and advance their resources. Possibly Senator John Thune of South Dakota, who grows more impressive, should take command as their representative figure. He brings charisma to politics and cache to the heartland.

Some of the ideas I and others were writing about to a few hundred in Libertarian journals just five years ago were considered quaint but dangerous and even treasonous, but it was okay so long as we remained in our crates. Now we hear Judge Andrew Napolitano talking to millions about these same ideas every day. As The Hill columnist Dick Morris writes this week, “The Tea Party has made the Republican Party safe for libertarians.” This will change everything. As Morris points out, it is no longer about cultural issues, but about economics.

Something else: The pig is dead. For decades now each political party has run a deficit so deep that when the opposition came to power any new deficit spending would break the bank. The only variation of this theme was when the most naïve of presidents, Bill Clinton, inexplicably hired the primo Republican trickster, who advised him to kill the deficit, so the Republican who followed could spend again, which they indeed did. Today, neither party can bring home the pork, The pig is butchered, baked, barbecued and eaten and there is no pork left.