When The Gods of the Copybook Headings Smile

It doesn't have to be terror and slaughter, unless you're just stupid.

In recent years, I’ve sometimes invoked Rudyard Kipling’s The Gods of the Copybook Headings, usually when something goes wrong because people did something obviously stupid.

Well, to be fair, that’s the main subject of the poem: how being entranced by popular but dumb ideas leads to destruction. But there’s another side to it. When you do things that are simple and obvious — and, often, traditional — you can do pretty well.

And we’re seeing that illustrated, at home and abroad.

At home, the allegedly insoluble illegal immigration problem is being solved, via the simple and obvious, and traditional, approach of policing the borders and deporting people who are here illegally.

We were told that the problem was hugely difficult, and would require complicated bipartisan legislation from Congress. Nope. All that was needed was a very simple policy: Don’t let them in, and kick them out if they’re already here. From this change, various other allegedly difficult problems began to resolve: Housing prices, crime, employment for American workers, and even L.A. traffic (!) show signs of improvement. Even the federal deficit is under less pressure, as benefits are cut.

Likewise, the “energy crisis,” which has been a thing since I was a kid, has evaporated. How did we make it go away? Simple: We needed more oil and gas, so we drilled more oil and gas, after which we had more oil and gas. I know, crazy, right?

Government spending was just one of those things you couldn’t control. It was going to organically increase each year, and you couldn’t stop it, slow it — or even figure out exactly where the money was going, most of the time. D.O.G.E. has put the brakes on that, and those changes are only beginning. Simply introducing basic accounting controls, of the sort used by basically every other entity, turns out to have been possible, though apparently never attempted before. The Corporation for Public Broadcasting is now gone, and other federal agencies are headed for the shredder too.

And Iran’s nuclear weapons program, something that we have (allegedly) struggled to contain for decades with a weird mixture of sanctions and pallets full of cash, was taken out of the picture by the novel expedient of bombing it into rubble. Go figure. Why didn’t we try that before?

In fact, why didn’t we try any of this before?

Well, my own theory is that problems remain “insoluble” mostly because people gain too much from not solving them. Sometimes it’s money — think of all the rice bowls that would shatter in the homelessness industry if “homelessness” were ever fixed — sometimes it’s position and ego, revolving around Very Important Meetings by Very Important People in Very Important (and always cushy) Places, at which the problem is never solved because then what would the next meeting be about?

I believe that our political establishment at some level wants things to be complicated and intractable: It boosts their influence. But it’s not good for the country, and the world.

And speaking of the world, we’ve seen similar approaches and results elsewhere. Argentina’s economy was choked by unsustainable government spending, bloated public-sector entities, and crushing regulation. Javier Millei got rid of all three and — go figure — now things are much better. Voters — especially younger voters whose opportunities were squashed by the old system — are noticing

Poland has done something very similar, though not quite as abruptly.

And, of course, the Bukele government in El Salvador got rid of its gang problem by . . . locking up the gang members. Again, wow, who could have guessed that might work?

So while ignoring the Gods of the Copybook Headings may bring terror and slaughter, paying attention to their simple principles — the Copybook Headings that inspired the poem were trite, moralistic sayings of the “waste not, want not” variety, which schoolchildren in those days learned instead of new gender pronouns — can bring happiness and prosperity.

This being obvious, why does it seem like such a breakthrough to see people applying obvious truths to the practice of government? Well, as I mentioned, our political establishment at some level wants things to be complicated and intractable. Part of this is to boost their influence. Part of it is a desire to engage in “bold experimentation” (a favorite phrase of FDR, whose policies prolonged the Depression by years), because “bold experimentation” empowers and exalts those who presume to experiment on their fellow citizens. And academia, which has a lot of influence on our governing class in spite of the fact that (or perhaps because) our governing class is not really terribly bright, places a high value on novelty. Maybe good for tenure pieces; not so great for government.

At any rate, Inman Majors once wrote that every political campaign boils down to either “A Bright New Day,” or “Back to Basics.” It is perhaps the irony of our age that going back to basics may be what ushers in a bright new day.

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