Context: The Republican Regime’s plans to impose worldwide-economy-destroying tariffs on our economy. Turmp himself said, ‘“I’m just saying they don’t need to have 30 dolls. They can have three. They don’t need to have 250 pencils. They can have five,” Trump said, acknowledging the prices of such items could also go up.’

I don’t know about you, but this kind of thing makes parts of my brain fall off. In what part of America is this supposed to be an encouraging message?? I find it incredible — in its original sense of ‘unbelievable’ — that Bessent would go on Fox News (even) and say such a thing.

However, here’s my pro tip: Believe him — because he believes it. HE HAS NEVER HAD TO TELL A CHILD THEY WEREN’T GETTING CHRISTMAS.  He’s a deep-dyed Puritan: life must be earned; food, clothing, shelter, all must be earned. If you don’t have them, you’re being punished by a benevolent deity and you deserve it.

Scott Bessent believes this with all his heart because, as a centimillionaire, he has no idea what real life is like for us peons. It’s like “Let them eat cake,” only the reverse of that: “Let them have less cake!” (Or as Dmitri Shostakovich put it in his biography Testimony, the message of the last movement of his iconic Symphony No. 5 was claimed to be “triumphant joy,” but he said it was “‘actually… clear to everyone what happens in the Fifth.  The rejoicing is forced, created under threat, as in Boris Godunov.  It’s as if someone were beating you with a stick and saying, ‘Your business is rejoicing, your business is rejoicing,’ and you rise, shaky, and go marching off, muttering, ‘Our business is rejoicing, our business is rejoicing.'”)

So of course Bessent has no moral qualms about advising parents to lecture their children about having a better life through having your childhood dreams stomped into a bloody, pulsating pulp. As far as he’s concerned, that’s Life.

(But if you asked him to specify how the little girl’s life would be better for it, you’d get nothing but facile generalities.)

P.S. My blog post about Shostakovich’s Fifth and other works has some serious warnings for us today.