After America: Get Ready for Armageddon (8 page)

after america

confiscated it. There are many people who can run businesses worth a million dollars. The ability to run a billion-dollar corporation is the province of very few individuals. The skill-set required to run a multi-trillion-dollar enterprise is unknown to human history.

In Justice Marshall’s words:

Industrial power should be decentralized. It should be scattered into many hands so that the fortunes of the people will not be dependent on the whim or caprice, the political prejudices, the emotional stability of a few self-appointed men. The fact that they are not vicious men but respectable and social minded is irrelevant.

In 1948 Marshall was worried about steel. But the dominant industrial power of our time is government. And it is because of the government monopoly that “the fortunes of the people” are dependent on “the whim or caprice” (not to mention “the emotional stability”) of a small number of all too like-minded individuals.

You can see where power lies in the very landscape: go to a steel town six decades after Marshall’s warning. The burg’s shot to hell. The handsome Victorian homes on the tree-lined avenues are worn and crumbling, with cracked clapboards and sagging porches, and cheaply partitioned into low-rent apartments. The railroad halts that sent the products of American industry across the nation and around the world are dead, their depots converted into laundromats and pizza joints or, worse, “community centers,” with the track removed and its weed-strewn path redesignated as a

“heritage trail.” Where do wealth and power gravitate today? In 2009

Reuters reported:

Washington, D.C., has become the favorite area for wealthy young adults, with the nation’s highest percentage of 25-34

year-olds making more than $100,000 a year.7

undreaming america 51

You don’t say! Now I wonder why that would be. Of the fifty counties with the biggest percentage of young high earners, sixteen were in the D.C. area.

Of the top ten, only two were not near either Washington or a state capital.8

Reuters filed this revealing analysis in its “lifestyle” section. Which makes sense. The easiest way to a “lifestyle” is a government job. The following year, another survey (from
Newsweek
) found that seven of the ten wealthiest counties in the United States were in the Washington commuter belt.9

What matters in the America of the twenty-first century is proximity not to industry or to wealth creation but to government.

As George Harrison warned, “the government’s monopolizing”: it has a monopoly of law, of licensing, of regulation, and when it abuses that monopoly then eventually you can’t move without encountering government at every turn. Even before the Obama spendaholics got to work supersizing the state, all levels of government, federal to local, were already sucking up over 40 cents of every dollar American workers generate.10

(European nations were able to go beyond even that dismal figure only because the United States has relieved them of the responsibility for their own defense.) The assumed rationale for an ever more intrusive superstate is that, thanks to technology and globalization, the world is far more complex and interconnected than in the days when hardscrabble farmers in New England townships could be trusted to run their own affairs. There is little objective evidence to support this argument, but it conveniently bolsters the political class’s belief in its own indispensability. Willie Whitelaw, the genial old buffer who served as Margaret Thatcher’s deputy for many years, once accused the Labour Party of going around Britain stirring up apathy. Viscount Whitelaw’s apparent paradox is, in fact, a shrewd political insight, and all the sharper for being accidental. Big Government depends on going around the country stirring up apathy—creating the sense that problems are so big, so complex, so intractable that even attempting to think about them for yourself gives you such a splitting headache it’s easier to shrug and accept as given the proposition that only government can deal with them.

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Take health care. Through all the interminable health-care “debates” of Obama’s first year, did you read any of the proposed plans? Of course not.

They’re huge and turgid and indigestible. Unless you’re a health-care lob-byist, a health-care think-tanker, a health-care correspondent, or some other fellow who’s paid directly or indirectly to plough through this stuff, why bother? None of the senators whose names are on the bills ever read ’em; why should you?

And you can understand why they drag on a bit. If you attempt to devise a health-care “plan” for over 300 million people, it’s bound to get a bit complicated. But a health-care plan for you, Mabel Scroggins of 27 Elm Street, didn’t used to be that complicated, did it? Let’s say you carelessly drop the ObamaCare bill on your foot and it breaks your toe. In the old days, you’d go to your doctor (or, indeed, have him come to you—that’s how insane it was back then), he’d patch you up, and you’d write him a check. That’s the way it was in most of the developed world within living memory.

When did it get too complicated to leave to individuals? “Health” is potentially a big-ticket item, but so’s a house and a car, and most folks manage to handle those without a Government Accommodation Plan or a Government Motor Vehicles System—or, at any rate, they did in pre-bailout America.

Ah, but government health care is not about health care, it’s about government. That’s why the Democrats spent the first year of a brutal recession trying to ram ObamaCare down the throats of a nation that didn’t want it. Because the governmentalization of health care is the fastest way to a permanent left-of-center political culture. It redefines the relationship between the citizen and the state in fundamental ways that make small government all but impossible ever again. In most of the rest of the western world, it’s led to a kind of two-party one-party state: right-of-center parties will once in a while be in office, but never in power, merely presiding over vast left-wing bureaucracies that cruise on regardless. All such “technocratic” societies slide left, into statism and stasis.

Many Americans are happy with the government monopoly. The monarchical urge persists even in a two-and-a-third-century-old republic.

undreaming america 53

So, when the distant Sovereign from Barackingham Palace graciously confers an audience on his unworthy subjects, they are eager to petition him to make all the bad stuff go away. “I have an urgent need,” one lady beseeched King Barack at a “town hall meeting” in Fort Myers early in 2009. “We need a home, our own kitchen, our own bathroom.”11

He took her name—Henrietta Hughes—and ordered his staff to meet with her. Hopefully, he didn’t insult her by dispatching some no-name deputy assistant secretary of whatever instead of flying in one of the big-time tax-avoiding cabinet honchos to nationalize a Florida bank and convert one of its branches into a desirable family residence, with a swing set hanging where the drive-thru ATM used to be. The audience roared their gratitude. “Yes!” they yelped, and “Amen!” and even “Gracious God, thank you so much!”

As Bing Crosby said to Bob Hope in
The Road to Utopia
, “Leave your name with the girl, and we may get to you for some crowd noises.” That’s the citizen’s role on America’s road to Utopia: Leave your name with the girl and, after the background check, you may qualify for the crowd scenes.

Early in his term, President Obama called in some fellow smarties to test out some slogans. FDR had a “New Deal,” so Obama thought he’d wrap up his domestic innovations under the umbrella title of “New Foundation.”

The historian Doris Kearns Goodwin cautioned against it. “New Foundation,” she said, sounds like a lady’s girdle.12 Actually, it’s more like a whale-bone corset. When the American citizen climbs into the “New Foundation,”

the stays get cranked tighter and tighter, but incrementally—so you barely feel it, till you realize the bottom’s dropped out, and you’re coughing up blood, and they’re still cranking.

★ ★ ★ ★ ★

the StatiSt Quo

FDR was the first American president to pass off Big Government as technocracy. He had a so-called “Brains Trust.” As with so many pious 54

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liberal concepts, the term started as a throwaway joke. Back in the trust-busting days of the 1890s, a wag at
The Daily Star
of Marion, Ohio, mused:

“Since everything else is tending to trusts, why not a brain trust . . . ? Our various and sundry supplies of gray matter may as well be controlled by a central syndicate.”13

That’s how America’s ruling class now regards itself: a central syndicate of gray matter. Which brings us back to George Harrison and the Monopolies Commission. The Big Government “brains trust” is a trust like any other: it exists to monopolize, to prevent free trade, to rig the market. Specifically, it exists to enforce a monopoly of ideas, and squash all alternatives.

You’ll recall that, during the 2008 primary season, Barack Obama was revealed, at a private fundraiser in San Francisco, to have belittled his own party’s voters in rural Pennsylvania as “bitter” people who “cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren’t like them.”14 He subsequently

“apologized” by explaining that “I said something everybody knows is true.”15

“
Everybody
”? Well, maybe at a swank Dem fundraiser in California—

and, if that’s not “everybody,” who is? This was an even more revealing remark than the original bitter-clingers crack. It deserves to be as celebrated as the famous response to the 1972 election results by a bewildered Pauline Kael, doyenne of the
New Yorker
, that nobody she knew voted for Nixon.

Just as “everybody” knows “we can’t just keep driving our SUVs, eating whatever we want, keeping our homes at 72 degrees,”16 so nobody we know voted for Nixon and everybody we know agrees that those crackers are embittered fundamentalist gun-nut bigots. Oh, c’mon, I said something
everybody
knows is true.

“Everybody” knows this stuff, especially if he reads the
New York Times
or listens to National Public Radio. “Everybody” knows that raising taxes is responsible, and “everybody” knows that cutting spending is just crazy talk.

“Everybody” knows that the governmentalization of health care—the annexation of one-sixth of the economy, the equivalent of the U.S. taking over the entire British or French economy, or the Indian economy twice undreaming america 55

over—“everybody” knows that that’s sober, prudent, technocratic, reasonable. And “everybody” knows that wanting to repeal ObamaCare is extremist, radical, dangerous. “Everybody” knows that serious proposals to address a looming shortfall in obligations of tens of trillions of dollars puts you in wide-eyed nut territory, just as “everybody” knows that massively increasing government spending is a moderate, centrist approach to stimulating the economy. Why, it’s in the
Washington Post
!
As the paper reported, after yet another anemic quarter:

Another big rise in growth came from the federal government, which rose at a 9.2 percent annual rate, including a 13 percent pace of gain in nondefense spending. That reflects in part the fiscal stimulus action that was enacted last year. . . . 17

So the establishment newspaper of the capital city of the so-called hyperpower thinks economic growth and government growth are the same thing?

Maybe if we’d had a 20 or 30 percent “big rise in growth” of government, the economy would
really
be roaring along.

Who are these everybodies who know instinctively what’s true and what isn’t? The idea of a technocracy—a “central syndicate of gray matter”—is vital to Big Government’s sense of itself. It’s not about tired outmoded concepts of left or right, it’s about “smart solutions” from smart guys—

starting with the president. “He’s probably the smartest guy ever to become president,” said Michael Beschloss the day after Obama’s election.18

Really? Other than demonstrate a remarkably focused talent for self-promotion, what has he ever
done
? Even as a legendary thinker, what original thought has he ever expressed in his entire life? And yet he’s “probably the smartest guy ever to become president” says Beschloss—and he’s a presidential historian so he should know, ’cause he’s a smart guy, too.

Lending a hand, another smart guy, the
New York Times
’ house conservative David Brooks, cooed over the credentialed-to-the-hilt smarts of the incoming administration: “If a foreign enemy attacks the United States 56

after america

during the Harvard-Yale game any time over the next four years, we’re screwed.”19

He’s right. Over a quarter of Obama’s political appointees had ties to Harvard; over 90 percent had “advanced degrees.”20 And yet we’re screwed anyway, with or without the Harvard-Yale game. If the smart guys are so smart, how come we’re broke? How come those Americans who aren’t tenured
New York Times
columnists or ex-legislators parlaying their Rolo-dexes into lucrative but undemanding “consultancies” or cozy “private-sector” sinecures as Executive Vice-President for Government Relations, are going to end their days significantly poorer? And how come those European social democracies that blazed the trail to Big Government are already poorer, and in several cases insolvent?

Unlike less sophisticated creeds, the statist ideology denies it’s any such thing. Why, they’re way beyond that: just as the political class are merely technocrats, so our educators are not leftist ideologues but impartial scholars, and the media establishment are objective reporters who would never dream of imposing their own biases even if they had any. Because, if you accept the idea that your worldview is merely that—a view—it implicitly acknowledges there are other views, against which yours should be tested.

Far easier to pronounce your side of the table the objective truth, and therefore any opposing argument is not a disagreement about policy or philosophy or economics, but merely evidence of Nazism, racism, or mental retardation. Contemplating a hostile electorate on the eve of the 2010