After America: Get Ready for Armageddon (11 page)

after america

“two basically irreconcilable views of reality”: “Only in America are they so equally balanced. Elsewhere in the west, the true believers in the Nanny State have long since prevailed.”54

Increasingly, America’s divide is about the nature of the state itself—

about the American idea. And in that case why go on sharing the same real estate? As someone once said, “A house divided against itself cannot stand.”

The Flownover Country’s champion ought, in theory, to be the Republican Party. But, even in less fractious times, this is a loveless marriage. Much of the GOP establishment is either seduced by the Conformicrats or terrified by them, to the point where they insist on allowing the liberals to set the parameters of the debate—on health care, immigration, education, Social Security—and then wonder why elections are always fought on the Democrats’ terms. If you let the left make the rules, the right winds up being represented by the likes of Bob Dole and John McCain, decent old sticks who know how to give dignified concession speeches. If you want to get rave reviews for losing gracefully, that’s the way to go. If you want to prevent Big Government driving America off a cliff, it’s insufficient.

The Conformicrats need Flownover Country to fund them. It’s less clear why Flownover Country needs the Conformicrats—and a house divided against itself cannot stand without the guy who keeps up the mortgage payments.

According to the Tax Policy Center, for the year 2009, 47 percent of U.S.

households paid no federal income tax.55 Obviously, many of them paid other kinds of taxes—state tax, property tax, cigarette tax. But at a time of massive increases in federal spending, half the country is effectively making no contribution to it, whether it’s national defense, or interest payments on the debt, or vital stimulus funding to pump monkeys in North Carolina full of cocaine (true, seriously, but don’t ask me why).56 Furthermore, if you pay local tax but no federal income tax, you’re more easily seduced by the most malign of Big Government’s distortions: its insistence that more and more aspects of life have to be regulated by a centralized regime in Washington rather than by varieties of state, county, and municipal bodies. As a undreaming america 71

general principle, if you pay nothing for government, why would you want less of it? More specifically, if you pay nothing for federal government, why would the relentless centralization of American statism bother you?

In 2009, Ken Rogulski of WJR Detroit reported on a federal aid “giveaway” at the city’s Cobo Center:

WJR: Why are you here?

WOMAN #1: To get some money.

WJR: What kind of money?

WOMAN #1: Obama money.

WJR: Where’s it coming from?

WOMAN #1: Obama.

WJR: And where did Obama get it?

WOMAN #1: I don’t know. His stash. I don’t know. [She laughs.] I don’t know where he got it from, but he’s giving it to us, to help us.

WOMAN #2: And we love him.

WOMAN #1: We love him. That’s why we voted for him!

WOMEN (chanting): Obama! Obama! Obama! [They laugh.]

WJR: . . . and where did Obama get the funds?

WOMAN #2: Ummm, I have no idea, to tell you the truth. He’s the President.57

Well, he got it from me, and from you. Every dollar in Obama’s “stash”

comes from me, you, or the Chinese Politburo. And redistributing it on the grounds above only inflates these ladies’ blithe assumptions. But so what?

If the object is to increase government, and expand the power of those in government, then the “Obama’s stash” route works just fine.

By contrast, if you fall into the taxation category and you’re stuck with the tab for Obama’s stash, you’re not only paying for groups that get a better hearing in Washington, but ensuring that the socioeconomic conditions of the republic will trend, mercilessly, against you. The small business class—men and women in unglamorous lines of work that keep the 72

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Flownover Country going—are disfavored by the Conformicrats. They are occasionally acknowledged by our rulers with rhetorical flourishes—“tax cuts for working families”—but, on closer inspection, these “tax cuts”

invariably mean not reductions in the rate of income seizure but a “tax credit” reimbursed from the seizure in return for living your life the way the government wants you to, and expanding the size of the dependent class.

United States income tax is becoming the twenty-first-century equivalent of the “jizya”—the punitive tax levied by Muslim states on their non-Muslim citizens. In return for funding the Caliphate, the infidels were permitted to carry on practicing their faith. Under the American jizya, in return for funding Big Government, the non-believers are permitted to carry on practicing their faith in capitalism, small business, economic activity, and the other primitive belief systems to which they cling so touchingly.

In the Islamic world, the infidel tax base eventually wised up. You can see it literally in the landscape in rural parts of the Balkans: Christian trades-men got fed up paying the jizya and moved out of the towns up into remote hills far from the shakedown crowd. In less mountainous terrain where it’s harder to lie low, non-Muslims found it easier to convert. That’s partly what drove Muslim expansion. Once Araby had been secured for Islam, it was necessary to move on to the Levant, and to Persia, and to Central Asia and North Africa and India and Europe—in search of new infidels to mug. I’m not so invested in my analogy that I’m suggesting America’s Big Government shakedown racket will be forced to invade Canada and Scandinavia.

For one thing, everywhere else got with the Big Government program well ahead of America and those on the receiving end long ago figured out all the angles: in the Stockholm suburb of Tensta, 20 percent of women in their late forties collect disability benefits.58 In the United Kingdom, five million people—a tenth of the adult population—have not done a day’s work since the New Labour government took office in 1997.59

America has a ways to go in catching up with those enlightened jurisdictions, but it’s heading there. As Congressman Paul Ryan pointed out, undreaming america 73

by 2004, 20 percent of U.S. households were getting about 75 percent of their income from the federal government.60 As a matter of practical politics, how receptive would they be to a pitch for lower taxes, which they don’t pay, or for lower government spending, of which they are such fortunate beneficiaries? How receptive would another fifth of households, who receive about 40 percent of their income from the feds, be to such a pitch?

But for the productive class, the ongoing government shakedown leads to demoralization and disincentivization. In 2002, 61 percent of Americans believed their children would enjoy higher living standards. By 2009, that was down to 45 percent. This is a hole in America’s soul, and it’s growing bigger every day.61

In the Nineties, the “culture wars” were over “God, guns and gays.” The overreach of the statists has added a fourth G: Government itself is now a front in the culture war, and a battle of the most primal kind. Is the United States a republic of limited government with a presumption in favor of individual liberty? Or is it just like any other western nation in which a permanent political class knows what’s best for its subjects? In California, the people can pass a ballot proposition against gay marriage, but a single activist judge overrules them. In Arizona, the people’s representatives vote to uphold the people’s laws, but a pliant judge strikes them down at Washington’s behest. It is surely only a matter of time before some federal judge finds the Constitution unconstitutional.

Some schlub in Fresno might wonder why a gay judge who seemed a more militant advocate for gay marriage than the plaintiffs were didn’t recuse himself from the case. But that just shows how little they know: it’s the voters of California who should have recused themselves. Their bigotry makes them unqualified to pronounce on the subject. They should be grateful Judge Walker didn’t mandate re-education camp.

It is never a good idea to send the message, as the political class now does consistently, that there are no democratic means by which the people can restrain their rulers. As the (Democrat) pollster Pat Cadell pointed out, the logic of that is “pre-revolutionary.”62

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Once you’ve secured the other levers of power, elective politics becomes a kind of sham combat to distract from the real battlegrounds. There are degrees of dissembling: the presidential candidate running as a “fiscally responsible post-partisan healer” provides the cover for an agenda crafted by far more explicitly left-wing legislators, such as Pelosi and Frank. Behind the legislators are the judges, behind the judges the regulatory bureaucracy, and behind the bureaucracy the union muscle: left, lefter, leftest.

★ ★ ★ ★ ★

fiddLinG whiLe rome BurnS money

Of all the many marvelous Ronald Reagan lines, this is my favorite:
We are a nation that has a government—not the other way
around.63

He said it in his inaugural address in 1981, and, despite a Democrat-controlled Congress, he lived it. It sums up his legacy abroad: across post-Communist Europe, from Slovenia to Bulgaria to Lithuania, governments that had nations were replaced by nations that have governments.

Today, in Reagan’s own country, we are atrophying into a government that has a nation.

In the eighteen months after the collapse of Lehman Brothers in September 2008, over seven million Americans lost their jobs, yet the number of federal bureaucrats earning $100,000 or more went up from 14 percent to 19 percent.64 An economic downturn for you, but not for them. They’re upturn girls living in a downturn world. At the start of the “downturn,” the Department of Transportation had just one employee earning more than $170,000 per year. Eighteen months later, it had 1,690.65 In the year after the passage of Obama’s “stimulus,” the private sector lost 2.5 million jobs, but the federal bureaucracy gained 416,000.66 Even if one accepts the government’s ludicrous concept of “creating or saving” jobs, by its own figures undreaming america 75

four out of every five “created or saved” jobs were government jobs. “Stimulus” stimulates government, not the economy. It’s part of the remorseless governmentalization of American life.

What sort of jobs were “created or saved”? Well, the United States Bureau of the Public Debt is headquartered in Parkersburg, West Virginia—

and it’s hiring! According to the Careers page of their website: “The Bureau of the Public Debt (BPD) is one of the best places to work in the federal government. When you work for BPD, you’re a part of one of the federal government’s most dynamic agencies
.
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I’m sure. They’re committed to a working environment of “Information, Informality, Integrity, Inclusion & Individual Respect.” In the land of the blind, the five-I’d bureaucrat is king. Alas, no room on the motto for the sixth I (Insolvency). At some point in the near future, Big Government will have reached its state of theoretical perfection and all revenues will be going either to interest payments to China or to lavish pensions liabilities for retired officials of the Bureau of Public Debt.

When the subject of the leviathan comes up, the media and other statism groupies tend to say, “Oh, well, it’s easy to talk about cutting government spending, until you start looking at individual programs, most of which tend to be very popular.”

“Programs” is a sly word. Regardless of the merits of the “program,”

it requires human beings to run it. And government humans cost more than private humans. In 2009, the average civilian employee of the United States government earned $81,258 in salary plus $41,791 in benefits.

Total: $123,049.68

The average American employed in the private sector earned $50,462

in salary plus $10,589 in benefits. Total: $61,051.69

So the federal worker earns more than twice as much as the private sector worker. Plus he has greater job security: he’s harder to fire, or even to persuade to take a small pay cut.

Experts talk about the difficulty of restructuring entitlement programs, or of carving out a few billions in savings here and there. But here’s a 76

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thought experiment: imagine if federal workers made the same as the private workers who pay their salaries. Imagine if they had to get by on 61K instead of 123 grand.

Ah, but such fancies dwell purely in the Land of Imagination. In theory, Americans govern themselves through elected representatives. In practice, the political class are no longer the citizen-legislators of a self-governing republic but instead the plump, pampered Emirs of Incumbistan. Hawaii’s Daniel Inouye has been in Congress as long as the islands have been a state, which means he’s been in office longer than the world’s longest-running dictators-for-life. Lest comparisons with Colonel Gaddafi seem a little unkind, Inouye has been in Washington almost as long as the five monarchs of the Kamehameha dynasty ruled over a unified kingdom of Hawaii. If that’s what Hawaiians are looking for in a political system, why bother overthrowing Queen Lili’uokalani? John Dingell Jr. has been a Michigan congressman since 1955. For the twenty-two years before that, his constituents were represented by John Dingell Sr. Between the first Duke of Dingell and the second, the Dingell family has held the seat for a third of the republic’s history. If that’s what Michiganders are looking for in a political system, why not stick with the House of Lords?

The late Robert C. Byrd sat in the Senate for half-a-century while the world transformed, and strung along: a former Klan leader (“Exalted Cyclops”) and recruiter (“Kleagle”) who opposed civil rights, he ended his days as a hero to Moveon.org for opposing the war on terror. He doesn’t seem to have been a principled Klansman or a principled Moveon.orgiast.

He simply moved on as required. You gotta know when to change the sheets.

He did what was necessary to maintain himself in power. Everything in West Virginia apart from the Bureau of Public Debt and the Klan lodge is named after him. When he turned against the war in Afghanistan in 2002, I suggested that maybe if we agreed to rename the place Robert C. Byrdistan, he might see his way to staying onside for a couple more months. (I’m still in favor of that: his view of power was no less primitively tribal and venal than your average Pushtun village headman’s.) Apart from naming more undreaming america 77