After America: Get Ready for Armageddon (16 page)

ChaPter

three

the new athenS

the drowning city

MR DIMPLE: Believe me, Colonel, when you shall have seen
the brilliant exhibitions of Europe, you will learn to despise the
amusements of this country as much as I do.

COLONEL MANLY: I do not wish to see them, for I can never
esteem that knowledge valuable, which tends to give me a distaste
for my native country.

—Royall Tyler,
The Contrast
(1787)
From the
Times
of London, May 6, 2010: The President of Greece warned last night that his country stood on the brink of the abyss after three people were killed when an anti-government mob set fire to the Athens bank where they worked.1

Almost right. They were not an “anti-government” mob, but a government mob, a mob comprised largely of civil servants. That they are highly uncivil and disinclined to serve should come as no surprise: they’re paid more and they retire earlier, and that’s how they want to keep it. So they’re objecting to austerity measures that would end, for example, the tradition 105

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of fourteen monthly paychecks per annum.2 You read that right: the Greek public sector cannot be bound by anything so humdrum as temporal reality. So, when it was mooted that the “workers” might henceforth receive a mere twelve monthly paychecks per annum, they rioted. Their hapless victims—a man and two women—were a trio of clerks trapped in a bank when the mob set it alight and then obstructed emergency crews attempting to rescue them.

Unlovely as they are, the Greek rioters are the logical end point of the advanced social democratic state: not an oppressed underclass, but a spoiled overclass, rioting in defense of its privileges and insisting on more subsidy, more benefits, more featherbedding, more government.

Who will pay for it? Not my problem, say the rioters. Maybe those dead bank clerks’ clients will—assuming we didn’t burn them to death, too.

America and Greece are at different stops on the same one-way street, all too familiar to us immigrants. There’s nothing new about Obama: been there, done that. Nothing could be less hopeful, or less of a change. He’s the land where we grew up, with its union bullies and marginal tax rates and government automobiles and general air of decay all re-emerging Brigadoon-like from the mists entirely unspoilt by progress. It’s like dock-ing at Ellis Island in 1883, coming down the gangplank, and finding everyone excited about this pilot program they’ve introduced called “serfdom.”

Greece is at the point in the plot where the canoe is about to plunge over the falls. America is upstream and can still pull for shore, but has decided instead that what it needs to do is not just drift along with the general current but paddle as fast as it can to catch up with the Greeks.

Chapter One (the introduction of unsustainable entitlements) leads eventually to Chapter Twenty (total societal meltdown); the Greeks are at Chapter Seventeen or Eighteen.

The problem facing advanced societies isn’t very difficult to figure out: the twentieth-century welfare state has run out of people to stick it to. When you’re spending four trillion dollars but only raising two trillion in revenue (the Democrat model), you’ve no intention of paying it off, and the rest of the new athens 107

the world knows it. In Greece, the arithmetic is even starker, because they’re at the next stage of social-democratic ruin. If America’s problem is that it’s spent tomorrow today, and can never earn enough tomorrow to pay for what we’ve already burned through, nations such as Greece have a more basic problem: they’ve spent tomorrow today, and there isn’t going to be a tomorrow. To prop up unsustainable welfare states, most of the western world isn’t “printing money” but instead printing credit cards and pre-approving our unborn grandchildren. That would be a dodgy proposition at the best of times. But in the Mediterranean those grandchildren are never going to be born. That’s the difference: in America, the improvident, insa-tiable boobs in Washington, Sacramento, Albany, and elsewhere are screw-ing over our kids and grandkids. In Europe, there are no kids or grandkids to screw over. In the end the entitlement state disincentives
everything from wealth creation to self-reliance to the survival instinct, as represented by the fertility rate. If the problem with socialism, as Mrs. Thatcher famously said, is that eventually you run out of other people’s money,3 the problem with Greece and much of Europe is that they’ve advanced to the next stage: they’ve run out of other people, period. All the downturn has done is brought forward by a couple decades the West’s date with demographic destiny.

The United States has a fertility rate of around 2.1—or just over two kids per couple.4 Greece, as I pointed out in
America Alone
, has one of the lowest fertility rates on the planet—1.3 children per couple, which places it in the “lowest-low” demographic category from which no society has recovered and, according to the UN, 178th out of 195 countries. In practical terms, it means 100 grandparents have 42 grandkids—in other words, the family tree is upside down.

Hooray, say the liberal progressives. No more overpopulation!

Here’s the problem: Greek public sector employees are entitled not only to fourteen monthly paychecks per annum during their “working” lives, but also fourteen monthly retirement checks per annum till death. Who’s going to be around to pay for that?

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So you can’t borrow against the future because, in the crudest sense, you don’t have one. Greeks in the public sector retire at fifty-eight, which sounds great. But, when ten grandparents have four grandchildren, who pays for you to spend the last third of your adult life loafing around?

Welcome to My Big Fat Greek Funeral.

We hard-hearted, small-government guys are often damned as selfish types who care nothing for the general welfare. But, as the protests in Greece, France, Britain, and beyond make plain, nothing makes an individual more selfish than the generous collectivism of big government: give a chap government health care, government-paid vacation, government-funded early retirement, and all the other benefits, and the last thing he’ll care about is what it means for society as a whole. People’s sense of entitlement endures long after the entitlement has ceased to make sense. And, if it bankrupts the entire state a generation from now, so what? In his pithiest maxim, John Maynard Keynes, the most influential economist of the twentieth-century social-democratic state and the patron saint of “stimulus,” offered a characteristically offhand dismissal of any obligation to the future: “In the long run we are all dead.”5 The Greeks are Keynesians to a man: the mob is rioting for the right to carry on suspending reality until they’re all dead. After that, who cares?

You don’t have to go to Greece to experience Greek-style retirement.

The Athenian “public service” of California has been metaphorically face down in the ouzo for a generation. As Arnold Schwarzenegger, the terminally terminated Terminator, told the legislature in his fourth State of the State address, “California has the ideas of Athens and the power of Sparta.”6

That’s half-right: California has the ideas of Athens. Unfortunately, it’s late twentieth-century Athens. As for “the power of Sparta,” unless he’s referring to gay marriage, it’s hard to see what he’s on about.

Greek public servants have their nose to the grindstone 24/7. They work twenty-four hours a week for seven months of the year. It’s not just that every year you receive fourteen monthly payments, but that you only do about thirty weeks’ work for it. For many public-sector “workers,” the work the new athens 109

day ends at 2.30 p.m. Gosh, when you retire on your fourteen monthly pension payments, you scarcely notice the difference, except for a few freed-up mornings. Couldn’t happen in America, right?

In Bell, California, an impoverished dump on the edge of Los Angeles whose citizens have a per capita annual income of $24,800, the city manager was paid $787,637. With benefits, Robert Rizzo’s compensation came to $1.5 million per annum. I use the phrase “per annum” loosely, since among the other gratifying aspects of his “job” was twenty-eight weeks off for vacation and sick leave. So in practical terms it worked out to $1.5 million per five and a half months.7

What kind of “city management” did Bell get in return for remunerat-ing their city manager so handsomely? By 2008, Mr. Rizzo’s regime had piled up nearly $80 million of debt on its 38,000 residents.8 You do the math: clearly it would be unreasonable to expect Manager Rizzo to—or the blue-chip insurers, bondholders, and guarantors (Citigroup, Wedbush Morgan) who continued to facilitate Rizzo’s “city management” in defiance of its arithmetical implausibility.9 U.S. municipal government is the subprime mortgage of big collective borrowing: Citigroup and the other bigshots wouldn’t have dealt with
you
on this basis, but they took the then reasonable view that even deranged spendthrift government doesn’t default, because there’s always someone it can pass the buck to. To modify Lord Acton, for Bell’s underwriters coziness with power corrupts very cozily.

Ask not for whom Bell tolls, it tolls for thee. As for murderous civil servants, you don’t have to go to Athens for that. In the New York Christmas snowstorm of 2010, the casualties of the city government’s incompetence went beyond the abandoned hot dog carts and buses and ambulances wedged into the snow banks of midtown Manhattan. A young woman gave birth in the lobby of a Brooklyn apartment house, but the baby died, because, in one of the most densely populated cities on earth, “first responders” were unable to get to her through the unploughed streets of Crown Heights until ten hours after her 911 call.10 In Queens, Yvonne Freeman, seventy-five, woke up with breathing difficulties, but she too died because the ambulance took 110

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hours to reach her.11 As the can’t-do buffoon mayor floundered from one disastrous press conference to another, it emerged that the city might have

been afflicted not merely by the weather but by something close to the municipal equivalent of treason. A councilman claimed that, when
the storm began, Sanitation Department bosses instructed their plough drivers to delay snow clearance in New York’s outer boroughs in order to protest some planned (and fairly desultory) budget cuts.12 The streets of Crown Heights weren’t unploughed because they were meteorologically stricken but as a conscious act of sabotage by public “servants.” That would make Mrs. Freeman, the Brooklyn baby, and others, victims of unionized manslaughter. As their Athenian comrades did, the public servants of New York prevented emergency crews from reaching those in peril, with fatal consequences. On the other hand, they did manage to clear the snow from outside the Staten Island home of Sanitation Department head honcho John Doherty, while leaving all surrounding streets pristinely clogged.13

Public-sector shakedown states are always unsustainable, but, though easy to launch, they’re hard to reel back. In 2010 the media reported the largest demonstration in a quarter-century had taken to the streets outside the Capitol in Springfield, Illinois, to demand, “Raise my taxes!”14 If you caught it with half an ear on the radio news, the gist seemed to be that these people were responsible and communitarian.

“Yes, people are hurting. That’s why we need a tax increase,” insisted Henry Bayer.

Who’s he? Well, he’s executive director of Council 31 of the American Federation of State, County, and Municipal Employees. Ah, right. So it’s not butchers, bakers, and candlestick makers chanting, “Raise my taxes!” It’s government workers.

Who live off taxes.

Taxes pay their salaries, benefits, and pensions. Government levies taxes on you and gives it to them. So Mr. Bayer and his chums might as well be yelling, “Gimme your money!” It’s no more communitarian than me standing in the street chanting, “Buy my book!”

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Big unions fund Big Government. The union slices off 2 percent of the workers’ pay and sluices it to the Democratic party, which uses it to grow

government, which also grows unions, which thereby grows the number of 2 percent contributions, which thereby grows the Democratic party, which thereby grows government. . . . Repeat until bankruptcy. Or bailout.

The “Raise my taxes!” protest was a subtler version of the Athenian riots—or a Trojan horse full of unionized Greeks. If the new class war is between “public servants” and the rest of us, some countries no longer have enough of “the rest of us” even to put up a fight. When the “public service”

becomes as dominant as Greece’s, it
is
the market: you can’t cut back public spending without moving toward economic crisis and social catastrophe.

The bloated public service leached so much out of the Greek economy that the European Union decided that the least worst response was to allow them to do the same to the broader EU economy—just as the debauched public sector of California is pinning its hopes on federal largesse.

Greece is a great civilization, or it was. Now it’s a basket case. They set up a caring, compassionate, progressive society, and it’s bankrupted them.

In Greece, a female working in a “hazardous” job can retire with a full government pension at fifty. Initially, “hazardous” meant jobs like bomb disposal and mining. Ever fancied a career in bomb disposal? No? Don’t blame you, it’s kinda hazardous.

But, as is the way of government entitlements, the “hazardous” category growed like Topsy. Five hundred and eighty professions now qualify as

“hazardous,” among them hairdressing.15 “I use a hundred different chem-icals every day—dyes, ammonia, you name it,” 28-year-old Vasia Veremi told the
New York Times
. “You think there’s no risk in that?” Not to mention all those scissors.

Like hairdressers, Greek TV and radio hosts can also retire at fifty—

because of their high level of exposure to “microphone bacteria.”16 Were you inspired to buy this book by seeing me yakking into a mike about it up on the podium at a stop on the publicity tour? Well, that very microphone counts as a hazardous work environment in Greece. What a class action we 112