After America: Get Ready for Armageddon (49 page)

counselor, the school board, the old, the late middle-aged and the early middle-aged have cleaned you out before you’ve got going.

“It’s about the future of all our children.” And the future of all our children is that you’ll be paying off the past of all your grandparents. In the assisted-suicide phase of western democracy, voters are seduced by politicians who bribe them with government lollipops, but they’re not willing to pay the cost of those lollipops. Solution: Kick it down the road, and stick it to the next generation. That’s you.

So government has spent your future. This is the biggest generational transfer of wealth in the history of the world. Look at the way your parents and grandparents live: it’s not going to be like that for you. You’re going to have a smaller house, and a smaller car—if not a basement apartment and a bus ticket. But thanks a bundle, it worked out great for us. We of the Greatest Generation, the Boomers, and Generation X salute you, the plucky members of the Brokest Generation, the Gloomers, and Generation Y, as in “Why the hell did you old coots do this to us?”, which is what you’re going to be asking in a few years’ time.

You’re being lined up for a twenty-first-century America of more government, more regulation, less opportunity, and less prosperity—and you should be mad about it: when you come to take your seat at the American table (to use another phrase politicians are fond of), you’ll find the geezers, the boomers, and the Gen X-ers have all gone to the bathroom, and you’re the only one sitting there when the waiter presents the check. That’s you: Generation Checks.

“You can be anything you want to be!” “Dream your dreams!” You won’t be able to dream your dreams, because you’ll be the gray morning after of us oldtimers’ almighty bender. The American Dream will be as elusive and mythical as 334

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the Greek Dream. Andrew Biggs of the American Enterprise Institute calculated that if the federal government were to increase every single tax by 30 percent it would be enough to balance the books—in 25 years.6 Except that it wouldn’t. Because if you raised taxes by 30 percent, government would spend even more than it already does, on the grounds that the citizenry needed more social programs and entitlements to compensate for their sudden reduction in disposable income.

In the Sixties, the hippies used to say, “Never trust anyone over 30.” Now all the Sixties hippies are in their sixties, and they’ve gone quiet about that, but it’s good advice for you: never trust anyone over 30 with the societal checkbook. You thought you were the idealistic youth of the Obama era, but in fact you’re the designated fall-guys. You weren’t voting for “the future,” but to deny yourself the very possibility of one—like turkeys volunteering to waddle around with an
Audacity of Thanksgiving
bumper sticker on your tush. Instead of swaying glassy-eyed behind President Obama at his campaign rallies singing “We are the hopeychange,” you should be demanding that the government spend less money on smaller agencies with fewer employees on lower salaries. Because if you don’t, there won’t be a future. “You can be anything you want be”—but only if you first tell today’s big spenders that, whatever they want to be, they should try doing it on their own dime.

That’s the most basic truth the young could impose on the old—the immo-rality of spending now and charging it to Junior. Next time Obama tells Joe the Plumber he wants to “spread the wealth around,” it should be pointed out that you can’t spread it until you’ve earned it. “Redistribution” from the future to the present is a crock, and if you happen (like the student body at Dillon High School) to have been assigned to the “future” half of that equation, you the hope of audacity 335

should be merciless in your contempt for the present-tensers who’ve done that to you.

Next to the gaseous abstractions of “hope” and “change” these are cruel, hard truths. But truths is what they are. Big Government makes everything else small, and rolling it back will be difficult. But a few core principles are useful guides:

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de-centraLiZe

To return to Obama’s plea that he is not the king, but only the president: the American colonists overthrew the Crown because they believed the people are sovereign. If that means anything at all, it means that power is leased up from the citizen to town, to county, to state, to the nation, and ever more sparingly at each step along the way. In Canada, by contrast, the Crown is sovereign, and power is leased down through nation, province, and municipality to the subjects. The unceasing centralization of power nullifies the American Revolution. Even surviving local institutions aren’t as local as they used to be. The nearly 120,000 school boards of America in 1940 have been consolidated into a mere 15,000 today, leaving them ever more to the mercies of the professional “educator” class.7 Which is not unconnected to the peeling-paint problem in Dillon, South Carolina.

If this trend is going to be reversed, it will be by states and municipalities both ignoring Washington and, when necessary, defying it. “It is important to recognize the distinction,” said President Reagan in 1987, “between problems of national scope (which may justify Federal action) and problems that are merely common to the States.”8 The former ought to be a very limited category: the best way to save “the United States” is to give it less to do, and the best way to do that is with a Tenth Amendment movement. “Let a hundred flowers bloom!” said Mao, who didn’t mean it. So let fifty bloom—and then even more.

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As we discussed earlier, in a liberal world much of our language decays into metaphor, disconnected from physical reality. A few years ago, a Fleet Street colleague accidentally booked himself into a conference on “building bridges” assuming it would be some multiculti community outreach yak-fest. It turned out to be a panel of engineers discussing bridge construction.

If only more “bridge building” was non-metaphorical: the ability to build real bridges is certainly an attribute of community, and one Americans used to be able to do for themselves.

A friend of mine is a New Hampshire “selectman,” one of those municipal offices Tocqueville found so admirable. In 2003, a state highway inspector rode through town and condemned one of the bridges, on a dirt road that serves maybe a dozen houses.

That’s the bad news. The good news was the 80/20 state/town funding plan, under which, if you applied to Concord for a new bridge, the state would pay 80 percent of the cost, the town 20. So they did. The state estimated the cost at $320,000, so the town’s share would be $64,000. Great. So the town threw up a temporary bridge just down river from the condemned one, and waited for the state to get going. Six years later, the temporary bridge had worn out, and the latest revised estimate was $655,000, so the town’s share would be $131,000.

That’s the bad news. The good news was that, under the “stimulus” bill, they could put in for the 60/40 federal/state bridge funding plan, under which the feds pay 60 percent, and the state pays 40, and thus the town would be on the hook for 20 percent of the 40 percent, if you follow. If they applied for the program now, the bridge might be built by, oh, 2018, 2020, and it’ll only be $1.2 million, or $4 million, or $12 million, or whatever the estimate’ll be by then.

But who knows? By 2018, there might be some 70/30 UN/federal bridge plan, under which the UN pays 70 percent, and the feds pay 30, and thus the town would only be liable for 20 percent of the state’s 40 percent of the feds’ 30 percent. And the estimate for the bridge will be a mere $2.7 billion.

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While the Select Board was pondering this, another bridge was condemned. The state’s estimate was $415,000, and, given that the previous bridge had been on the to-do list for six years, they weren’t ready to pencil this second one in on the schedule just yet. So instead the town put in a new bridge from a local contractor. Cost: $30,000. Don’t worry; it’s all up to code—and a lot safer than the worn-out temporary bridge still waiting for the 80/20/60/40/70/30 deal to kick in. As my friend said at the meeting:

Screw the state. Let’s do it ourselves.

“Screw the state” is not a Tocquevillian formulation, but he would have certainly agreed with the latter sentiment. When something goes wrong, a European demands to know what the government’s going to do about it.

An American does it himself. Or he used to—in the Jacksonian America a farsighted Frenchman understood so well. Big Government is better understood as remote government. If we can’t “do it ourselves” when it comes to painting schoolrooms or building bridges, we should certainly confine it to the least remote level of government.

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de-GoVernmentaLiZe

Much of America is now in need of an equivalent to Mrs. Thatcher’s privatization program in 1980s Britain, or post-Soviet Eastern Europe’s economic liberalization in the early Nineties. It’s hard to close down government bodies, but it should be possible to sell them off. And a side benefit to outsourcing the Bureau of Government Agencies and the Agency of Government Bureaus is that you’d also be privatizing public-sector unions, which are the biggest and most direct assault on freedom, civic integrity, and fiscal solvency.

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de-reGuLate

A couple of years back, I was talking to a stonemason and a roofer who were asked to do a job for a certain large institution in New Hampshire. They were obliged to attend “ladder school,” even though both men have been working at the top of high ladders for over forty years. The gentleman from OSHA (the Occupational Safety and Health Administration) cautioned them against mocking his transparent waste of their time: under the new administration, he explained, his bureaucracy would be adopting a more enforcement-oriented approach to private business. So they rolled their eyes merely metaphorically and accepted the notion that they should give up a working day because the federal government has taken to itself the right to credentialize ladder-climbing from the Great North Woods to Honolulu.

At a certain point, why bother? As fast as you climb the ladder, you’ll be taxed and regulated down the chute back to the bottom rung. You’ll be frantically peddling the treadmill seven days a week so that the statist suc-cubus squatting on your belly as you sleep can sluice the fruits of your labors to untold millions of bureaucrats from the Bureau of Compliance microregulating you till your pips squeak while they enjoy a lifestyle you never will. “The business of America is business,” said Calvin Coolidge. Now the business of America is regulation. It is necessary for once free people to take back responsibility for their own affairs. Ultimately, judge-made law and bureaucrat-made regulations and dancing with the czars strike at the compact between citizen and state. By sidestepping the consent of the governed, as regulators do, or expressing open contempt for it, as judges do, the governing class delegitimizes itself. When government is demanding the right to determine every aspect of your life, those on the receiving end should at least demand back that our betters have the guts to do so by passing laws in legislatures of the people’s representatives. Micro-regulation is micro-tyranny, a slithering, serpentine network of insinuating Ceaucescu and Kim Jong-Il mini-me’s. It’s time for mass rejection of their diktats. A political order that subjects you to the caprices of faceless bureaucrats or crusading the hope of audacity 339

“judges” merits no respect. To counter the Bureau of Compliance, we need an Alliance of Non-Compliance to help once free people roll back the regulatory state.

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de-monopoLiZe

We also need a new trust-busting movement to bust the dominant trust of our time—the Big Government monopoly that monopolizes more and more of life. It is depressing that the government monopoly is now so taken for granted that much of our public discourse simply assumes the virtues of collectivism. For example, it’s often argued that, as a proportion of GDP, America spends more on health care than countries with government medical systems.9 As a point of fact, pre-ObamaCare “America” doesn’t spend anything on health care: hundreds of millions of people make hundreds of millions of individual decisions about what they’re going to spend on health care. Whereas up north a handful of bureaucrats determine what Canada will spend on health care—and that’s that: health care is a government budget item. If Joe Hoser in Moose Jaw wants to increase Canada’s health-care spending by $500 drawn from his savings account, he can’t. The law prevents it. Unless, as many Canadians do, he drives south and spends it in a U.S. hospital for treatment he can’t get in a timely manner in his own country.

While we’re on the subject, why is our higher per capita health spending by definition a bad thing? We spend more per capita on public education than any advanced nation except Luxembourg, and at least the Luxem-bourgers have something to show for it.10 But no one says we need to bring our education spending down closer to the OECD average.
Au contraire
, the same people who say we spend too much on health care are in favor of spending even more on education. You can make the “controlling costs”

argument about anything. After all, it’s no surprise that millions of free people freely choosing how they spend their own money will spend it in 340

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different ways than government bureaucrats would be willing to license on their behalf. America spends more per capita on food than Zimbabwe.

America spends more on vacations than North Korea. America spends more on lap-dancing than Saudi Arabia (well, officially). America spends more per capita on health than Canada, but Canada spends more per capita on doughnuts than America. Yet the Canadian Parliament doesn’t say, well, that shows that we need to control costs so we’ve drawn up a 2,000-page doughnut-reform bill, which would allow children to charge their doughnuts to their parents until they’re twenty-six years old. Ottawa would introduce a National Doughnut Licensing Agency. You’d still see your general dispenser for simple procedures like a lightly sugared cruller, but he’d refer you to a specialist if you needed, say, a maple-frosted custard—