After America: Get Ready for Armageddon (50 page)

and it would only be a six-month wait, at the end of which you’d receive a stale cinnamon roll.

During the 2004 election, John Kerry and John Edwards went around telling people there are no jobs out there, even though at the time America had much lower unemployment than Canada, France, Germany, or almost any other developed country. But, catching Senator Edwards on the stump in an old mill town in New Hampshire, I saw what he was getting at. There are no jobs like the jobs your pa had, where you could go to the mill and do the same thing day in, day out for forty-five years, and it made it so much easier for swanky senators come election time because there were large numbers of you losers all in the same place when they flew in for the campaign stop, and the crowd was impressive, whereas now they have to prowl around town ferreting out small two- or three-man start-ups, which takes a lot longer and to be honest never looks so good on the evening news. Watching Senator Edwards pining for the mills, I wondered if he wasn’t having a strange premonition of his own obsoles-cence. The rise of big business was also the rise of Big Government. This isn’t 1934. In an age of small start-ups and home businesses and desktop publishing, we don’t need a one-size-fits-all statist monopoly.

the hope of audacity 341

★ ★ ★ ★ ★

de-compLicate

We have unnecessarily complicated too many areas of human existence.

Complexity justifies even more government intervention, leading to even more impenetrable complexity. After all, if health-care costs are the issue, it isn’t very difficult. As every economist knows, third-party transactions are always more expensive, whether the third party is an insurer or the government. If I go to a movie, I’ve got a general idea of what it ought to cost me.

If I’m expecting to pay ten bucks and the clerk says “That’ll be $273.95,” I would notice. But most of the people in a hospital waiting room have no idea whether the procedure costs $200 or $2,000 or $20,000—and they don’t care: their only concern is whether the third party will grant access to it. I know what a movie ticket costs, I’ve no idea what a broken leg costs. Nor does anybody else—because there are so many third parties interceding themselves between your bone and the doctor that there is no longer a real market price for a broken leg. So if, as Massachusetts has done, you mandate universal third-partyism, your costs by definition will increase. There’s no mystery about it. As a businessman, Mitt Romney should have known that.

Third-party transactions are always inflationary. So let’s return as much of daily life as possible to a two-party system—buyer and seller. You’ll be amazed how affordable it is. Compare cellphone and laptop and portable music system prices with what they were in the Eighties, and then ask yourself how it would have turned out with a government-regulated system of electronic insurance plans.

★ ★ ★ ★ ★

de-credentiaLiZe

The most important place to start correcting America’s structural defects is in the schoolhouse. The Democrats justified ObamaCare on the grounds of “controlling costs.” What about applying the same argument to 342

after america

education? The object should be not to universalize college and therefore defer adulthood even further, but to telescope schooling. Even if one over-looks the malign social engineering, much of what goes on in the American schoolhouse is merely passing the time. In 2011, a study by Richard Arum and Josipa Roksa found that fewer than half of America’s undergraduates had taken a single course in the previous semester that required twenty pages of written work. A third had not taken a single course demanding forty pages of reading. Forty-five percent of students showed no improvement in critical thinking, reasoning, or writing by the end of their sopho-more years.11 Writing, reading, thinking: who needs it? Certainly not the teachers of tomorrow: students majoring in education showed the least gains in learning.

Six-figure universal college education will only reinforce a culture of hermetically sealed complacency. Instead, it should be possible to teach what a worthless high school diploma requires by the age of fourteen. You could then do an extra two years on top of that and give people a
real
certificate of value, unlike today’s piece of paper, to prospective employers.

College should be for those who wish to pursue genuine disciplines, not the desultory salad bar of Women’s “Studies,” Queer “Studies,” or 99 percent of the other “studies.” As a culture, we do too much “studying” (mostly of our navels, if not lower parts) and not enough doing. Vocational education, even for what we now dignify as “professions,” would be much better. So would privatizing education entirely.

★ ★ ★ ★ ★

diS-entitLe

It’s not so extraordinary that on the brink of fiscal catastrophe the Obama Democrats should propose the Ultimate Entitlement—health care.

After all, the Entitlement Utopia is where they reside. What’s more remarkable is that a couple of
years earlier the Bush Republicans should have introduced a brand new entitlement all of their own—prescription drugs.

the hope of audacity 343

Entitlements are the death of responsible government: they offend against every republican precept. Regardless of government revenues or broader economic conditions, they “mandate” spending: they are thus an offense against one of the most basic democratic principles—that a parliament cannot bind its successors. In a sense, they negate the American revolution.

They are taxation without representation—for, as we well know, no matter how the facts on the ground evolve over the decades, entitlements are insulated from both parliamentary oversight and election results. That is why the battle has to be won in the broader culture. Entitlements have to be delegitimized. “Human dignity,” writes Paul Rahe, “is bound up with taking responsibility for conducting one’s own affairs.”12 When the state annexes that responsibility, the citizenry are indeed mere sheep to the government shepherd.

★ ★ ★ ★ ★

de-normaLiZe

You can win this. Statists overreach. They did on “climate change”

scaremongering, and the result is that it’s over. Hollywood buffoons will continue to lecture us from their mega-mansions that we should toss out our washers and beat our clothes dry on the rocks singing native chants down by the river, but only suckers are listening to them.

They overreached fiscally, too. On January 20, 2009, Year Zero of the Democrat utopia, it seemed like a smart move to make “trillion” a routine part of the Washington lexicon. After all, what’s easier to spend than a trillion we don’t have? If most of us cannot conceive of what a “trillion” is in any meaningful sense anyway, how can we conceive of ever having to “repay”

a trillion? There was method in the madness of the Democrats’ baseline inflation. Yet they never quite closed the deal, and now all its many citations do is remind even the most innumerate that the Democrat project is a crock, and the word itself is merely shorthand for “money we don’t have and will never have.” The spendaholics tried to normalize “trillion.” They failed. Let’s 344

after america

keep it de-normalized and, while we’re at it, de-normalize “billion,” too—or, at any rate, “tens of.” Units that are beyond the size of your pocket calculator should not be part of the public discourse.

Nevertheless, both these victories were close-run things. Had it not been for the leaked emails of the East Anglia Climate Research Unit warm-mongers (showing the collusion and corruption of scientific “peer review”) and had it not been for a small band of grossly abused “climate denialists” to leak them to and get the word out, the Copenhagen deal might well have passed. Liberty cannot survive if only a few are eternally vigilant. We need more. We took our eyes off the colleges, and the high schools, and the grade schools, and these and many other institutions were coopted by forces deeply hostile to the American idea. So push back, beginning in kindergarten. Changing the culture (the schools, the churches, the movies, the TV shows) is more important than changing the politics.

An election is one Tuesday every other November. The culture is every day, every month, every year. Politicians are, for the most part, a craven, finger-in-the-windy bunch. Like Milton Friedman says, don’t wait for the right people to get elected; create the conditions whereby the wrong people are forced to do the right thing.

★ ★ ★ ★ ★

do

During Scott Brown’s insurgent election campaign in deep blue Massachusetts, he was joined at one rally by a rare non-Democrat celebrity, John Ratzenberger, who played Cliff Claven on the sitcom
Cheers
. Back in 1969, it turned out, Mr. Ratzenberger had been at Woodstock. No, he wasn’t the bass player with Country Joe and the Fish, assuming they have a bass player.

Rather, he was a working carpenter. And four decades later, stumping for Brown, he offered the all-time greatest comment on those three days of

“peace and love”:

the hope of audacity 345

This isn’t the Democratic party of our fathers and grandfathers.

This is the party of Woodstock hippies. I was at Woodstock—I built the stage. And when everything fell apart, and people were fighting for peanut butter sandwiches, it was the National Guard who came in and saved the same people who were protesting them. So when Hillary Clinton a few years ago wanted to build a Woodstock memorial, I said it should be a statue of a National Guardsman feeding a crying hippie.13

Oh, my. Was Mr. Ratzenberger an officially licensed carpenter? Maybe whoever leaked Joe the Plumber’s files could look into it.

I mentioned earlier that I always advise aspiring writers to not only write but
do
something. I have a particular respect for fellows who are brilliant at one thing but nevertheless like to potter at something else entirely. Frank Loesser was one of the greatest figures in American popular music, a man whose songs include “Heart And Soul,” “Baby, It’s Cold Outside,” and the score for
Guys and Dolls
. That would be enough for most of us. But I remember being very impressed to discover that he was also a prodigious carpenter and cabinetmaker whose home was filled with amazing pieces of his own design and construction. He once got one of those pompous letters from some Hollywood vice-president or other headed “From the Desk of. . . . ” So he went into his shop and spent the weekend crafting a beautiful life-size desk corner complete with inlay and moldings, and put it in the mail with a sheet of paper headed “From the Desk of Frank Loesser.”

On a broader socio-cultural point, people who don’t know where stuff comes from or how it works are more receptive to bigger government. That’s one reason why Canada and much of western Europe, both of which are more urbanized and in which more people live in small apartments, vote leftier than America. In my part of New Hampshire, we have to drill our own wells and supply our own water. Obviously, that’s not feasible on Fifth Avenue, or not without greatly spoiling Central Park. So water becomes just another thing that government takes care of for you.

346

after america

The aforementioned John Ratzenberger isn’t merely an actor. He’s also the founder of the Nuts, Bolts & Thingamajigs Foundation, dedicated to reviving the lost art of tinkering.14 Familiar with the word? Messing about with stuff—taking it apart, figuring out how it worked, putting it together again with some modification of your own. What boys (and a few girls) used to do in the garage or the basement before the Internet was invented. “If we give up tinkering,” says John Derbyshire of
National
Review
, “we
might
survive, but only as a bureaucratic empire of paper-pushers and lotus-eaters.”15 Tinkerers built America. Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Edison, Henry Ford, all were tinkerers in their childhood. Everything from the airplane to the computer started in somebody’s garage.

Go back even further: the Industrial Revolution was a revolution of tinkerers. The great scientific thinkers of eighteenth-century England couldn’t have been less interested in cotton spinning and weaving. Why would you be? It was left to a bloke on the shop floor who happened to glance at a one-thread wheel that had toppled over and noticed that both the wheel and the spindle were still turning. So James Hargreaves invented the spinning jenny, and there followed other artful gins and mules and frames and looms, and Britain and the world were transformed. By tinkerers rather than thinkerers. “Technological change came from tinkerers,”

wrote Professor J. R. McNeill of Georgetown, “people with little to no scientific education but with plenty of hands-on experience.”16 John Ratzenberger likes to paraphrase a Stanford University study: “Engineers who are great in physics and calculus but can’t think in new ways about old objects are doomed to think in old ways about new objects.”17 That’s the lesson of the spinning jenny: an old object fell over and someone looked at it in a new way.

In 2008, America elected a man with no “hands-on experience” of anything who promptly cocooned himself within a circle of advisors with less experience of business, of the private sector, of
doing
than any previous administration in American history. You want “change,” so you vote for a bunch of guys who’ve never done nuthin’ but sit around talking?

the hope of audacity 347

That letter from the post-American world a few pages back was addressed to those Americans of 1950. By the beginning of the new century,

“1950s” had become a pejorative. Conservative pundits are routinely accused of wanting to turn the clock back to the Fifties. Not me. There is, after all, no need to turn the clock back because, fiscally and geopolitically, America’s clock is stuck in the Truman administration. At the U.S. Treasury, the State Department, the Pentagon, it’s forever chiming 1950. At the dawn of the American era, Washington was the last man standing, the victor of the Second World War and with its cities and factories intact, unlike Europe.

It had a unique dominance of the “free world,” and it could afford to be generous, so it was. America had more money than it knew what to do with, so it funded the UN and a dozen subsidiary bodies, and it absolved post-war Europe of paying for its own defense. And, as Germany and Japan and the rest of the West recovered, we continued to pay, garrisoning not remote colonies but some of the richest nations in history. Having forsworn imperialism, we sat back as the UN fell into the hands of our enemies and their appeasers, and still we picked up the check. Western economic ideas were taken up by Asia and Eastern Europe and Brazil and Turkey, and enriched many lands, but we saw ourselves as the unipolar hyperpower, so at Nato and the G7 and everywhere else, each time the bill came and the rest of the gang skipped to the bathroom, we were happy to stick it on our tab. We threw money at our friends (to defend them against hostile powers that had collapsed a generation earlier) and at our enemies (to enable them to use their oil revenues to fund anti-Americanism worldwide) and at dozens of countries in between who were of no geopolitical significance but wouldn’t say no to a massive subsidy for an AIDS prevention program or whatever.