Answered
by Victor Davis Hanson in
PJ Media
It
Can’t Happen Here?
What does it take to warn Americans about unchecked pension
growth, socialized medicine, vast increases in entitlements, higher taxes, and
steady expansion of government? In other words, what is it about Detroit, Italy, or Greece that we
do not understand?
In the last five years, the Obama administration has raised taxes
on the top income rates, implemented Obamacare, added millions to the
disability and food stamp roles, grown the size of the federal work force, run
up the national debt, and vastly expanded the money supply, along with insuring
near zero interest rates. Are there any historical examples where these
redistributive efforts have brought long-term tranquility and prosperity?
To put it another way, does anyone ask basic questions about human
nature anymore? If one gives more incentives to obtain government support while
unemployed, why would not fewer people be working? If the food stamp,
unemployment, and disability rolls are markedly up, and if it is almost
impossible to verify that recipients are also not working for unreported cash
wages (we hear mostly of government efforts to add more to these programs,
rather than to audit those already on them), why would one seek a “regular” job
that would lose such subsidies and make all one’s income reportable? (We know
two basic truths about the IRS in the age of Obama: first, it goes after
political opponents in partisan fashion, and second, it gives away billions of
dollars in federal income tax rebate credits to those who did not deserve
them.)
If you allow illegal immigrants to enjoy full government
subsidies, driver’s licenses, in-state tuition discounts, sanctuary cities,
participation on juries, and all without fear of deportation, then why (a)
would people not flock here illegally from Mexico, and (b) why after arriving
would they go through the hassle of seeking citizenship when residency provides
almost all the same benefits?
If Obamacare is structured to ensure health insurance in extremis
without paying a premium upfront, why would anyone buy it — as opposed to
simply purchasing it only after an illness or operation, and paying a small
fine? (Do life insurance companies allow us to purchase $1 million policies
after open heart surgery, and if not, why not?) And if young people often
choose to play the very good odds that they won’t get sick, or at least not
terribly sick, and therefore do not need health insurance until after their
ordeal, how could a plan be predicated on luring millions of young people (a
poorer cohort than either the middle-aged or elderly) to buy something they
would not often need in order to pay for others who would pay less for
something they would constantly need?
The problem with socialism (cf. Detroit to Athens) is not just
that it destroys individual initiative and creates a dispirited and montonous
sameness to everything, but that its
architects usually find exemption from the ramifications of
their own ideology and thereby are more emboldened to implement it.
Unions, pet businesses, and D.C. insiders will all receive waivers
or subsidies to excuse them from the full wrath of Obamacare — and, therefore,
they foist it on others. The Wall Street Journal’s credo of
“comprehensive immigration reform” is predicated on the assumption that none of
the opinion writers live either along the border or in areas that have
experienced huge influxes of illegal immigrants (e.g., their children are not
in the public schools of a Tulare or central Los Angeles. They do not try to
ranch in southern Arizona; they do not drive in rural Tulare County. And they
are not lower middle-class residents of California trying to pay steep taxes
for very little in return).
How did it happen that the United States chose to follow the path
of socialism at precisely the time that it was imploding the world over?
Do Scandals Exist?
Is there still a notion of scandal? If EPA director Lisa
Jackson’s fake email con and the Pigford payouts were small beer, what
were the scandals about Benghazi, the IRS, the AP, and the NSA?
Does anyone care that every presidential pronouncement about the
Affordable Care Act was false? We have reached a new point where either the
media is an appendage of government, or the public is too weary to care about
the conduct of its government — to the degree that this administration could do
pretty much anything.
If running up $6 trillion in debt and disrupting one-sixth of the
U.S. economy with Obamacare are passé, what would not be? Tapping a German
chancellor’s phone? Turning the entire Persian Gulf into an anti-American
enclave? Reducing the president’s word abroad into the stuff of jest?
Arbitrarily deciding not to enforce “settled law”?
Zero Interest and Debt
Can anyone recall in our recent memories a period in which the
Federal Reserve essentially ended real interest rates (almost non-existent
interest that does not match the rate of low inflation)? We understand the
logic behind quantitative easing, given that only with about 2% interest on
federal obligations can the government service the huge $17 trillion debt (our
service costs on the debt are actually less than during the 1990s in
inflation-adjusted dollars when the debt was a third of the present amount). Is
the theory that the deserving poor who are debtors should pay their undeserving
rich creditors very little?
But how does that work out in fact? Debtors are paying high
interest, from 7-8% on many student loans to 15-20% on credit cards —
especially those who cannot take advantage of cheaper mortgage loans. Yet why
save, when passbook accounts pay about 1% or less? Are you to turn to the stock
market with your $1,000 and risk another 2008? Or dabble in real estate and
ditto the same?
Would it be better to have worked 30 years at the DMV and be
receiving a California state pension, or to have owned a small business and
scrimped to have put away $3 million in savings? In terms of monthly income,
perhaps the state pension is preferable.
Cool Non-Liability
In our “sue anyone” America, we are told that companies are
responsible, even indirectly, for the unintended but pernicious effects of
their products. We not only sue tobacco companies for the bad lungs of the
smoker, who on his own free will plays poker with cancer, but also the fast
food outlet whose coffee when spilled burns inattentive buyers. By that
litigious standard, why are there no suits against Apple for its iPhone — an
insidious device far more addictive than opiates, an impairment to driving far
more deleterious than two martinis, and at a monthly cost as disruptive to
household finances as habitual visits to the casino?
In the last week, on five occasions I have dodged two swerving
semi-trucks on State #99, a motorist who made a rolling stop into a pedestrian
walkway and almost hit my bicycle, and two drivers going no more than 40 mph in
the fast left freeway lane. The common denominator? They were all texting on
their phones. According to liberal legal minds, isn’t Silicon Valley guilty of
hawking one of the most dangerous consumer items of the last fifty years?
Uncivil Liberties
How did Barack Obama become the most
anti-civil liberties president in history — to almost complete
silence? Well aside from the fact that Obama embraced, or more often expanded,
all the Bush-Cheney anti-terrorism protocols (e.g., preventative detention,
Guantanamo, renditions, the Patriot Act, etc.), he has droned ten times more
suspects than did Bush.
Do we remember Obama’s own reference to Bush’s occasional use of
bombing and predators in Afghanistan, when he called for more ground troops so
that the U.S. had “enough troops that we’re not just air raiding villages and
killing civilians which is causing enormous problems there”?
When was the last time a president got caught tapping the private
phones of French elites, a German chancellor, or a Brazilian head of state?
When has an Associated Press reporter found his communications monitored? Has
any president since Richard Nixon been accused of politicizing the IRS to go
after supposedly partisan enemies? What might have been the media response had
George Bush monitored the communications of our key allies? Never in recent
U.S. history has a president so impaired the concept of civil liberties — and
to the complete silence of the media that proclaims itself the very champion of
the First Amendment.
In sum, we have become so inured to recent distortions in reality,
that we assume aberration is the new normal — or we are too busy texting to
care.
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