Mark Steyn - After America

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. 58In 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, by 2004, 20 percent of U.S. households were getting about 75 percent of their income from the federal government. 60As 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

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.

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. 64An 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. 65In the year after the passage of Obama’s “stimulus,” the private sector lost 2.5 million jobs, but the federal bureaucracy gained 416,000. 66Even if one accepts the government’s ludicrous concept of “creating or saving” jobs, by its own figures 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 . ” 67

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 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?