Mark Steyn - After America

Never underestimate the totalitarian temptations of the smart set. We’ll hear a lot more of that in the years ahead.

In this chapter, Steyn writes:

“Barack Obama is so smart he had a fake Martin Luther King quote sewn onto the Oval Office carpet…. Barbra Streisand is so smart she sonorously declaimed to a Democratic Party national gala a fake Shakespeare quote she insisted was from Julius Caesar…. Hundreds of leftie websites are so smart that, after the 2011 shootings in Tucson, they all blamed it on Sarah Palin by using the same fake Sinclair Lewis quote from It Can’t Happen Here …. Liberals are so smart they teach a fake book in college ( I, Rigoberta Menchu ).”

So what’s your best “Liberals are so smart they…” line?

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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 of fourteen monthly paychecks per annum. 2You 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 docking 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 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, insatiable boobs in Washington, Sacramento, Albany, and elsewhere are screwing 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, 3the 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. 4Greece, 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?

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.” 5The 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?