Mark Steyn - After America

You can’t always be anything you want to be. I wanted to be a great tap-dancer. Instead I’m a mediocre tap-dancer. But that’s my problem. Your problem is that my generation and your teachers’ generation have put a huge obstacle in the way of you being anything you want to be: We’ve spent your future. Generationally speaking, yours truly, the principal, the guidance 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 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. 6Except 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 immorality 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 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:

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. 7Which 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.” 8The 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.

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.