Mark Steyn - After America

You fundamentally change the relationship between the citizen and the state into something closer to that of junkie and pusher—and you make it very difficult ever to change back. In the end, it’s not about money, but about something more fundamental. Yes, you can tax people to the hilt and give them “free” health care and “free” homes and “free” food. But in doing so you turn them into, if not (yet) slaves, then pets. And that’s the nub of it: Big Government leads to small liberty, and to small men. If a 26-year-old is a child, as President Obama says; if a 50-year-old hairdresser can retire and live at the state’s expense for over half her adult life, as the Government of Greece says, then you are no longer free. “You can be anything you want to be”? Not at all. Not when you’re owned by the government.

Freedom is messy. In free societies, people will fall through the cracks—drink too much, eat too much, buy unaffordable homes, fail to make prudent provision for health care, and much else. But the price of being relieved of all those tiresome choices by a benign paternal government is far too high. Big Government is the small option: it’s the guarantee of smaller freedom, smaller homes, smaller cars, smaller opportunities, smaller lives.

I’m an immigrant to this great land. For fellows like me, this is where the bus terminates. There’s nowhere else to go. Everywhere else tried this, and it’s killed them. There’s nothing new about Obama-era “hope” and “change.” For some of us, it’s the land where we grew up: government hospitals, government automobiles, been there, done that. This isn’t a bright new future, it’s a straight-to-video disco-zombie sequel: the creature rises from the grave to stagger around in rotting bell-bottoms and cheesecloth shirt terrorizing a new generation. Burn, baby, burn, it’s a Seventies-statist disco-era inferno!

When I first moved to New Hampshire, where “Live free or die” appears on our license plates, I carelessly assumed General Stark had said it before some battle or other—a bit of red meat to rally the boys for the charge; a touch of the old Henry V-at-Agincourt routine. But I soon discovered that the Granite State’s great Revolutionary War hero had made his cri de coeur decades after the cessation of hostilities, in a letter regretting that he would be unable to attend a dinner. And in a way I found that even more impressive. In extreme circumstances, many people can rouse themselves to rediscover the primal impulses: the brave men on Flight 93 did. They took off on what they thought was a routine business trip, and, when they realized it wasn’t, they went into General Stark mode and cried, “Let’s roll!”

But it’s harder to maintain the “Live free or die!” spirit when you’re facing not an immediate crisis but just a slow, unceasing ratchet effect. Which is, in stable societies unthreatened by revolution or war within their borders, how liberty falls, traded away to the state incrementally, painlessly, all but imperceptibly. “Live free or die!” sounds like a battle cry: we’ll win this thing or die trying, die an honorable death. But in fact it’s something far less dramatic. It’s a bald statement of the reality of our lives in the prosperous West. You can live as free men, but, if you choose not to, your society will surely die.

So, if you don’t want to die, you need to force the statists either out of office or into dramatic course correction. For a start, if a candidate is not publicly committed to fewer government programs from fewer government agencies enforcing fewer government regulations with fewer government bureaucrats on less lavish taxpayer-funded pay, he’s not serious. He’s not only killing your grandchildren’s and children’s future, he’s killing yours—and you will live to see it. It will be hard enough to apply pressure on America’s bureaucracy-for-life once he’s elected, but if he’s not prepared to argue for smaller government en route to office he’s certainly not going to do so afterwards. This applies to all levels of government: not just federal but state, county, town, and school district. Follow Friedman’s rule: make the wrong people do the right thing. Forcing candidates to make no-tax pledges has had some success, not least in my own state. Let’s try some spending pledges, and regulation pledges.

Americans face a choice: you can rediscover the animating principles of the American idea—of limited government, a self-reliant citizenry, and the opportunities to exploit your talents to the fullest—or you can join most of the rest of the western world in terminal decline. To rekindle the spark of liberty once it dies is very difficult. The inertia, the ennui, the fatalism is even more pathetic than the demographic decline and fiscal profligacy of the social democratic state, and, because it’s subtler and less tangible, even harder to rally against.

And a final word to “the children”: do you want to get suckered like your big brothers and sisters? Those saps who spent 2008 standing behind the Obamessiah swaying and chanting, “We are the dawning of the Hopeychange” like brainwashed cult extras? Sooner or later you guys have to crawl out from under the social engineering and rediscover the contrarian spirit for which youth was once known. If you’re a First Grader reading this by flashlight under the pillow, don’t wait till Middle School to start pushing back on this junk. This will be the great battle of the next generation—to reclaim your birthright from those who spent it. If you don’t, the entire global order will teeter and fall. But, if you do, you will have won a great victory. Every time a politician proposes new spending, tell him he’s already spent your money, get his hand out of your pocket. Every time a politician says you can stay a child until your twenty-seventh birthday, tell him, “No, you’re the big baby, not me—you’ve spent irresponsibly, and me and my pals are the ones who are gonna have to be the adults and clean up your mess. Don’t treat me like a kid when your immaturity got us into this hole.” This is a battle for the American idea, and it’s an epic one, but—to reprise the lamest of lame-o lines—you can do anything you want to do.

So do it.

I would like to thank Marji Ross, Harry Crocker, Kathleen Sweetapple, and their colleagues at Regnery for their encouragement and advice.

As always, I’m indebted to readers in America, Britain, Canada, Australia, Europe, Asia, and beyond for filling my in-box with sharp insights and pertinent anecdotes every morning. And I would be entirely adrift were it not for my trusty sidekicks Tiffany Cole, Chantal Benoît, and Katherine Ernst and their dogged research and expertly compressed statistical summaries. They could be taking it easy in a cushy government union job, so I’m grateful to them for laboring down the Steyn salt mines instead.

1. Town hall meeting in Greeley, Colorado, August 21, 2010; available online at http://www.greeleygazette.com/press/?p=5029.

2. Terrence P. Jeffrey, “111th Congress Added More Debt Than First 100 Congresses Combined: $10,429 Per Person in U.S.,” CNSNews.com, December 27, 2010; available online at http://www.cnsnews.com/news/article/111th-congress-added-more-debt-first-100.

3. Herbert Stein, “Herb Stein’s Unfamiliar Quotations,” Slate.com, May 16, 1997; available online at http://www.slate.com/id/2561/.

4. Herbert Stein, “Herb Stein’s Unfamiliar Quotations,” Slate.com, May 16, 1997; available online at http://www.slate.com/id/2561/.