After America - Mark Steyn [110]
But, if you’re not on welfare, or working in the welfare office, or working for a “green solutions” business that’s landed the government contract for printing the recycled envelopes in which the welfare checks are mailed out, or the trial lawyers behind the class action suit after the green-friendly recycled latex gloves cause mass Chlamydia outbreaks at Newark, O’Hare, and LAX, it’s not an attractive society to be in. It’s not a place to run a small business—a feed store or a plumbing company or anything innovative, all of which will be taxed and regulated into supporting the state sector. After all, what does it matter to them if your business goes under? Either you’ll join the government workforce, or you’ll go on the dole. So you too will become part of the dependent class, or the class that’s dependent upon the dependent class. Whichever it is, Big Government wins.
We’re told that America’s and the world’s economy depends on “consumption.” Hence, the efforts of the government and the Federal Reserve to stampede recalcitrant consumers back into the malls. But consumption is a manifestation of an economy, not the cause of it. In order for something to be consumed, it first has to be produced—which is why healthy societies make wealth before consuming it. Big Government prefers to “stimulate” the public into consuming because it’s easier than stimulating them into producing. But the latter is what matters.
What happens when you consume without producing? You can see it on any American Main Street, whose very inhabitants would startle a time-traveler from 1890 long before he noticed any of the technological marvels. A time-traveler from 1950 might have a more specific reaction: back in those days, a signature image of sci-fi movies and comic books was the enlarged brain, the lightbulb cranium with which a more evolved humanity would soon be wandering around. Evolvo Lad had one in his tussles with Superboy. So did Superman’s sidekick in a futuristic fantasy called “The Super-Brain of Jimmy Olsen.” “With his super-intelligent brain, Jimmy has me at his mercy!” gasps Superman. But Clark Kent’s gal pal felt differently about her colossal noggin when it showed up in “Lois Lane’s Super-Brain.” “The evolution ray that made me super-intelligent turned me into a freak!” she sobs, clutching her unsightly Edisonian incandescent of a head.
There’s good news and bad news, Lois. As any visitor from the Fifties would soon discover, in a bleak comment on the limits of predictive fiction, our brains didn’t get bigger. But our butts did. If DC Comics had gone with “The Super-Ass of Jimmy Olsen,” they’d have been up there with Nostradamus. “Our culture’s sedentary character—our strong preference for watching over doing, for virtual over real action—seems closely correlated to our changing physical shape,” wrote the Harvard historian Niall Ferguson. “We now consume significantly more fats and carbohydrates than we actually need. According to the standard measure of obesity, the body-mass index, the percentage of Americans classified as obese nearly doubled, from 12 percent to 21 percent, between 1991 and 2001. Nearly two-thirds of all American men are officially considered overweight, and nearly three-quarters of those between 45 and 64. Only Western Samoans and Kuwaitis are fatter.”29 We are our own walking (or waddling) metaphor for consumption unmoored from production.
Dependistan is an unhealthy land. In America, obesity starts earlier and earlier: it’s doubled since 1980.30 According to some surveys, a third of all children over two are obese.31 Libertarians