After America - Mark Steyn [23]
In 1948 Marshall was worried about steel. But the dominant industrial power of our time is government. And it is because of the government monopoly that “the fortunes of the people” are dependent on “the whim or caprice” (not to mention “the emotional stability”) of a small number of all too like-minded individuals.
You can see where power lies in the very landscape: go to a steel town six decades after Marshall’s warning. The burg’s shot to hell. The handsome Victorian homes on the tree-lined avenues are worn and crumbling, with cracked clapboards and sagging porches, and cheaply partitioned into low-rent apartments. The railroad halts that sent the products of American industry across the nation and around the world are dead, their depots converted into laundromats and pizza joints or, worse, “community centers,” with the track removed and its weed-strewn path redesignated as a “heritage trail.” Where do wealth and power gravitate today? In 2009 Reuters reported:
Washington, D.C., has become the favorite area for wealthy young adults, with the nation’s highest percentage of 25-34 year-olds making more than $100,000 a year.7
You don’t say! Now I wonder why that would be. Of the fifty counties with the biggest percentage of young high earners, sixteen were in the D.C. area. Of the top ten, only two were not near either Washington or a state capital.8 Reuters filed this revealing analysis in its “lifestyle” section. Which makes sense. The easiest way to a “lifestyle” is a government job. The following year, another survey (from Newsweek) found that seven of the ten wealthiest counties in the United States were in the Washington commuter belt.9 What matters in the America of the twenty-first century is proximity not to industry or to wealth creation but to government.
As George Harrison warned, “the government’s monopolizing”: it has a monopoly of law, of licensing, of regulation, and when it abuses that monopoly then eventually you can’t move without encountering government at every turn. Even before the Obama spendaholics got to work supersizing the state, all levels of government, federal to local, were already sucking up over 40 cents of every dollar American workers generate.10 (European nations were able to go beyond even that dismal figure only because the United States has relieved them of the responsibility for their own defense.) The assumed rationale for an ever more intrusive superstate is that, thanks to technology and globalization, the world is far more complex and interconnected than in the days when hardscrabble farmers in New England townships could be trusted to run their own affairs. There is little objective evidence to support this argument, but it conveniently bolsters the political class’s belief in its own indispensability. Willie Whitelaw, the genial old buffer who served as Margaret Thatcher’s deputy for many years, once accused the Labour Party of going around Britain stirring up apathy. Viscount Whitelaw’s apparent paradox is, in fact, a shrewd political insight, and all the sharper for being accidental. Big Government depends on going around the country stirring up apathy—creating the sense that problems are so big, so complex, so intractable that even attempting to think about them for yourself gives you such a splitting headache it’s easier to shrug and accept as given the proposition that only government can deal with them.
Take health care. Through all the interminable health-care “debates” of Obama’s first year, did you read any of the proposed plans? Of course not. They’re huge and turgid and indigestible. Unless you’re a health-care lobbyist, a health-care think-tanker, a health-care correspondent, or some other fellow who’s paid directly or indirectly to plough through this stuff, why bother? None of the senators whose names are on the