After America - Mark Steyn [35]
But for the productive class, the ongoing government shakedown leads to demoralization and disincentivization. In 2002, 61 percent of Americans believed their children would enjoy higher living standards. By 2009, that was down to 45 percent. This is a hole in America’s soul, and it’s growing bigger every day.61
In the Nineties, the “culture wars” were over “God, guns and gays.” The overreach of the statists has added a fourth G: Government itself is now a front in the culture war, and a battle of the most primal kind. Is the United States a republic of limited government with a presumption in favor of individual liberty? Or is it just like any other western nation in which a permanent political class knows what’s best for its subjects? In California, the people can pass a ballot proposition against gay marriage, but a single activist judge overrules them. In Arizona, the people’s representatives vote to uphold the people’s laws, but a pliant judge strikes them down at Washington’s behest. It is surely only a matter of time before some federal judge finds the Constitution unconstitutional.
Some schlub in Fresno might wonder why a gay judge who seemed a more militant advocate for gay marriage than the plaintiffs were didn’t recuse himself from the case. But that just shows how little they know: it’s the voters of California who should have recused themselves. Their bigotry makes them unqualified to pronounce on the subject. They should be grateful Judge Walker didn’t mandate re-education camp.
It is never a good idea to send the message, as the political class now does consistently, that there are no democratic means by which the people can restrain their rulers. As the (Democrat) pollster Pat Cadell pointed out, the logic of that is “pre- revolutionary.”62
Once you’ve secured the other levers of power, elective politics becomes a kind of sham combat to distract from the real battlegrounds. There are degrees of dissembling: the presidential candidate running as a “fiscally responsible post-partisan healer” provides the cover for an agenda crafted by far more explicitly left-wing legislators, such as Pelosi and Frank. Behind the legislators are the judges, behind the judges the regulatory bureaucracy, and behind the bureaucracy the union muscle: left, lefter, leftest.
FIDDLING WHILE ROME BURNS MONEY
Of all the many marvelous Ronald Reagan lines, this is my favorite:
We are a nation that has a government—not the other way around.63
He said it in his inaugural address in 1981, and, despite a Democratcontrolled Congress, he lived it. It sums up his legacy abroad: across post-Communist Europe, from Slovenia to Bulgaria to Lithuania, governments that had nations were replaced by nations that have governments.
Today, in Reagan’s own country, we are atrophying into a government that has a nation.
In the eighteen months after the collapse of Lehman Brothers in September 2008, over seven million Americans lost their jobs, yet the number of federal bureaucrats earning $100,000 or more went up from 14 percent to 19 percent.64 An economic downturn for you, but not for them. They’re upturn girls living in a downturn world. At the start of the “downturn,” the Department of Transportation had just one employee earning more than $170,000 per year. Eighteen months later, it had 1,690.65 In the year after the passage of Obama’s “stimulus,” the private sector lost 2.5 million jobs, but the federal bureaucracy gained 416,000.66 Even if one accepts the government’s ludicrous concept of “creating or saving” jobs, by its own figures four out of every five “created or saved” jobs were government jobs. “Stimulus” stimulates government, not the economy. It’s part of the remorseless governmentalization of American life.
What sort of jobs were “created or saved”? Well, the United States Bureau of the Public Debt is headquartered in Parkersburg, West Virginia—and it’s hiring! According to the Careers page of their website: “The