After America - Mark Steyn [6]
The question to ask is: What’s holding the joint up? A second- or thirdtier nation—Iceland, for example—is generally resting on modest assumptions about its resources and economic outlook. There is a deal of it in a nation, but a superpower relies on subtler stocks, like image and credibility. If you’re on a train going uphill and you’re out of fuel, you’ll still move forward—for a bit. By the time you notice you’re slowing down, the coal’s already gone. What comes next? You roll backwards, downhill, fast.
It starts with the money. For dominant powers, it always does—from the Roman Empire to the British Empire. “Declinism” is in the air these days, but we full-time apocalyptics are already well past that stage. In the space of one generation, a nation of savers became the world’s largest debtors, and a nation of makers and doers became a cheap service economy. Everything that can be outsourced has been—manufacturing to by no means friendly nations overseas; and much of what’s left in agriculture and construction to the armies of the “undocumented.” At the lower end, Americans are educated at a higher cost per capita than any nation except Luxembourg in order to do minimal-skill checkout-line jobs about to be rendered obsolete by technology.32 At the upper end, America’s elite goes to school till early middle age in order to be credentialed for pseudoemployment as $350 grand-a-year diversity consultants (Michelle Obama) or in one of the many other make-work schemes deriving from government micro-regulation of virtually every aspect of endeavor.
So we’re not facing “decline.” We’re already in it. What comes next is the “fall”—fast, sudden, off the cliff, if only because the Obama spending binge made what was vague and distant explicit and immediate. America has squandered its supposedly unipolar moment on the world’s most expensive suicide. What is happening to the United States is not “cyclical,” but structural. Like Belshazzar’s Babylon, when you weigh us in the balances, we’re seriously wanting. Under a ruling class comprehensively inept but comfortably insulated, America has been thoroughly unbalanced: thanks largely to distortions driven by government, we have too much college, too much housing, too much financial sector, too much “professional servicing”—accounting, lawyering, and other activities necessary to keep the fine print in compliance with the regulatory state. All of these are huge obstacles to making productive use of even our non-borrowed money and to keeping America competitive with the rest of the world.
Even in its glory days, the Age of Abundance wasn’t exactly a Belshazzaresque party for most folks: since 1973, the wages of 90 percent of Americans have grown by only 10 percent in real terms, and consumption even of cheap Chinese goods was fueled by borrowing.33 But eventually even that mirage fades and you see the writing on the Wal-Mart.
When government spends on the scale Washington’s got used to, that’s not a spending crisis, it’s a moral one. The Irish have a useful word for the times—flaithiúlacht—which translates to ruinous generosity, invariably with someone else’s money. There’s nothing virtuous about “caring” “compassionate” “progressives” demonstrating