After America

by Mark Steyn

  “Fourteen grand?” I roared to my lawyer. “On principle, I’d rather go to jail and be gang-raped by whichever bunch of convicted Albany legislators I have the misfortune to be sharing a cell with.”

  “I take it then you don’t want to settle?”

  No, sir. I’m proud to be in non-compliance with the Bureau of Compliance. I’ve put it on my business card. Still, I was interested to read this a few days later in the New York Times:Albany—As Gov. David A. Paterson calls lawmakers back to work on the budget this week, he has announced that the fiscal situation is so serious that he must begin laying off state workers. But there is one wrinkle, as officials try to pare government 86

  Oh, my. You’d think that that would also be in non-compliance with the Bureau of Compliance, wouldn’t you? But no, it’s just business as usual. They can audit you, but no one can audit them. You have to comply with them, but they don’t have to comply with them. The Times attempted to get some ballpark figures from the hundreds of state agencies; a few provided employment numbers, but others “seemed unaccustomed to public inquiry,” as the newspaper tactfully put it.

  Why wouldn’t they be? Government accounting is a joke. In one year (2009), Medicare handed out $98 billion in improper or erroneous payments. 87 A tenth of a trillion? Ha! Rounding error. Look for it in the lineitems under “Miscellaneous.” For an accounting fraud of $567 million, Enron’s executives went to jail, and its head guy died there.88 For an accounting fraud ten times that size, the two Democrat hacks who headed Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, Franklin Raines and Jamie Gorelick, walked away with a combined taxpayer-funded payout of $116.4 million. Fannie and Freddie are two of the largest businesses in America, but they’re exempt from SEC disclosure rules and Sarbanes-Oxley “corporate governance” burdens, and so in 2008, unlike Enron, WorldCom, or any of the other reviled private-sector bogeymen, they came close to taking down the entire global economy. What then is the point of the SEC?

  By 2005, the costs of federal regulatory compliance alone (that is, not including state or local red tape) were up to $1.13 trillion—or approaching 10 percent of GDP.89 In much of America, it takes far more paperwork to start a business than to go on welfare. In the words of a headline in the organic free-range hippie-dippy magazine Acres, “Everything I Want to Do Is Illegal.”90

  The most vital element in a dynamic society is the space the citizen has to live life to his fullest potential. Big Government encroaches on this space unceasingly. Under the acronyms uncountable, we have devolved from What’s the Matter with Kansas? gives the game away in its very title. What’s the matter with Kansas is that it declines to vote as the statists would like. It surely cannot be that there is something the matter with the statists, so there must be something the matter with their subjects: they’re too ill-educated, or manipulated by advertisers, or deceived by talk radio, or just plain lazy to understand their own best interests. Therefore, it is our duty, as enlightened progressives, to correct their misunderstanding of themselves and decide on their behalf. In a famous interaction at an early tea party, CNN’s Susan Roesgen interviewed a guy in the crowd and asked why he was here: “Because,” said the Tea Partier, “I hear a president say that he believed in what Lincoln stood for. Lincoln’s primary thing was he believed that people had the right to liberty, and had the right ...”91

  But Miss Roesgen had heard enough: “What does this have to do with your taxes? Do you realize that you’re eligible for a $400 credit?”

  Had the Tea Party animal been as angry as Angry White Men are supposed to be, he’d have said, “Oh, push off, you condescending tick. Taxes are a liberty issue. I don’t want a $400 ‘credit’ for agreeing to live my life in governmentapproved ways.” Had he been of a more literary bent, he might have adapted Sir Thomas More’s line from A Man for All Seasons: “Why, Susan, it profits a man nothing to give his soul for the whole world... but for a $400 tax credit?”

  But Miss Roesgen wasn’t done with her “You may already have won!” commercial: “Did you know,” she sneered, “that the state of Lincoln gets $50 billion out of this stimulus? That’s $50 billion for this state, sir.”

  Golly! Who knew it was that easy? $50 billion! Where did it come from? Did one of those Somali pirate ships find it just off the coast in a half-submerged treasure chest, all in convertible pieces of eight or Zanzibari doubloons? Or is it perhaps the case that that $50 billion has to be raised from the same limited pool of 300 million Americans and their as yet unborn descendants? And, if so, is giving it to the (bankrupt) “state of Lincoln” likely to be of much benefit to the citizens? Government money is not about the money, it’s about the government. It’s about social engineering—a $400 tax

  In Political Economy (1816), Thomas Jefferson wrote that “to take from one because it is thought that his own industry and that of his father’s has acquired too much, in order to spare to others, who, or whose fathers have not exercised equal industry and skill, is to violate arbitrarily the first principle of association—‘the guarantee to every one of a free exercise of his industry and the fruits acquired by it.’” To do so on the scale modern western societies do leads to two obvious problems: First, you can’t erect a system of socioeconomic redistribution as extravagant as Susan Roesgen favors without losing a lot of the money en route. How much money do you have to take from Smith to give a $400 tax credit to Jones? Government isn’t an efficient delivery system; it’s a leach-field pipe with Smith at one end and Jones at the other and holes every couple of inches with thousands of bureaucrats sluicing all the way along. That’s why we’ve wound up with a situation worse than that foreseen by Jefferson. America is not a society comprising two groups—one that has “acquired too much” and one that has “not exercised equal industry and skill”—but a society dominated by a third group, a government bureaucracy that has “acquired too much” and, to add insult to financial injury, is not required to “exercise equal industry.”

  And, when the state is that large, it takes not only the fruits but the fruit pies of your labors.

  AS UNAMERICAN AS APPLE PIE

  On the first Friday of Lent 2009, a state inspector from the Pennsylvania Department of Agriculture raided the fish fry at St. Cecilia’s Catholic

  He swooped. Would these by any chance be homemade pies? Sergeant Joe Pieday wasn’t taking no for an answer. The perps fessed up:

  Josie Reed had made her pumpkin pie.

  Louise Humbert had made her raisin pie.

  Mary Pratte had made her coconut cream pie.

  And Marge Murtha had made her farm apple pie.

  And, by selling their prohibited substances for a dollar a slice, these ladies and their accomplices were committing a criminal act. In the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania, it is illegal for 88-year-old Mary Pratte to bake a pie in her kitchen for sale at a church fundraiser. The inspector declared that the baked goods could not be sold.92

  St. Cecilia’s holds a fish fry every Friday during Lent, and regular church suppers during the rest of the year. That’s a lot of pie to forego. What solutions might there be? The inspector informed the ladies they could continue baking pies at home if each paid a $35 fee for him to come ’round to her home and certify her kitchen as state-compliant. “Well, that’s just ridiculous,” Louise Humbert, seventy-three, told the Wall Street Journal.

  Alternatively, they could bake their pies in the state-inspected kitchen at the church. As anyone who bakes pies, as opposed to regulating them, could tell the inspector, if you attempt to replicate your family recipe in a strange oven, it doesn’t always turn out like it should.

  A local bakery stepped in and donated some pies. But that’s not really the same, is it? Perhaps a more inventive solution is required. In simpler times, Sweeney Todd, purveyor of fine foodstuffs to Mrs. Lovett’s pie shop in Fleet Street, would have been proposing we drop the coconut cream and replace it with state-inspector pie, perhaps with a lattice crust, symbolizing the prison bars he ought to be behind. Problem solved.
Easy as pie, as we used to say.

  Instead, bye bye, Miss American Pie.

  No matter how you slice it, this is tyranny. When I first came to my corner of New Hampshire, one of the small pleasures I took in my new state were the frequent bake sales—the Ladies’ Aid, the nursery school, the church rummage sale. Most of the muffins and cookies were good; some were exceptional; a few went down to sit in the stomach like overloaded barges at the bottom of the Suez Canal. But even then you admired if not the cooking then certainly the civic engagement. In a small but tangible way, a person who submits to a state pie regime is a subject, not a citizen—because participation is the essence of citizenship, and thus barriers to participation crowd out citizenship. A couple of kids with a lemonade stand are learning the rudiments not just of economic self-reliance but of civic identity. So naturally an ever multiplying number of jurisdictions have determined to put an end to such a quintessentially American institution. Seven-year-old Julie Murphy was selling lemonade in Portland, Oregon, when two officers demanded to see her “temporary restaurant license.” Which would have cost her $120. When she failed to produce it, they threatened her with a $500 fine, and also made her cry.93 Perhaps like the officers of Saudi Arabia’s mutaween (the “Commission for the Promotion of Virtue and Prevention of Vices”) the cheerless scolds of Permitstan could be issued with whips and scourges to flay the sinners in the street. When life hands you lemons, make lemonade—and then watch the state enforcers turn it back into sour fruit.

  It is part of a sustained and all but explicit assault on civic participation, intended to leave government with a monopoly not just of power but of social legitimacy. So, while thanking that local bakery in Pennsylvania for their generosity in stepping up to the plate, we should note that, just as gun control is not about guns but control, so pie control is likewise not about pies, but about ever more total control.

  Indeed, we do an injustice to ye medieval tyrants of yore. As Tocqueville wrote: “There was a time in Europe in which the law, as well as the consent of the people, clothed kings with a power almost without limits. But almost never did it happen that they made use of it.”

  True. His Majesty was an absolute tyrant—in theory. But in practice he was in his palace hundreds of miles away. A pantalooned emissary might come prancing into your dooryard once every half-decade and give you a hard time, but for the most part you got on with your life relatively undisturbed. In Tocqueville’s words: “Although the entire government of the empire was concentrated in the hands of the emperor alone, and although he remained, in time of need, the arbiter of all things, the details of social life and of individual existence ordinarily escaped his control.”

  Just so. You were the mean and worthless subject of a cruel and mercurial despot but, even if he wanted to, he lacked the means to micro-regulate your life in every aspect. Yet what would happen, Tocqueville wondered, if administrative capability were to evolve to make it possible “to subject all of his subjects to the details of a uniform set of regulations”?

  That moment has now arrived. Thanks to computer technology, it’s easier than ever to subject the state’s subjects to “a uniform set of regulations.”

  Back in the 1990s, Bill Clinton famously said, “The era of Big Government is over.”94 What we have instead is the era of lots and lots of itsy-bitsy, teensy-weensy morsels of small government that cumulatively add up to something bigger than the Biggest Government of all—a web of micro-tyrannies which, in their overbearing pettiness, ensnare you at every turn.

  Marge Murtha can make an apple pie. What can a regime that criminalizes such a pie make? That’s easy: Big Government makes small citizens.

  Like to mull that thought over a cup o’ joe? Sorry, I’d love to offer you one, but it’s illegal. With its uncanny ability to prioritize, California, land of Golden Statism for unionized bureaucrats, is cracking down on complimentary coffee. From the Ventura County Star:Ty Brann likes the neighborly feel of his local hardware store. The fourth-generation Ventura County resident and small business owner has been going to the B & B Do it Center on Mobile Avenue in Camarillo for many years.... So when he 95

  Dunno why. He lives in California. He surely knows by now everything you enjoy is either illegal or regulated up the wazoo. The Collins family had been putting a coffee pot on the counter for fifteen years, as the previous owners of the store had done, too, and yea, back through all the generations. But in California that’s an illegal act. The permit mullahs told Randy Collins that he needed to install stainless steel sinks with hot and cold water and a prep kitchen to handle the doughnuts. “What some establishments do is hire a mobile food preparation services or in some cases a coffee service,” explained Elizabeth Huff, “Manager of Community Services” (very Orwellian) for the Ventura County Environmental Health Division. “Those establishments have permits and can operate in front of or even inside of the stores.”

  Even inside? Gee, that’s big of you. “Those establishments have permits”? In California, what doesn’t? Commissar Huff added that there are a range of permits of varying costs. No doubt a plain instant coffee permit would be relatively simple, but if you wished to offer a decaf caramel macchiato with complimentary biscotti additional licenses may be required.

  “We’re certainly working with the health department,” said Mr. Collins. “We want to be in compliance with the law.”

  Why?

  When the law says that it’s illegal for a storekeeper to offer his customer a cup of coffee, you should be proud to be in non-compliance. Otherwise, what the hell did you guys bother holding a revolution for? Say what you like about George III, but he didn’t prosecute the Boston Tea Party for unlicensed handling of beverage ingredients in a public place.

  This is the reality of small business in America today. You don’t make the rules, you don’t get to vote for people who make the rules. But you have to work harder, pay more taxes, buy more permits, fill in more paperwork,

  The prohibition of non-state-licensed coffee is a small but palpable loss to civic life—a genuine community service, as opposed to those “Community Services” of which Elizabeth Huff is the state-designated “Manager.” Randy Collins and the other taxpayers of Ventura County pay Commissar Huff’s salary. I would wager that, like most small business owners, the Collins family work hard. They take fewer vacations and receive fewer benefits than Commissar Huff. They will retire later and on a smaller pension. Yet they pay for her. Big Government requires enough of a doughnut to pay for the hole: you take as much dough as you can get away with and toss it into the big gaping nullity of microregulation. And it’s never enough. And eventually you wake up and find your state is all hole and no doughnut.

  BULLS IN A CHINA SHOP

  What do we have to show for the political class’ disruption of every field of endeavor? From education to energy, health care to homeowning, the Conformicrats bungled everything they touched. You can see the impact of the regulatory state in the structural transformation of the American economy. From 1947 to the start of the downturn in 2008, manufacturing declined from 25.6 percent of the economy to 11 percent, while finance, insurance, real estate, and “professional services” grew from 13.9 percent to 33.5 percent.96 Much of that last category is about the paperwork necessary to keep whatever it is you do in compliance with the Bureau of Compliance. Of the remainder, the financial sector ballooned in support of the Age of Credit, and real estate was the one thing you could always rely on—“safe as houses,” right?

  So how are those growth “industries” doing today? A headline from the New York Times: Real Estate’s Gold Rush Seems Gone for Good97

  Which is a problem. For all the novelty junkies twittering about the Internet age and virtual reality, the principal asset of most Americans remains the most basic of all: the bricks and mortar of their rude dwelling. For all the analysts proclaiming society’s transition from manufacturing to the “knowledge economy,” for the majority of Americans the surest way of building wea
lth at the dawn of the twenty-first century involved neither knowing nor making anything: you bought a house, and, simply by doing nothing but eating, sleeping, and watching TV in it, your net worth increased.

  Not anymore. Dean Baker, of the Center for Economic and Policy Research, calculates that it will take two decades to recoup the $6 trillion of housing wealth lost between 2005 and 2010.98 Which means that in real terms it might never be recouped. In the early Seventies, the United States had about 35 million homes with three or more bedrooms, and about 25 million two-parent families with children. By 2005, the number of two-parent households with children was exactly the same, but the number of three-or-more-bedroom homes had doubled to 72 million. As the Baby Boomers began to retire, America had perhaps as much as a 40 percent over-supply of family-sized houses.99 As Mr. Baker puts it, “People shouldn’t look at a home as a way to make money because it won’t.”100

  Oh. So what does that leave?

  The “financial sector”? In the Atlantic Monthly, Simon Johnson pointed out that, from 1973 to 1985, it was responsible for about 16 percent of U.S. corporate profits. By the first decade of the twenty-first century, it was up to 41 percent.101 That’s higher than healthy, but the “financial sector” would never have got anywhere near that size if government didn’t annex so much of your wealth—through everything from income tax to small-business regulation—that it’s become increasingly difficult to improve your lot in life through effort—by working hard, making stuff, selling it. Instead, in order to fund a more comfortable retirement and much else, large numbers of people became “investors”—