After America

by Mark Steyn

  Greece is at the point in the plot where the canoe is about to plunge over the falls. America is upstream and can still pull for shore, but has decided instead that what it needs to do is not just drift along with the general current but paddle as fast as it can to catch up with the Greeks. Chapter One (the introduction of unsustainable entitlements) leads eventually to Chapter Twenty (total societal meltdown); the Greeks are at Chapter Seventeen or Eighteen.

  The problem facing advanced societies isn’t very difficult to figure out: the twentieth-century welfare state has run out of people to stick it to. When you’re spending four trillion dollars but only raising two trillion in revenue (the Democrat model), you’ve no intention of paying it off, and the rest of 3 the problem with Greece and much of Europe is that they’ve advanced to the next stage: they’ve run out of other people, period. All the downturn has done is brought forward by a couple decades the West’s date with demographic destiny.

  The United States has a fertility rate of around 2.1—or just over two kids per couple.4 Greece, as I pointed out in America Alone, has one of the lowest fertility rates on the planet—1.3 children per couple, which places it in the “lowest-low” demographic category from which no society has recovered and, according to the UN, 178th out of 195 countries. In practical terms, it means 100 grandparents have 42 grandkids—in other words, the family tree is upside down.

  Hooray, say the liberal progressives. No more overpopulation!

  Here’s the problem: Greek public sector employees are entitled not only to fourteen monthly paychecks per annum during their “working” lives, but also fourteen monthly retirement checks per annum till death. Who’s going to be around to pay for that?

  So you can’t borrow against the future because, in the crudest sense, you don’t have one. Greeks in the public sector retire at fifty-eight, which sounds great. But, when ten grandparents have four grandchildren, who pays for you to spend the last third of your adult life loafing around?

  Welcome to My Big Fat Greek Funeral.

  We hard-hearted, small-government guys are often damned as selfish types who care nothing for the general welfare. But, as the protests in Greece, France, Britain, and beyond make plain, nothing makes an individual more selfish than the generous collectivism of big government: give a chap government health care, government-paid vacation, government-funded early retirement, and all the other benefits, and the last thing he’ll care about is what it means for society as a whole. People’s sense of entitlement endures long after the entitlement has ceased to make sense. And, if it bankrupts the entire state a generation from now, so what? In his pithiest maxim, John Maynard Keynes, the most influential economist of the twentieth-century social-democratic state and the patron saint of “stimulus,” offered a characteristically offhand dismissal of any obligation to the future: “In the long run we are all dead.”5 The Greeks are Keynesians to a man: the mob is rioting for the right to carry on suspending reality until they’re all dead. After that, who cares?

  You don’t have to go to Greece to experience Greek-style retirement. The Athenian “public service” of California has been metaphorically face down in the ouzo for a generation. As Arnold Schwarzenegger, the terminally terminated Terminator, told the legislature in his fourth State of the State address, “California has the ideas of Athens and the power of Sparta.”6 That’s half-right: California has the ideas of Athens. Unfortunately, it’s late twentieth-century Athens. As for “the power of Sparta,” unless he’s referring to gay marriage, it’s hard to see what he’s on about.

  Greek public servants have their nose to the grindstone 24/7. They work twenty-four hours a week for seven months of the year. It’s not just that every year you receive fourteen monthly payments, but that you only do about thirty weeks’ work for it. For many public-sector “workers,” the work

  In Bell, California, an impoverished dump on the edge of Los Angeles whose citizens have a per capita annual income of $24,800, the city manager was paid $787,637. With benefits, Robert Rizzo’s compensation came to $1.5 million per annum. I use the phrase “per annum” loosely, since among the other gratifying aspects of his “job” was twenty-eight weeks off for vacation and sick leave. So in practical terms it worked out to $1.5 million per five and a half months .7

  What kind of “city management” did Bell get in return for remunerating their city manager so handsomely? By 2008, Mr. Rizzo’s regime had piled up nearly $80 million of debt on its 38,000 residents.8 You do the math: clearly it would be unreasonable to expect Manager Rizzo to—or the bluechip insurers, bondholders, and guarantors (Citigroup, Wedbush Morgan) who continued to facilitate Rizzo’s “city management” in defiance of its arithmetical implausibility.9 U.S. municipal government is the subprime mortgage of big collective borrowing: Citigroup and the other bigshots wouldn’t have dealt with you on this basis, but they took the then reasonable view that even deranged spendthrift government doesn’t default, because there’s always someone it can pass the buck to. To modify Lord Acton, for Bell’s underwriters coziness with power corrupts very cozily.

  Ask not for whom Bell tolls, it tolls for thee. As for murderous civil servants, you don’t have to go to Athens for that. In the New York Christmas snowstorm of 2010, the casualties of the city government’s incompetence went beyond the abandoned hot dog carts and buses and ambulances wedged into the snow banks of midtown Manhattan. A young woman gave birth in the lobby of a Brooklyn apartment house, but the baby died, because, in one of the most densely populated cities on earth, “first responders” were unable to get to her through the unploughed streets of Crown Heights until ten hours after her 911 call.10 In Queens, Yvonne Freeman, seventy-five, woke up with breathing difficulties, but she too died because the ambulance took 11 As the can’t-do buffoon mayor floundered from one disastrous press conference to another, it emerged that the city might have been afflicted not merely by the weather but by something close to the municipal equivalent of treason. A councilman claimed that, when the storm began, Sanitation Department bosses instructed their plough drivers to delay snow clearance in New York’s outer boroughs in order to protest some planned (and fairly desultory) budget cuts.12 The streets of Crown Heights weren’t unploughed because they were meteorologically stricken but as a conscious act of sabotage by public “servants.” That would make Mrs. Freeman, the Brooklyn baby, and others, victims of unionized manslaughter. As their Athenian comrades did, the public servants of New York prevented emergency crews from reaching those in peril, with fatal consequences. On the other hand, they did manage to clear the snow from outside the Staten Island home of Sanitation Department head honcho John Doherty, while leaving all surrounding streets pristinely clogged.13

  Public-sector shakedown states are always unsustainable, but, though easy to launch, they’re hard to reel back. In 2010 the media reported the largest demonstration in a quarter-century had taken to the streets outside the Capitol in Springfield, Illinois, to demand, “Raise my taxes!”14 If you caught it with half an ear on the radio news, the gist seemed to be that these people were responsible and communitarian.

  “Yes, people are hurting. That’s why we need a tax increase,” insisted Henry Bayer.

  Who’s he? Well, he’s executive director of Council 31 of the American Federation of State, County, and Municipal Employees. Ah, right. So it’s not butchers, bakers, and candlestick makers chanting, “Raise my taxes!” It’s government workers.

  Who live off taxes.

  Taxes pay their salaries, benefits, and pensions. Government levies taxes on you and gives it to them. So Mr. Bayer and his chums might as well be yelling, “Gimme your money!” It’s no more communitarian than me standing in the street chanting, “Buy my book!”

  Big unions fund Big Government. The union slices off 2 percent of the workers’ pay and sluices it to the Democratic party, which uses it to grow government, which also grows unions, which thereby grows the number of 2 percent contributions, which thereby grows the Democratic
party, which thereby grows government.... Repeat until bankruptcy. Or bailout.

  The “Raise my taxes!” protest was a subtler version of the Athenian riots—or a Trojan horse full of unionized Greeks. If the new class war is between “public servants” and the rest of us, some countries no longer have enough of “the rest of us” even to put up a fight. When the “public service” becomes as dominant as Greece’s, it is the market: you can’t cut back public spending without moving toward economic crisis and social catastrophe. The bloated public service leached so much out of the Greek economy that the European Union decided that the least worst response was to allow them to do the same to the broader EU economy—just as the debauched public sector of California is pinning its hopes on federal largesse.

  Greece is a great civilization, or it was. Now it’s a basket case. They set up a caring, compassionate, progressive society, and it’s bankrupted them. In Greece, a female working in a “hazardous” job can retire with a full government pension at fifty. Initially, “hazardous” meant jobs like bomb disposal and mining. Ever fancied a career in bomb disposal? No? Don’t blame you, it’s kinda hazardous.

  But, as is the way of government entitlements, the “hazardous” category growed like Topsy. Five hundred and eighty professions now qualify as “hazardous,” among them hairdressing.15 “I use a hundred different chemicals every day—dyes, ammonia, you name it,” 28-year-old Vasia Veremi told the New York Times. “You think there’s no risk in that?” Not to mention all those scissors.

  Like hairdressers, Greek TV and radio hosts can also retire at fifty—because of their high level of exposure to “microphone bacteria.”16 Were you inspired to buy this book by seeing me yakking into a mike about it up on the podium at a stop on the publicity tour? Well, that very microphone counts as a hazardous work environment in Greece. What a class action we

  It all sounds great. Who wouldn’t want to be a Greek hairdresser? Alas, being a Greek, period, is now a hazardous profession. An Obamafied America, following California down the Athenian path, is Greecing its own skids.

  The EU is now throwing an extra trillion dollars at countries which by any objective measure are insolvent, and are unlikely ever again to be anything but—at least this side of bloody revolution. How do you grow your economy in an ever shrinking market? Greece is a land of ever fewer customers and fewer workers but ever more retirees and more government. How do you increase GDP? By export? To where? You’re entirely uncompetitive; you can’t make anything at a price any foreigner would be prepared to pay for it.

  When you binge-spend at the Greek level in a democratic state, there aren’t many easy roads back. The government introduced an austerity package to rein in spending.17 In response, Greek tax collectors walked off the job. Read that again slowly: to protest government cuts, striking tax collectors refuse to collect taxes. In a sane world, this would be an hilarious TV comedy sketch. But most of the western world is no longer sane. It’s tough enough to persuade the town drunk to sober up, but when everyone’s face down in the moonshine, maybe it’s best just to head for the hills—if you can find anywhere to flee.

  Let us take it as read that Greece is an outlier. As waggish officials in Brussels and Strasbourg will tell you, it only snuck into the EU due to some sort of clerical error. It’s a cesspit of sloth and corruption even by Mediterranean standards. If you were going to cut one “advanced” social democracy loose and watch it plunge into the abyss pour encourager les autres, it would be hard to devise a better candidate than Greece. And yet and yet . . . riotwracked Athens isn’t that much of an outlier. Greece’s 2010 budget deficit 18 Ireland’s was 14.7.19 Greece’s debt was 125 percent of GDP;20 Italy’s 117 percent. Greece’s 65-plus population will increase from 18 percent in 2005 to 25 percent in 2030;21 Spain’s will increase from 17 percent to 25 percent.

  Some of the oldest nations in the world are now in the situation of a homeowner who’s fallen too far behind on the payments and has no prospect of catching up: you might as well just put the door keys in an envelope, shove ’em under the door of the bank, and move on—perhaps to an uninhabited atoll in the South Pacific as yet unspoilt by unsustainable levels of government. At some point, the least worst option becomes armed revolution, civil war, or at least an electro-magnetic pulse attack that conveniently obliterates every single bank account and wipes the slate clean. As lazy, feckless, squalid, corrupt, and vicious as Greece undoubtedly is, it’s not that untypical. It’s where the rest of Europe’s headed—and Japan and North America shortly thereafter.

  THE GREEK BONE CONNECTED TO THE KRAUT BONE

  Greece is broke, and has run out of Greeks. So it’s getting bailed out by Germany. But Germany also has deathbed demographics: as Angela Merkel, the Chancellor, pointed out in 2009, for Germany an Obama-sized stimulus was out of the question simply because its foreign creditors know there are not enough young Germans around ever to repay it.22 Germany has the highest proportion of childless women in Europe: one in three fräulein have checked out of the motherhood business entirely.23

  Absolved from having to pay for their own defense, Continentals beat their swords into welfare checks, and erected huge cradle-to-grave entitlements. Even under the U.S. security umbrella, they proved unsustainable. Why? Well, like Keynes said, in the long run we are all dead—so why not bilk the future? We won’t be here, and our creditors won’t have a forwarding

  And these days Germany has to support a continent. It’s the economic powerhouse that’s supposed to be rescuing the euro and preventing the five soi-disant PIIGS (Portugal, Italy, Ireland, Greece, Spain) from having the Big Bad Wolf of reality blow their house of straw to smithereens. But what happens when your engine room is rusting? “Germany’s workingage population is likely to decrease 30 percent over the next few decades,” says Steffen Kröhnert of the Berlin Institute for Population Development. “Rural areas will see a massive population decline and some villages will simply disappear—Germany will become a weak economic power in the future.”24

  The EU committed (to borrow from Philip K. Dick) a kind of precrime: it mugged the next generation. For the moment, the victims are still walking around, mostly unaware of what they’re in for. For many of them, life is good. Take Marina Casagrande of Bergamo.25 In Italy, a court ordered her father to pay Marina an allowance of 350 euros—approximately $525—every month. Signor Casagrande was then sixty. His daughter was thirtytwo. She was supposed to have graduated with a degree in philosophy eight years earlier but, though her classes ended way back at the beginning of the century, she was still working on her thesis. So Signor Casagrande is obliged to pay up, either in perpetuity or until the completion of Marina’s thesis, whichever comes sooner. Her thesis is about the Holy Grail. Which Marina would have little use for, given that she’s already found a source of miraculous life-transforming powers in Papa’s checkbook.

  Marina is what they call a “bambocciona,” which translates, roughly, as “big baby”—the term for the ever-growing number of Italian adults still living at home, in the same bedroom they’ve slept in since they were in diapers. There was, as usual, a momentary spasm of ineffectual outrage over the judge’s decision against Signor Casagrande, whose very name is mocked by this demographic trend: the casa would seem much more grande if only Junior would move out. But in Italy they rarely do: seven out of ten adults 26 Sixtysomething Italians ordered to pay “child support” to thirtysomething kids might consider moving back in with their nonagenarian parents and suing for a monthly allowance backdated to the early Seventies.

  Italy’s bamboccioni have their equivalents around the world. In Japan, they’re called parasaito shinguru—or “parasite singles,” after the horror film Parasite Eve, in which alien spawn grow in human bellies feeding off the host. In Germany, they’re Nesthockers with no plans to move out of “Hotel Mama.” In Britain, they’re KIPPERS (Kids In Parents’ Pockets Eroding Retirement Savings). In Canada, by 2006, 31 percent of men aged 25 to 29 were still sleeping in t
heir childhood bedroom each night.27

  The economics of demographics used to be relatively simple: in a traditional agricultural society, by the time you got too worn and stooped for clearing and plowing, you hoped to have sired able-bodied 13-year-olds to do it for you. Today, most developed nations have managed to defer adulthood and thus to disincentivize parenthood—quite dramatically so, if the judgment against Signor Casagrande holds. Why blame his daughter? No matter how long you stay in school in Italy, there’s nothing waiting for you when you come out. Francesca Esposito was twenty-nine, spoke five languages, had two degrees, and could land no job other than an unpaid traineeship with a government agency facilitating millions of euros’ worth of false disability claims.28 “I have every possible certificate,” she told the New York Times, which, in its poignant profile of Italy’s young, never seemed to consider whether such expensively acquired “certification” is necessary for a government job—or most others. Young(ish) Francesca had a law degree from Italy, a master’s from Germany, and had interned in Luxembourg at the European Court of Justice. A century ago, this leisurely, indulgent saunter through a tri-national varsity would have been the province of bored aristocratic scions with no interest in politics or soldiery, but somehow Europe got the idea to universalize it. Miss Esposito’s father is a fireman, her mother a high school teacher. She is the first in her family to learn a foreign language and graduate from college.