by Mark Steyn
For the moment that remains a purely hypothetical thought. On the other hand, the first major item of congressional business after the Democrats’ midterm shellacking in 2010 was to pass a “Food Safety” Act, among whose items was federal regulation of schoolhouse bake sales.5 If the students of Dillon ever rouse themselves to do something about their peeling paint and train-rattled windows by selling blueberry pies and cranberry muffins, they can at least do so knowing their baked goods are now under the supervision of the Imperial Court in Washington.
IT’S NOT HOW YOU QUIT, IT’S WHERE YOU START
“I think of Ty’Sheoma Bethea,” said Barack Obama. I think I think of her rather more than he does these days, and I wonder how two generations of American students came to think like this at all.
I doubt I’ll be invited to give the commencement address in Dillon any time soon. Even at the best of times, “upbeat and inspirational” isn’t really my bag. I went to one of those old-school English boys’ institutions where instead of prioritizing “self-esteem” the object was to lower it to imperceptible levels by the end of the first week. Still, I’ve spoken at enough American schools to know that you’re supposed to jolly ’em along with something uplifting like “You can be anything you want to be.” Here’s the problem, and here’s what I would tell the student body of Dillon in the unlikely event they book me for a motivational speech:You can’t always be anything you want to be. I wanted to be a great tap-dancer. Instead I’m a mediocre tap-dancer. But that’s my problem. Your problem is that my generation and your teachers’ generation have put a huge obstacle in the way of you being anything you want to be: We’ve spent your future. Generationally speaking, yours truly, the principal, the guidance
“It’s about the future of all our children.” And the future of all our children is that you’ll be paying off the past of all your grandparents. In the assisted-suicide phase of western democracy, voters are seduced by politicians who bribe them with government lollipops, but they’re not willing to pay the cost of those lollipops. Solution: Kick it down the road, and stick it to the next generation. That’s you.
So government has spent your future. This is the biggest generational transfer of wealth in the history of the world. Look at the way your parents and grandparents live: it’s not going to be like that for you. You’re going to have a smaller house, and a smaller car—if not a basement apartment and a bus ticket. But thanks a bundle, it worked out great for us. We of the Greatest Generation, the Boomers, and Generation X salute you, the plucky members of the Brokest Generation, the Gloomers, and Generation Y, as in “Why the hell did you old coots do this to us?”, which is what you’re going to be asking in a few years’ time. You’re being lined up for a twenty-first-century America of more government, more regulation, less opportunity, and less prosperity—and you should be mad about it: when you come to take your seat at the American table (to use another phrase politicians are fond of), you’ll find the geezers, the boomers, and the Gen X-ers have all gone to the bathroom, and you’re the only one sitting there when the waiter presents the check. That’s you: Generation Checks.
“You can be anything you want to be!” “Dream your dreams!” You won’t be able to dream your dreams, because you’ll be the gray morning after of us oldtimers’ almighty bender. The American Dream will be as elusive and mythical as 6 Except that it wouldn’t. Because if you raised taxes by 30 percent, government would spend even more than it already does, on the grounds that the citizenry needed more social programs and entitlements to compensate for their sudden reduction in disposable income.
In the Sixties, the hippies used to say, “Never trust anyone over 30.” Now all the Sixties hippies are in their sixties, and they’ve gone quiet about that, but it’s good advice for you: never trust anyone over 30 with the societal checkbook. You thought you were the idealistic youth of the Obama era, but in fact you’re the designated fall-guys. You weren’t voting for “the future,” but to deny yourself the very possibility of one—like turkeys volunteering to waddle around with an Audacity of Thanksgiving bumper sticker on your tush. Instead of swaying glassy-eyed behind President Obama at his campaign rallies singing “We are the hopeychange,” you should be demanding that the government spend less money on smaller agencies with fewer employees on lower salaries. Because if you don’t, there won’t be a future. “You can be anything you want be”—but only if you first tell today’s big spenders that, whatever they want to be, they should try doing it on their own dime.
That’s the most basic truth the young could impose on the old—the immorality of spending now and charging it to Junior. Next time Obama tells Joe the Plumber he wants to “spread the wealth around,” it should be pointed out that you can’t spread it until you’ve earned it. “Redistribution” from the future to the present is a crock, and if you happen (like the student body at Dillon High School) to have been assigned to the “future” half of that equation, you
Next to the gaseous abstractions of “hope” and “change” these are cruel, hard truths. But truths is what they are. Big Government makes everything else small, and rolling it back will be difficult. But a few core principles are useful guides:
DE-CENTRALIZE
To return to Obama’s plea that he is not the king, but only the president: the American colonists overthrew the Crown because they believed the people are sovereign. If that means anything at all, it means that power is leased up from the citizen to town, to county, to state, to the nation, and ever more sparingly at each step along the way. In Canada, by contrast, the Crown is sovereign, and power is leased down through nation, province, and municipality to the subjects. The unceasing centralization of power nullifies the American Revolution. Even surviving local institutions aren’t as local as they used to be. The nearly 120,000 school boards of America in 1940 have been consolidated into a mere 15,000 today, leaving them ever more to the mercies of the professional “educator” class.7 Which is not unconnected to the peeling-paint problem in Dillon, South Carolina.
If this trend is going to be reversed, it will be by states and municipalities both ignoring Washington and, when necessary, defying it. “It is important to recognize the distinction,” said President Reagan in 1987, “between problems of national scope (which may justify Federal action) and problems that are merely common to the States.”8 The former ought to be a very limited category: the best way to save “the United States” is to give it less to do, and the best way to do that is with a Tenth Amendment movement. “Let a hundred flowers bloom!” said Mao, who didn’t mean it. So let fifty bloom—and then even more.
As we discussed earlier, in a liberal world much of our language decays into metaphor, disconnected from physical reality. A few years ago, a Fleet Street colleague accidentally booked himself into a conference on “building bridges” assuming it would be some multiculti community outreach yakfest. It turned out to be a panel of engineers discussing bridge construction. If only more “bridge building” was non-metaphorical: the ability to build real bridges is certainly an attribute of community, and one Americans used to be able to do for themselves.
A friend of mine is a New Hampshire “selectman,” one of those municipal offices Tocqueville found so admirable. In 2003, a state highway inspector rode through town and condemned one of the bridges, on a dirt road that serves maybe a dozen houses.
That’s the bad news. The good news was the 80/20 state/town funding plan, under which, if you applied to Concord for a new bridge, the state would pay 80 percent of the cost, the town 20. So they did. The state estimated the cost at $320,000, so the town’s share would be $64,000. Great. So the town threw up a temporary bridge just down river from the condemned one, and waited for the state to get going. Six years later, the temporary bridge had worn out, and the latest revised estimate was $655,000, so the town’s share would be $131,000.
That’s the bad news. The good news was that, under the “stimulus” bill, they could put in for the 60/40 federal/s
tate bridge funding plan, under which the feds pay 60 percent, and the state pays 40, and thus the town would be on the hook for 20 percent of the 40 percent, if you follow. If they applied for the program now, the bridge might be built by, oh, 2018, 2020, and it’ll only be $1.2 million, or $4 million, or $12 million, or whatever the estimate’ll be by then.
But who knows? By 2018, there might be some 70/30 UN/federal bridge plan, under which the UN pays 70 percent, and the feds pay 30, and thus the town would only be liable for 20 percent of the state’s 40 percent of the feds’ 30 percent. And the estimate for the bridge will be a mere $2.7 billion.
While the Select Board was pondering this, another bridge was condemned. The state’s estimate was $415,000, and, given that the previous bridge had been on the to-do list for six years, they weren’t ready to pencil this second one in on the schedule just yet. So instead the town put in a new bridge from a local contractor. Cost: $30,000. Don’t worry; it’s all up to code—and a lot safer than the worn-out temporary bridge still waiting for the 80/20/60/40/70/30 deal to kick in. As my friend said at the meeting:Screw the state. Let’s do it ourselves.
“Screw the state” is not a Tocquevillian formulation, but he would have certainly agreed with the latter sentiment. When something goes wrong, a European demands to know what the government’s going to do about it. An American does it himself. Or he used to—in the Jacksonian America a farsighted Frenchman understood so well. Big Government is better understood as remote government. If we can’t “do it ourselves” when it comes to painting schoolrooms or building bridges, we should certainly confine it to the least remote level of government.
DE-GOVERNMENTALIZE
Much of America is now in need of an equivalent to Mrs. Thatcher’s privatization program in 1980s Britain, or post-Soviet Eastern Europe’s economic liberalization in the early Nineties. It’s hard to close down government bodies, but it should be possible to sell them off. And a side benefit to outsourcing the Bureau of Government Agencies and the Agency of Government Bureaus is that you’d also be privatizing public-sector unions, which are the biggest and most direct assault on freedom, civic integrity, and fiscal solvency.
DE-REGULATE
A couple of years back, I was talking to a stonemason and a roofer who were asked to do a job for a certain large institution in New Hampshire. They were obliged to attend “ladder school,” even though both men have been working at the top of high ladders for over forty years. The gentleman from OSHA (the Occupational Safety and Health Administration) cautioned them against mocking his transparent waste of their time: under the new administration, he explained, his bureaucracy would be adopting a more enforcement-oriented approach to private business. So they rolled their eyes merely metaphorically and accepted the notion that they should give up a working day because the federal government has taken to itself the right to credentialize ladder-climbing from the Great North Woods to Honolulu.
At a certain point, why bother? As fast as you climb the ladder, you’ll be taxed and regulated down the chute back to the bottom rung. You’ll be frantically peddling the treadmill seven days a week so that the statist succubus squatting on your belly as you sleep can sluice the fruits of your labors to untold millions of bureaucrats from the Bureau of Compliance microregulating you till your pips squeak while they enjoy a lifestyle you never will. “The business of America is business,” said Calvin Coolidge. Now the business of America is regulation. It is necessary for once free people to take back responsibility for their own affairs. Ultimately, judge-made law and bureaucrat-made regulations and dancing with the czars strike at the compact between citizen and state. By sidestepping the consent of the governed, as regulators do, or expressing open contempt for it, as judges do, the governing class delegitimizes itself. When government is demanding the right to determine every aspect of your life, those on the receiving end should at least demand back that our betters have the guts to do so by passing laws in legislatures of the people’s representatives. Micro-regulation is microtyranny, a slithering, serpentine network of insinuating Ceaucescu and Kim Jong-Il mini-me’s. It’s time for mass rejection of their diktats. A political order that subjects you to the caprices of faceless bureaucrats or crusading
DE-MONOPOLIZE
We also need a new trust-busting movement to bust the dominant trust of our time—the Big Government monopoly that monopolizes more and more of life. It is depressing that the government monopoly is now so taken for granted that much of our public discourse simply assumes the virtues of collectivism. For example, it’s often argued that, as a proportion of GDP, America spends more on health care than countries with government medical systems.9 As a point of fact, pre-ObamaCare “America” doesn’t spend anything on health care: hundreds of millions of people make hundreds of millions of individual decisions about what they’re going to spend on health care. Whereas up north a handful of bureaucrats determine what Canada will spend on health care—and that’s that: health care is a government budget item. If Joe Hoser in Moose Jaw wants to increase Canada’s health-care spending by $500 drawn from his savings account, he can’t. The law prevents it. Unless, as many Canadians do, he drives south and spends it in a U.S. hospital for treatment he can’t get in a timely manner in his own country.
While we’re on the subject, why is our higher per capita health spending by definition a bad thing? We spend more per capita on public education than any advanced nation except Luxembourg, and at least the Luxembourgers have something to show for it.10 But no one says we need to bring our education spending down closer to the OECD average. Au contraire, the same people who say we spend too much on health care are in favor of spending even more on education. You can make the “controlling costs” argument about anything. After all, it’s no surprise that millions of free people freely choosing how they spend their own money will spend it in
During the 2004 election, John Kerry and John Edwards went around telling people there are no jobs out there, even though at the time America had much lower unemployment than Canada, France, Germany, or almost any other developed country. But, catching Senator Edwards on the stump in an old mill town in New Hampshire, I saw what he was getting at. There are no jobs like the jobs your pa had, where you could go to the mill and do the same thing day in, day out for forty-five years, and it made it so much easier for swanky senators come election time because there were large numbers of you losers all in the same place when they flew in for the campaign stop, and the crowd was impressive, whereas now they have to prowl around town ferreting out small two- or three-man start-ups, which takes a lot longer and to be honest never looks so good on the evening news. Watching Senator Edwards pining for the mills, I wondered if he wasn’t having a strange premonition of his own obsolescence. The rise of big business was also the rise of Big Government. This isn’t 1934. In an age of small start-ups and home businesses and desktop publishing, we don’t need a one-size-fits-all statist monopoly.
DE-COMPLICATE
We have unnecessarily complicated too many areas of human existence. Complexity justifies even more government intervention, leading to even more impenetrable complexity. After all, if health-care costs are the issue, it isn’t very difficult. As every economist knows, third-party transactions are always more expensive, whether the third party is an insurer or the government. If I go to a movie, I’ve got a general idea of what it ought to cost me. If I’m expecting to pay ten bucks and the clerk says “That’ll be $273.95,” I would notice. But most of the people in a hospital waiting room have no idea whether the procedure costs $200 or $2,000 or $20,000—and they don’t care: their only concern is whether the third party will grant access to it. I know what a movie ticket costs, I’ve no idea what a broken leg costs. Nor does anybody else—because there are so many third parties interceding themselves between your bone and the doctor that there is no longer a real market price for a broken leg. So if, as Massachusetts has done, you mandate universal third-partyism, your costs by definition w
ill increase. There’s no mystery about it. As a businessman, Mitt Romney should have known that.
Third-party transactions are always inflationary. So let’s return as much of daily life as possible to a two-party system—buyer and seller. You’ll be amazed how affordable it is. Compare cellphone and laptop and portable music system prices with what they were in the Eighties, and then ask yourself how it would have turned out with a government-regulated system of electronic insurance plans.
DE-CREDENTIALIZE
The most important place to start correcting America’s structural defects is in the schoolhouse. The Democrats justified ObamaCare on the grounds of “controlling costs.” What about applying the same argument to 11 Writing, reading, thinking: who needs it? Certainly not the teachers of tomorrow: students majoring in education showed the least gains in learning.
Six-figure universal college education will only reinforce a culture of hermetically sealed complacency. Instead, it should be possible to teach what a worthless high school diploma requires by the age of fourteen. You could then do an extra two years on top of that and give people a real certificate of value, unlike today’s piece of paper, to prospective employers. College should be for those who wish to pursue genuine disciplines, not the desultory salad bar of Women’s “Studies,” Queer “Studies,” or 99 percent of the other “studies.” As a culture, we do too much “studying” (mostly of our navels, if not lower parts) and not enough doing. Vocational education, even for what we now dignify as “professions,” would be much better. So would privatizing education entirely.
