by Mark Steyn
DIS-ENTITLE
It’s not so extraordinary that on the brink of fiscal catastrophe the Obama Democrats should propose the Ultimate Entitlement—health care. After all, the Entitlement Utopia is where they reside. What’s more remarkable is that a couple of years earlier the Bush Republicans should have introduced a brand new entitlement all of their own—prescription drugs. 12 When the state annexes that responsibility, the citizenry are indeed mere sheep to the government shepherd.
DE-NORMALIZE
You can win this. Statists overreach. They did on “climate change” scaremongering, and the result is that it’s over. Hollywood buffoons will continue to lecture us from their mega-mansions that we should toss out our washers and beat our clothes dry on the rocks singing native chants down by the river, but only suckers are listening to them.
They overreached fiscally, too. On January 20, 2009, Year Zero of the Democrat utopia, it seemed like a smart move to make “trillion” a routine part of the Washington lexicon. After all, what’s easier to spend than a trillion we don’t have? If most of us cannot conceive of what a “trillion” is in any meaningful sense anyway, how can we conceive of ever having to “repay” a trillion? There was method in the madness of the Democrats’ baseline inflation. Yet they never quite closed the deal, and now all its many citations do is remind even the most innumerate that the Democrat project is a crock, and the word itself is merely shorthand for “money we don’t have and will never have.” The spendaholics tried to normalize “trillion.” They failed. Let’s
Nevertheless, both these victories were close-run things. Had it not been for the leaked emails of the East Anglia Climate Research Unit warmmongers (showing the collusion and corruption of scientific “peer review”) and had it not been for a small band of grossly abused “climate denialists” to leak them to and get the word out, the Copenhagen deal might well have passed. Liberty cannot survive if only a few are eternally vigilant. We need more. We took our eyes off the colleges, and the high schools, and the grade schools, and these and many other institutions were coopted by forces deeply hostile to the American idea. So push back, beginning in kindergarten. Changing the culture (the schools, the churches, the movies, the TV shows) is more important than changing the politics.
An election is one Tuesday every other November. The culture is every day, every month, every year. Politicians are, for the most part, a craven, finger-in-the-windy bunch. Like Milton Friedman says, don’t wait for the right people to get elected; create the conditions whereby the wrong people are forced to do the right thing.
DO
During Scott Brown’s insurgent election campaign in deep blue Massachusetts, he was joined at one rally by a rare non-Democrat celebrity, John Ratzenberger, who played Cliff Claven on the sitcom Cheers. Back in 1969, it turned out, Mr. Ratzenberger had been at Woodstock. No, he wasn’t the bass player with Country Joe and the Fish, assuming they have a bass player. Rather, he was a working carpenter. And four decades later, stumping for Brown, he offered the all-time greatest comment on those three days of “peace and love”: This isn’t the Democratic party of our fathers and grandfathers. This is the party of Woodstock hippies. I was at Woodstock—I built the stage. And when everything fell apart, and people were fighting for peanut butter sandwiches, it was the National Guard who came in and saved the same people who were protesting them. So when Hillary Clinton a few years ago wanted to build a Woodstock memorial, I said it should be a statue of a National Guardsman feeding a crying hippie.13
Oh, my. Was Mr. Ratzenberger an officially licensed carpenter? Maybe whoever leaked Joe the Plumber’s files could look into it.
I mentioned earlier that I always advise aspiring writers to not only write but do something. I have a particular respect for fellows who are brilliant at one thing but nevertheless like to potter at something else entirely. Frank Loesser was one of the greatest figures in American popular music, a man whose songs include “Heart And Soul,” “Baby, It’s Cold Outside,” and the score for Guys and Dolls. That would be enough for most of us. But I remember being very impressed to discover that he was also a prodigious carpenter and cabinetmaker whose home was filled with amazing pieces of his own design and construction. He once got one of those pompous letters from some Hollywood vice-president or other headed “From the Desk of....” So he went into his shop and spent the weekend crafting a beautiful life-size desk corner complete with inlay and moldings, and put it in the mail with a sheet of paper headed “From the Desk of Frank Loesser.”
On a broader socio-cultural point, people who don’t know where stuff comes from or how it works are more receptive to bigger government. That’s one reason why Canada and much of western Europe, both of which are more urbanized and in which more people live in small apartments, vote leftier than America. In my part of New Hampshire, we have to drill our own wells and supply our own water. Obviously, that’s not feasible on Fifth Avenue, or not without greatly spoiling Central Park. So water becomes just another thing that government takes care of for you.
The aforementioned John Ratzenberger isn’t merely an actor. He’s also the founder of the Nuts, Bolts & Thingamajigs Foundation, dedicated to reviving the lost art of tinkering.14 Familiar with the word? Messing about with stuff—taking it apart, figuring out how it worked, putting it together again with some modification of your own. What boys (and a few girls) used to do in the garage or the basement before the Internet was invented. “If we give up tinkering,” says John Derbyshire of National Review, “we might survive, but only as a bureaucratic empire of paperpushers and lotus-eaters.”15 Tinkerers built America. Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Edison, Henry Ford, all were tinkerers in their childhood. Everything from the airplane to the computer started in somebody’s garage. Go back even further: the Industrial Revolution was a revolution of tinkerers. The great scientific thinkers of eighteenth-century England couldn’t have been less interested in cotton spinning and weaving. Why would you be? It was left to a bloke on the shop floor who happened to glance at a one-thread wheel that had toppled over and noticed that both the wheel and the spindle were still turning. So James Hargreaves invented the spinning jenny, and there followed other artful gins and mules and frames and looms, and Britain and the world were transformed. By tinkerers rather than thinkerers. “Technological change came from tinkerers,” wrote Professor J. R. McNeill of Georgetown, “people with little to no scientific education but with plenty of hands-on experience.”16 John Ratzenberger likes to paraphrase a Stanford University study: “Engineers who are great in physics and calculus but can’t think in new ways about old objects are doomed to think in old ways about new objects.”17 That’s the lesson of the spinning jenny: an old object fell over and someone looked at it in a new way.
In 2008, America elected a man with no “hands-on experience” of anything who promptly cocooned himself within a circle of advisors with less experience of business, of the private sector, of doing than any previous administration in American history. You want “change,” so you vote for a bunch of guys who’ve never done nuthin’ but sit around talking?
That letter from the post-American world a few pages back was addressed to those Americans of 1950. By the beginning of the new century, “1950s” had become a pejorative. Conservative pundits are routinely accused of wanting to turn the clock back to the Fifties. Not me. There is, after all, no need to turn the clock back because, fiscally and geopolitically, America’s clock is stuck in the Truman administration. At the U.S. Treasury, the State Department, the Pentagon, it’s forever chiming 1950. At the dawn of the American era, Washington was the last man standing, the victor of the Second World War and with its cities and factories intact, unlike Europe. It had a unique dominance of the “free world,” and it could afford to be generous, so it was. America had more money than it knew what to do with, so it funded the UN and a dozen subsidiary bodies, and it absolved post-war Europe of paying for its own defense. And, as Germany and Japan and the rest of the West re
covered, we continued to pay, garrisoning not remote colonies but some of the richest nations in history. Having forsworn imperialism, we sat back as the UN fell into the hands of our enemies and their appeasers, and still we picked up the check. Western economic ideas were taken up by Asia and Eastern Europe and Brazil and Turkey, and enriched many lands, but we saw ourselves as the unipolar hyperpower, so at Nato and the G7 and everywhere else, each time the bill came and the rest of the gang skipped to the bathroom, we were happy to stick it on our tab. We threw money at our friends (to defend them against hostile powers that had collapsed a generation earlier) and at our enemies (to enable them to use their oil revenues to fund anti-Americanism worldwide) and at dozens of countries in between who were of no geopolitical significance but wouldn’t say no to a massive subsidy for an AIDS prevention program or whatever.
And we never even noticed we were no longer paying cash but with foreign credit cards.
1950 never ended. Even after the 2008 crash, even after the multi-trillion dollar deficits, it’s still 1950. At the 2009 Copenhagen summit, America (broke, bankrupt, drowning in debt) offered to pay for China (the country in whose debt we’re drowning) to lower its carbon footprint.18 As Jonah
The further we get from 1950, the more Washington spends like 1950 is forever.
This is the real “war on children” (to use another Democrat catchphrase) —and every time you bulk up the budget you make it less and less likely they’ll win it. Conservatives often talk about “small government,” which, in a sense, is framing the issue in leftist terms: they’re for Big Government—and, when you’re arguing for the small alternative, it’s easy to sound pinched and mean and grudging. But small government gives you big freedoms—and Big Government leaves you with very little freedom. The opposite of Big Government is not small government, but Big Liberty. The bailout and the stimulus and the budget and the trillion-dollar deficits are not merely massive transfers from the most dynamic and productive sector to the least dynamic and productive. When governments annex a huge chunk of the economy, they also annex a huge chunk of individual liberty. You fundamentally change the relationship between the citizen and the state into something closer to that of junkie and pusher—and you make it very difficult ever to change back. In the end, it’s not about money, but about something more fundamental. Yes, you can tax people to the hilt and give them “free” health care and “free” homes and “free” food. But in doing so you turn them into, if not (yet) slaves, then pets. And that’s the nub of it: Big Government leads to small liberty, and to small men. If a 26-year-old is a child, as President Obama says; if a 50-year-old hairdresser can retire and live at the state’s expense for over half her adult life, as the Government of Greece says, then you are no longer free. “You can be anything you want to be”? Not at all. Not when you’re owned by the government.
Freedom is messy. In free societies, people will fall through the cracks—drink too much, eat too much, buy unaffordable homes, fail to make prudent provision for health care, and much else. But the price of being relieved of all those tiresome choices by a benign paternal government is far too
LIVE FREE OR DIE
I’m an immigrant to this great land. For fellows like me, this is where the bus terminates. There’s nowhere else to go. Everywhere else tried this, and it’s killed them. There’s nothing new about Obama-era “hope” and “change.” For some of us, it’s the land where we grew up: government hospitals, government automobiles, been there, done that. This isn’t a bright new future, it’s a straight-to-video disco-zombie sequel: the creature rises from the grave to stagger around in rotting bell-bottoms and cheesecloth shirt terrorizing a new generation. Burn, baby, burn, it’s a Seventies-statist disco-era inferno!
When I first moved to New Hampshire, where “Live free or die” appears on our license plates, I carelessly assumed General Stark had said it before some battle or other—a bit of red meat to rally the boys for the charge; a touch of the old Henry V-at-Agincourt routine. But I soon discovered that the Granite State’s great Revolutionary War hero had made his cri de coeur decades after the cessation of hostilities, in a letter regretting that he would be unable to attend a dinner. And in a way I found that even more impressive. In extreme circumstances, many people can rouse themselves to rediscover the primal impulses: the brave men on Flight 93 did. They took off on what they thought was a routine business trip, and, when they realized it wasn’t, they went into General Stark mode and cried, “Let’s roll!”
But it’s harder to maintain the “Live free or die!” spirit when you’re facing not an immediate crisis but just a slow, unceasing ratchet effect. Which is, in stable societies unthreatened by revolution or war within their borders, how liberty falls, traded away to the state incrementally, painlessly, all but imperceptibly. “Live free or die!” sounds like a battle cry: we’ll win this thing or die trying, die an honorable death. But in fact it’s something far less
So, if you don’t want to die, you need to force the statists either out of office or into dramatic course correction. For a start, if a candidate is not publicly committed to fewer government programs from fewer government agencies enforcing fewer government regulations with fewer government bureaucrats on less lavish taxpayer-funded pay, he’s not serious. He’s not only killing your grandchildren’s and children’s future, he’s killing yours—and you will live to see it. It will be hard enough to apply pressure on America’s bureaucracy-for-life once he’s elected, but if he’s not prepared to argue for smaller government en route to office he’s certainly not going to do so afterwards. This applies to all levels of government: not just federal but state, county, town, and school district. Follow Friedman’s rule: make the wrong people do the right thing. Forcing candidates to make no-tax pledges has had some success, not least in my own state. Let’s try some spending pledges, and regulation pledges.
Americans face a choice: you can rediscover the animating principles of the American idea—of limited government, a self-reliant citizenry, and the opportunities to exploit your talents to the fullest—or you can join most of the rest of the western world in terminal decline. To rekindle the spark of liberty once it dies is very difficult. The inertia, the ennui, the fatalism is even more pathetic than the demographic decline and fiscal profligacy of the social democratic state, and, because it’s subtler and less tangible, even harder to rally against.
And a final word to “the children”: do you want to get suckered like your big brothers and sisters? Those saps who spent 2008 standing behind the Obamessiah swaying and chanting, “We are the dawning of the Hopeychange” like brainwashed cult extras? Sooner or later you guys have to crawl out from under the social engineering and rediscover the contrarian spirit for which youth was once known. If you’re a First Grader reading this by flashlight under the pillow, don’t wait till Middle School to start
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
I would like to thank Marji Ross, Harry Crocker, Kathleen Sweetapple, and their colleagues at Regnery for their encouragement and advice. As always, I’m indebted to readers in America, Britain, Canada, Australia, Europe, Asia, and beyond for filling my in-box with sharp insights and pertinent anecdotes every morning. And I would be entirely adrift were it not for my trusty sidekicks Tiffany Cole, Chantal Benoît, and Katherine Ernst and their dogged research and expertly compressed statistical summaries. They could be taking it easy in a cushy government union job, so I’m grateful to them for laboring down the Steyn salt mines instead.
NOTES
Prologue
1 Town hall meeting in Greeley, Colorado, August 21, 2010; available online at http://www.greeleygazette.com/press/?p=5029.
2 Terrence P. Jeffrey, “111th Congress Added More Debt Than First 100 Congresses Combined: $10,429 Per Person in U.S.,” CNSNews.com, December 27, 2010; available online at http://www.cnsnews.com/news/article/111th-congressadded-more-debt-first-100.
3 Herbert Stein, “Herb Stein’s Unfamiliar Quotations,” Slate.com, May 1
6, 1997; available online at http://www.slate.com/id/2561/.
4 Herbert Stein, “Herb Stein’s Unfamiliar Quotations,” Slate.com, May 16, 1997; available online at http://www.slate.com/id/2561/.
5 Remarks to reporters at a Christian Science Monitor breakfast, April 8, 2010; available online at http://www.politico.com/news/stories/0410/35546.html.
6 Brian Riedl, “President Obama Set to Exceed President Bush’s Deficits,” The Heritage Foundation, February 11, 2009; available online at http://blog.heritage.org/2009/02/11/president-obama-set-to-exceed-president-bush%E2%80%99s-deficits/.
7 Remarks at Thompson Creek Manufacturing in Landover, Maryland, January 7, 2011; available online at http://m.whitehouse.gov/the-press-office/2011/01/07/remarks-president-december-jobs-report-and-economic-personnelannounceme .
8 White House, “Table 15.3—Total Government Expenditures as Percentages of GDP: 1948-2010”; available online at http://www.whitehouse.gov/omb/budget/Historicals.
9 CBO report, “The Budget and Economic Outlook: Fiscal Years 2011 to 2021,” January 2011; available online at http://www.cbo.gov/ftpdocs/120xx/doc12039/01-26_FY2011Outlook.pdf.