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Mark Steyn thinks our prospects are poor.
A few years ago, after the publication of my book America Alone, an exasperated reader wrote to advise me to lighten up, on the grounds that “we’re rich enough to be stupid.” That’s to say, Western democracies and their citizens are the wealthiest societies ever known, and no matter how much of our energies are wasted on pointless hyper-regulation for the business class and multigenerational welfare for the dependency class and Transgender and Colonialism Studies for our glittering youth, we can afford it, and the central fact of our wealth will ensure that our fortunes do not change. Since the collapse of Lehman Brothers in 2008, we have been less rich, and our stupidity ought in theory to be less affordable. Instead, it’s been supersized. To take only the most obvious example, President Obama has added six-and-a-half trillion bucks to the national debt, and has nothing to show for it. As Churchill would say, had his bust not been bounced from the Oval Office, never in the field of human spending has so much been owed by so many for so little.
The West’s rivals do not think like this. China is now the second-biggest economy on the planet, but it has immense structural problems: As I’ve been saying for years, it will get old before it gets rich. Thanks to its grotesque “one-child” policy, it has the most male-heavy demographic cohort in history — no chicks and millions of guys who can’t get any action, which is not normally a recipe for social stability. Despite being extremely large, the country is resource-poor. But you can’t say it’s not thinking outside the box. The Daily Telegraph in London reported this week that the Chinese have just signed a deal to lease five percent of Ukraine (or an area about the size of Belgium) to grow crops and raise pigs on. …
… Obamacare is something new in American life: the creation of a massive bureaucracy charged with downsizing you — to a world of fewer doctors, higher premiums, lousier care, more debt, fewer jobs, smaller houses, smaller cars, smaller, fewer, less; a world where worse is the new normal. Would Americans, hitherto the most buoyant and expansive of people, really consent to live such shrunken lives? If so, mid-20th-century America and its assumptions of generational progress will be as lost to us as the Great Ziggurat of Ur was to 19th-century Mesopotamian date farmers. …
David Harsanyi thinks its the Dems who caused the hostage crisis over healthcare.
… In a recent exchange on “Real Time with Bill Maher,” panelists went a few rounds on the GOP’s strategy for the upcoming budget showdowns (wily anarchists or slack-jawed yokels?) and talked about the pros and cons of “hostage taking” before MSNBC’s Chris Hayes chimed in with a pretty revealing comment, saying, “I think it is useful to separate the kind of tactical question here from the substantive one, which is to say, like, you know, if there were a liberal caucus in the United States government that could, you know, hold the continuing resolution hostage to try to stop a war that I thought was horrible, I would say, ‘Yeah, do it.’ The thing that they’re trying to stop here is 30 million people getting health insurance!”
It’s the substantive question liberals have a problem with these days, not the tactical one.
A potential shutdown over the continuing resolution or the debt ceiling would be fine if the issue happened to move the liberal soul. But Republicans can’t possibly have a legitimate reason to want to defund/delay/defeat/de-anything Obamacare. The GOP opposes the law because of an insatiable impulse to deny millions of poor Americans health insurance. If Hayes were to concede that genuine objections existed — however misguided he might find them — he’d also be conceding that conservatives have a purpose beyond his own cartoon depiction of free market beliefs.
In this cartoon, Republicans are obstructionists, and that’s that. When Reid says any Republican House budget he dislikes is “dead on arrival,” how many nonpartisan publications will call him out on his uncompromising position? When the president states that negotiating with Republicans over the debt ceiling “is not going to happen,” how many reporters are going to point out that his stubbornness could lead to a government shutdown? …
Turns out Dems led by Ted Kennedy threatened to refuse to raise the debt ceiling during Nixon’s second term. Instapundit links to a James Taranto column suggesting Kennedy must have been a “terrorist” then since that is what the GOP is labeled now.
… Yet Obama is now in a position very much analogous to that of President Nixon in 1973. We now know that government corruption–namely IRS persecution of dissenters–was a factor in Obama’s re-election. To be sure, Obama himself has not, at least so far, been implicated in the IRS wrongdoing as Nixon ultimately was in Watergate. On the other hand, Nixon’s re-election victory was so overwhelming that no one could plausibly argue Watergate was a necessary condition for it. The idea that Obama could not have won without an abusive IRS is entirely plausible.
The Obama supporters who counsel intractability overlook the practical political risk of such an approach. Maybe Republicans will back down in the end, but maybe they won’t. That is to say, Obama’s intransigence could trigger a catastrophic result, and whether it does is beyond his control.
If that happens, maybe the majority of voters will blame Republicans, but maybe they won’t. Courting and then presiding over a catastrophe is not exactly a fail-safe plan for strengthening one’s presidency. …
io9 Blog posts on the mysterious fire that destroyed America’s greatest city in 1170!
One thousand years ago, in the place where St. Louis, Missouri now stands, there was once a great civilization whose city center was ringed with enormous earthen pyramids, vast farmlands, and wealthy suburbs. For hundreds of years it was the biggest city in North America. Then a mysterious fire changed everything.
The city that once existed in St. Louis’ current footprint is known today as Cahokia, and its creators are commonly called the Mound Builders because of the 120 or so enormous mounds they left behind. Shaped much like the stone pyramids of the Maya civilization to the south, these mounds rose up hundreds of feet, and were often built on top of tombs. At their summits were ceremonial buildings made from wood and thatch. Unfortunately, many of these magnificent creations were destroyed in the nineteenth century when St. Louis was built. Below, you can see one of the only remaining pyramids, known as Monk’s Mound. …