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Mark Steyn is back with a sobering discussion of British and American decline.
…It’s interesting to learn that “anti-fascism” now means attacking the British Empire, which stood alone against fascism in that critical year between the fall of France and Germany’s invasion of Russia. And it’s even sadder to have to point out the most obvious fatuity in those “anti-fascist groups” litany of evil—“the British Empire’s association with slavery.” The British Empire’s principal association with slavery is that it abolished it. Before William Wilberforce, the British Parliament, and the brave men of the Royal Navy took up the issue, slavery was an institution regarded by all cultures around the planet as as permanent a feature of life as the earth and sky. Britain expunged it from most of the globe.
…When a society loses its memory, it descends inevitably into dementia. As I always try to tell my American neighbors, national decline is at least partly psychological—and therefore what matters is accepting the psychology of decline. Thus, Hayek’s greatest insight in The Road to Serfdom, which he wrote with an immigrant’s eye on the Britain of 1944:
“…The virtues possessed by Anglo-Saxons in a higher degree than most other people, excepting only a few of the smaller nations, like the Swiss and the Dutch, were independence and self-reliance, individual initiative and local responsibility, the successful reliance on voluntary activity, noninterference with one’s neighbor and tolerance of the different and queer, respect for custom and tradition, and a healthy suspicion of power and authority.”
Within little more than half a century, almost every item on the list had been abandoned, from “independence and self-reliance” (some 40 percent of Britons receive state handouts) to “a healthy suspicion of power and authority”—the reflex response now to almost any passing inconvenience is to demand the government “do something.” …
This has consequences. …In cutting off two generations of students from their cultural inheritance, the British state has engaged in what we will one day come to see as a form of child abuse, one that puts a huge question mark over the future. Why be surprised that legions of British Muslims sign up for the Taliban? These are young men who went to school in Luton and West Bromwich and learned nothing of their country of nominal citizenship other than that it’s responsible for racism, imperialism, colonialism, and all the other bad -isms of the world. If that’s all you knew of Britain, why would you feel any allegiance to Queen and country? And what if you don’t have Islam to turn to? The transformation of the British people is, in its own malign way, a remarkable achievement. Raised in schools that teach them nothing, they nevertheless pick up the gist of the matter, which is that their society is a racket founded on various historical injustices. The virtues Hayek admired? Ha! Strictly for suckers. …
…Does the fate of the other senior Anglophone power hold broader lessons for the United States? …you cannot wage a sustained ideological assault on your own civilization without profound consequence. Without serious course correction, we will see the end of the Anglo-American era, and the eclipse of the powers that built the modern world. Even as America’s spendaholic government outspends not only America’s ability to pay for itself but, by some measures, the world’s; even as it follows Britain into the dank pit of transgenerational dependency, a failed education system, and unsustainable entitlements; even as it makes less and less and mortgages its future to its rivals for cheap Chinese trinkets, most Americans assume that simply because they’re American they will be insulated from the consequences. …
David Harsanyi laughs at the absurdity of President Obama claiming he’s going to simplify regulations.
…I can’t recall a single federal program, legislation or proposal in the past two years that was initiated to ease the burden on consumers or businesses. (If you know of any, please send specifics to sorry@dowelooklikesuckers.com.)
Obama doesn’t have to look far, if he’s serious. Nor does he need an executive order. Right now the EPA is drafting carbon rules to force on states, even though a similarly torturous 2,000 pages on a cap-and-trade scheme intending to make power more expensive was rejected. …
Right now, the FCC is shoving net neutrality in the pipeline — again, bypassing Congress — so government can regulate the Internet for the first time in history, though the commissioners themselves admit that, as of now, any need for rules are based on the what-ifs of their imaginations.
There exists no legislation more burdensome and expensive than the “job-crushing” “Patient Protection and Affordable Health Care Act,” formerly known as Obamacare and presently being symbolically repealed by House Republicans. …
And the WSJ editors are also skeptical of Obama’s lip service to more balanced regulation.
…Sarbanes-Oxley delegated 16 rule-makings to the executive branch, yet the Dodd-Frank financial law calls for literally hundreds of new rules by dozens of agencies, and two entirely new agencies. The Congressional Research Service reports that ObamaCare “gives federal agencies substantial responsibility and authority to ‘fill in the details’ of the legislation,” a process that may take “years, or even decades” to complete.
Other hyperactive regulators include the Federal Communications Commission (net neutrality), the Food and Drug Administration (food safety, medical devices) and the Labor Department (the SEIU’s wish list). But the worst offender is the Environmental Protection Agency, which is rewriting environmental law with almost no scrutiny.
The EPA’s goal is to impose carbon emissions limits that even Democrats in Congress rejected, in particular through its “endangerment finding”—which unless Congress intervenes will become the costliest regulation in government history. EPA is also re-regulating conventional air pollutants, often bypassing the usual notice and public comment. It isn’t a good omen that Mr. Obama singled out the EPA and its carbon-emissions rules (as related to auto fuel efficiency) as a model of “smart” regulation. …
Robert Samuelson was in November 2nd’s Pickings writing on the waste from “high speed” rail. Michael Barone does the same today saying it is a fast way to waste money.
…Take the $2.7 billion, 84-mile line connecting Orlando and Tampa that incoming Florida Gov. Rick Scott is mulling over.
It would connect two highly decentralized metro areas that are already connected by Interstate 4. Urban scholar Wendell Cox, writing for the Reason Foundation, found that just about any door-to-door trip between the two metro areas would actually take longer by train than by auto, and would cost more. Why would any business traveler take the train?
…So we are spending billions on high-speed rail that isn’t really high-speed, that will serve largely affluent business travelers and that will need taxpayer subsidies forever. This should be a no-brainer for a Congress bent on cutting spending.
Scott Adams shares his adventures in yoga.
I’ve heard good things about yoga. People say it’s an excellent way to manage stress. I convinced my wife, Shelly, to try it with me.
Shelly sensibly suggested that we try a yoga video at home before we sign up for classes. Let me tell you how well the yoga video managed my stress.
…I suggested that we randomly select one of the classes and just see what happens. But this, my friends, is not how shopping is done. First you read each of the descriptions then you read them again. Then you read them aloud. Then you discuss. Then you narrow it down to two. Then you forget what the other three were, and wonder if maybe they were better than the two you had first selected, so you start over. Halfway through this process, my tension could have powered a Chevy Volt. I was red and vibrating. I wasn’t getting any of my cartooning work done, we would be late for the Apple Genius Bar, and I was shopping in my own home. I was so tense that I worried I would actually snap in half if I tried anything bendy.
Eventually we picked the class we wanted. It only took a few minutes, but in shopping years, I was 106. We fired up the DVD menu and looked for the class we had selected on the DVD cover.
…A granola-eating, bare-chested yoga dude appeared on screen. He was on the beach of some sort of tropical ocean paradise. I call that cheating. I wouldn’t need any yoga at all if I were on that beach. But whatever. …