Photograph by Yiorgos Karahalis/Reuters
This isn’t “climate change,” dependent on this or that predictive model. This is the certainty of disaster. And yet the only certainty is that Western governments will continue to grow the state at the expense of the market: they will create more regulations requiring more agencies with more expensively paid public-service union employees. Not all of this growth will be intentional; much of it will happen under various desultory hiring and wages “freezes.” But, because government is immune to normal pressures, unless you’re actively shrinking it it always grows.
Much of the above is about numbers, costs, and other economic indices. But at least as telling is the psychology. A couple of years ago in this space, I quoted a reader who thought I should lighten up: “We’re rich enough that we can afford to be stupid.” This is presumably the thinking behind California public education. Its teachers are the highest paid in the United States, and its schools are among the worst. Since my reader’s cheery assurance, we’re a lot less rich but seem determined to be even more stupid. Americans spend more on education than anyone but the Swiss, and have the least to show for it. In London, New Labour ministers still fall back on stillborn invocations of “the knowledge economy” that will always make Britain an attractive place to do business because of the “added value” of its educated workforce. Are you serious? Have you set foot in an English state school in the last 15 years?
In The Time Machine by H. G. Wells, a fellow in late Victorian England saddles up the eponymous contraption, propels himself forward and finds himself in a world where humanity has divided into a small, soft, passive, decadent elite, the Eloi, among whom one can barely tell the boys from the girls, and a dark, feral, subterranean underclass, the Morlocks. This is supposedly Britain in the year 802,701 AD. That’s the only thing Wells got wrong: the date. If he’d set his time machine to zip forward a mere hundred years or so to the early 21st century, he’d have been bang on target. The historian Victor Davis Hanson thinks Wells’s tale sums up his fellow Californians, too. The new Eloi expect to be able to enjoy all the benefits of an advanced prosperous society while erecting a regime of sentimentalized regulation that will make its continuation impossible. The new Morlocks demand iPods and video games and other diversions they regard as their birthright but are all but incapable of making any contribution to the kind of society required to produce them. As for Canada, though not yet in the advanced state of decay of the formerly Golden State, those debt-to-income figures are following the same path. At the dawn of the Reagan era, America was the world’s largest creditor nation and its citizens had a 10 per cent savings rate. Not today. To Lord Keynes, a government treasury was not a family purse: the state, unlike the household, could go into debt to “invest.” Now, the family purse has caught up: governments and individuals alike borrow extravagantly—and to consume rather than invest in any meaningful sense.
Swimming into view come rising powers—India, Brazil, China and others, all with problems of their own, but not wedded to the proposition that great nations can squander both their inheritance and their children’s future without cost. Decline is a choice. The selfish pampered profligates of the postwar West made theirs, and for good measure and to ward off the day of reckoning consigned their kids and grandkids to it, too. It would seem to me unlikely that the next generation will be willing or so easily diverted by electronic novelties to reduce themselves to serfs in a vain attempt to sustain an unsustainable system. So something will happen: Greek riots? Total societal collapse? Best to keep the jetpack fuelled and ready. If you can find somewhere to go.
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