As Victor Davis Hanson writes, “Decline is in the Mind:”
But in the Obama vision, decline is the wrong word for necessary readjustment — analogous to the wondrous post-Churchillian socialization of Britain after the war, in which an aging imperialist air force and navy gave way to the new people’s National Health Service. As far as the staggering debt goes, massive red ink is a necessary reset policy, a long overdue method of fair redistribution. Both the borrowing and its eventual remedy will bring a much needed reality check to a cowboyish and inherently unjust “old” America. Ponder the politics of debt: more borrowing means more government (200,000 thousand new employees during Obama’s first two years alone), which in turn means good jobs for the deserving, a growing political progressive constituency of loyal and grateful public workers, and more watchdogs (cf. to monitor everything from fatty foods to breast pumps) that can spot racial, gender, and class bias and take the appropriate and long overdue federal action — create a bureau, hire federal watch- and attack-dogs, publicize private sector immorality, and then establish new fees and regulations to justify more bureaus.More borrowing also means that taxes must go up and that usually ensures that those who make at some point in their lives Obama’s “enough” will have to do their patriotic duty and finally pay their fair share. After all, they made such sums, if outside of government (that is, not the enlightenened sort like University of California administrators or San Jose police chiefs who take in over $500,000 a year), at someone else’s expense (the peasant idea of a limited good). They should thus fork it back over to its rightful owners, the commonwealth that was veritably robbed in the first place.
As I’ve written before, for a guy who hates England, Obama sure does love England — or at least the collectivism of its postwar socialism.
Elsewhere at Pajamas, shortly before hoisting a tall glass of VSOP, Steve Green writes, see, I told you.
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