From Ace of Spades. (H/T ECM)
Excerpt:
We see our future playing out in England and France right now. Only our upheavals are going to be much larger and more violent than theirs. Our population is larger, more diverse, and more polarized; our politics more fraught; our debts and obligations massively larger. Our passions are harder to rouse, but once aflame, take a long time to burn out.
As in France, we have let an enormous segment of our population — perhaps as much as half — fall into a state where they depend on government largesse for a substantial part of their income. This is not money they earned themselves, not wages or savings, but rather money squeezed from the more productive half of the country. Half of our citizens pay no income taxes at all. An increasing number will draw public-sector pensions, Social Security, and medical insurance (Medicare/Medicaid) in amounts that far exceed what they contributed to those plans. Half of the US population, in short, lives not by the fruits of their own toil but by the (coerced) charity of others, as filtered and distilled through the hand of the government. This can not — it can not, by the laws of economics and simple physics — continue. The mathematics of the problem trump even philosophical issues of fairness, of governance, of ethics or law. The mathematics simply will not allow it.
Consider the French. They are rioting over a proposal to raise the national age of retirement from 60 to 62. Germany’s is 65 (going to 67) — how happy will German workers be to subsidize the early retirements of their French neighbors? The French labor unions are on a rampage, denouncing the move as a violation of a “promise” the country made to the workers. (If this reminds you of California, New Jersey, New York, and Michigan — well, the situations are closely analogous.) The word “promise” is illuminating: people have stopped thinking of social welfare as a “benefit” or a “perquisite”, and have begun instead to think of it as a “right” or a “promise”. A legally-binding promise which cannot be broken, though the heavens fall. Well, the heavens are falling, and the sovereigns will discover a universal truth: a government “promise” is not a suicide pact. Reality will assert itself, one way or another.
Governments the world over are discovering that the river of money is not endless. That seemingly-inexhaustable mountain of wealth has been turned into an ocean of debt that will take decades to pay off. The spendthrift habits of the Western nations will put burdens on our children, and other generations not yet born, that should outrage us as a people. We are investing in the old rather than the young, and are punishing risk-taking and entrepreneurship rather than rewarding it. Our tax regimes seem to be deliberately crafted to kill innovation and long-term thinking. (What does “legacy” mean if the wealth I have accumulated in my life cannot be passed on to my children or heirs, but is instead eaten by the all-consuming government?) Young people — young families — are the foundation upon which Western Civilization is built. Neglect them, overburden them, cheat them, and you are committing societal suicide.
This is what the House Republicans have to stop Obama from doing. This is what is at stake.
WINTERY KNIGHT 