Richard Fernandez writes about unsustainable debt:
I Want My MTV
When there’s no money left in the till talk inevitably turns to what color of the garbage bins should be or whether Christians should be allowed to wear crucifixes to work. The really important public issues like carbon trading take center stage. Across the Atlantic in California, Victor Davis Hanson was noticing the same obsession with irrelevant forms in a state facing the same challenges as Britain. As the actual poverty rose in California the ’socially conscious’ turned in upon themselves, living in overpriced, politically correct communities, seeking solace in “ambiance — that is, living among people like themselves … Why? I have a theory. It allows them to be liberal and progressive in the abstract, without having to live the logical consequences of their utopianism, or deal with the underbelly of American life.”
This may explain the strange inverse relationship between shrinking resources and growing promises. When you can’t provide the real then promise the fake. The bleaker the reality the more soaring the vision. The higher the price of oil, the smaller the military budget, the costlier the medical appliances the more grandiose the goals of the administraton become. Why aim for incremental environmental improvement when you can make the seas can fall. Never mind if one must accept a nuclear Iran; at least we’ll have a world without nuclear weapons! If Israel can give up Jerusalem there’ll be peace in the Middle East at last! Why fix the health care system where it’s broken? Fix it all.
And it’s all going to happen in the future, that wondrous, inexhaustible cornucopia of a place which will lend us everything we want, and roll it over when we can’t pay. It will do it even though its peopled by people that are too much trouble care for; like the children who should never be born because pregnancy, according to one judicial nominee being considered by the administration, is “involuntary servitude” comparable to slavery. Can you have a future without people, without cheap, abundant and secure energy? Can you have a future without truth? Why sure you can. Just you wait and see.
Go read the whole article.
And the one rejoinder the tax and spenders could use is that at the end of WW II the US was spending upwards of 40% of its GDP on the war and its national debt was 160% of GDP. Americans survived that, with some painful readjustment but we did almost retire the debt and cut military spending to 10%. Though this time the US will have competition as after the war we were nearly the only country in the West, excluding the much smaller Latin American economies, to provide manufactured goods and credit.
They offer us pain because we have sinned rather than offering pain and then a reward.