We have been shirking too long, and that's unworthy of a great civilization. To see off the new Dark Ages will be tough and demanding. The alternative will be worse.
Mark SteynGoogle and Apple and other latter day American success stories started in somebody's garage--the one place where innovation isn't immediately buried by bureaucracy, or at least in most states, not until some minor municipal functionary discovers you neglected to apply for a Not Sitting Around on My Ass All Day permit.
Mark Steyn...when you hit the expressway to Declinistan there are few exit ramps. That America's animating principles should require a defense at all is a melancholy reflection on how far we've already gone. Live free--or die from a thousand soothing caresses of nanny-state sirens.
Mark SteynOur new elite have more refined sensibilities than the old aristocracy: just as dowager duchesses would sniff that so-and-so was "in trade", so today's rulers have an antipathy to doers in general. How could Sarah Palin's executive experience running a state, a town, and a commercial fishing operation compare to all that experience Barack Obama had in sitting around thinking great thoughts? In forming his war cabinet, Winston Churchill said that he didn't want to fill it up with "mere advisors at large with nothing to do but think and talk." But Obama sent the Oval Office bust of Sir Winston back to the British, and now we have a government by men who've done nothing but "think and talk". There was less private-sector business experience in Obama's cabinet than in any administration going back a century.
Mark SteynAt bottom, today's Democrats from Baucus to Waters are united in only two beliefs, and they demand that American citizens believe in only two things: diversity and rights.
Mark SteynFaced with public discontent about the statist agenda, the Condescendi look out the window at the unlovely mob in their "Don't treat on me" T-shirts and sneer, "The peasants are revolting." You oppose illegal immigration? You're a xenophobe. Gay marriage? Homophobe. The Ground Zero mosque? Islamaphobe. If that's the choice, I'd rather be damned as a racist and sexist. The evolution from -isms to phobias is part of the medicalization of dissent: the Conformicrats simply declare your position as a form of mental illness.
Mark SteynPopular sovereignty may be fine in theory but not when the citizenry are so obviously in need of "re-education" by their betters. The alliance of political statists and judicial statists is moving us into a land beyond law--a land of apostasy trials. The Conformicrats have made a bet that the populace will willingly submit to subtle but pervasive forms of re-education camp. Over in England, London's transportation department has a bureaucrat whose very title sums up our ruler's general disposition toward us: Head of Behavior Change.
Mark SteynAbout half the global economy is living beyond not only its means but its diminished number of children's means. Instead of addressing that fact, countries with government debt of 125 percent of GDP are being "rescued" by countries with government debt of 80 percent of GDP. Good luck with that.
Mark SteynWe give far more to charity per capita than Europeans do. Why? Are we born better? No. The bigger the government the worse the citizen. They are preoccupied in Europe with how much time off. Where will they vacation? When will they retire? These are selfish questions, these are not altruistic questions. So the goodness that America created is jeopardized by our not knowing what we stand for. That's our greatest threat. We are our problem.
Mark SteynAmerica is now a land that rewards failure--at the personal, corporate and state level. If you reward it, you get more of it. If you reward it lavishly as the federal government does, you'll get the Radio City Spectacular of Failure, on ice and with full supporting orchestra. The problem is that, in abolishing failure, you also abolish the possibility of success, and guarantee only the huge sucking statist swamp. From Motown to no town, from the Golden State to Golden Statists. What happens when the policies that brought ruin to Detroit and decay to California are applied to the nation at large?
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