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Any of us in 2-3 minutes can see how it could all be reversed -- a full-fledged effort to develop all our energy resources, from nuclear to natural gas, radical cuts in public spending, closed borders, fiscal sanity and pay as you go legislation, a return to merit instead of situational pleading. Given our wealth and talent in four years we could balance the budget, slash energy imports and make schools work far better with fewer dollars.
No, decline is a state of mind, and proceeds so often from the dreams of utopianism, or the creed that a new generation can change human nature, eliminate war, legislate peace, end inequality, and enforce an equality of result -- alone through state power wielded by enlightened despots and philosopher kings amid imposed "civility". In response, the productive, highly-taxed upper-middle classes become alienated, convinced that their efforts will not lead to their own self-interested advancement. So they adopt "quietism", a sort of psychological hibernation from society, a disconnect where they virtually drop or hide out from popular culture -- a theme as old as characters in Plato, Sophocles and Euripides, authors who at times focused on those so resistant to the redistributive Athenian state.
But it is Not Easy to Turn Us into Belgium
In America's case, these are choices, not fate. The Constitution is still here should we wish to follow it. Our ancestors left us freeways, airports and universities and a rich infrastructure. Napa Valley, Silicon Valley, and Central Valley agriculture here in bankrupt California are still sources of amazing ingenuity and enormous wealth creation. Even with 9.6% unemployment, millions rise at 6AM to go to work; millions work the night shift. So to nullify that dynamism, well, that takes work. It requires constant sloganeering about inequality. It demands massive social engineering to create huge public work forces to administer redistributive entitlements. It must entice a new privileged elite to go over to the side of crony capitalism and insider favoritism of the GE sort. It encourages a demonized "them" and a deified "us", the abyss say somewhere around the Obama's $250,000 line of annual income. It requires an ideology of envy and jealously and the exit of moral responsibility for self. It dictates that most personal unhappiness emanates from not having what someone else supposedly does, and can be rectified by state action rather than personal improvement. Yet that is all hard to do quickly in America.
A bracing essay. Read it all @ Victor Hanson's Works and Days » Decline is in the Mind
