For what seems to be forever, Liberals and Progressives have been telling us what a caring society should look like. It should provide generous benefits from the public treasury to the people who fail on the path of life. It should provide health care to all, paid for from that same public treasury. It should provide for a comfortable retirement at ever earlier ages, paid for in full or in part from that same public treasury. If people fall behind in their mortgage payments the public treasury should make their payments for them. If they need a new car, the treasury should provide part of the payment. If they need a new house the treasury should provide a payment. If they need new appliances the treasury should provide a payment. If they need an abortion, the treasury should pay the bill. As schools get worse and children graduate not being able to read their diplomas the public treasury should increase its school funding.
I could go on but the list of things that the government should do is, to the Liberal mind, literally limitless.
So as we head into the last 6 months before the fall elections, we finally have the answer to what happens when Liberals run things long enough. Eventually they run our of other people’s money. I was speaking to a client the other day and told him that I was hopeful despite the collapsing global economy. Because this election will be about Greece. Greece represents a nation that has implemented the policies that the Obama administration – in its wholehearted amorous embrace of the entire Liberal enchilada – lead to: national bankruptcy. And bankruptcy for a nation is not a trip to the lawyer’s office. It means rioting in the streets, people having their pay cut and streets not being repaired, broken windows staying that way. And if we go that way, there will be no Uncle Sugar to bail us out.
Victor Davis Hanson has a great essay in NRO (excerpts)
In just a few months the brave new dream world as we knew it has died — but with a whimper, not a bang.
There will be no more lectures on soft power and a Baltic-to-Mediterranean postmodern culture. Suddenly European Union expansion is dead in its tracks. The question of Turkish membership, after a decade-long controversy, has been settled without so much as a demonstration. The Europeans don’t want another Greece in their midst; the Turks don’t want German bankers running their sagging finances. A soaring Euro was supposed to reflect the sobriety of socialism; instead, it hid its profligacy, but only for a while.
So the welfare state is discredited. In the past, we used to be warned that static population growth, vast public-sector employment, early and generous retirement benefits, and high taxes were not sustainable. In recent years, those lectures were caricatured as partisan or hypothetical. No longer. The Greek meltdown — with Ireland, Italy, Portugal, and Spain on the brink — has shown that European socialism does not work. Bankruptcy, not politics, is the final arbiter: Individuals, firms, and nations either buy particular bonds or they don’t. And a nation like Greece, in turn, either pays what it has borrowed or it doesn’t. All the op-eds in the New York Times cannot change that fact.
And that bold experiment in "Smart Diplomacy?"
I do not think the word “reset” will be used much longer to characterize American foreign policy. Reset from what to what? After all, is Iran closer to getting a bomb or further away than it was a year and a half ago? Are terrorists more or less likely to attack and kill inside the United States? Is Syria now a more or a less helpful player in the Middle East? Is Israel safer or less safe, more or less a U.S. ally? Are Putin and Chávez now more helpful players on the world scene, in appreciation of Obama’s olive branches? Does a North Korea or an Iran feel more or less emboldened to run risks in testing the status quo?
The new world order as envisioned by Obama in January 2009 was, I think, supposed to look something like the following: A social-democratic America would come to emulate the successful welfare states in the European Union. These twin Western communitarian powers would together usher in a new world order in which no one nation was to be seen as preeminent. All the old nasty ideas of the 20th century — military alliances, sovereign borders, independent international finance, religious and cultural chauvinism — would fall by the wayside, as the West was reinvented as part of the solution rather the problem it had been in its days of colonialism, imperialism, and exploitation. A new green transnationalism would assume the place of that bad old order, a transnationalism run by elite, highly educated, and socially conscious technocrats — albeit themselves Western — supported by a progressive press more interested in effecting social change than in merely reporting the tawdry news.
Most experiments in the soft sciences are hard or impossible, but Greece volunteered to be the test tube of Liberalism and Progressivism. It's what Hope N' Change looks like after a few decades. How does that look to you?
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