This morning I listened to President Bush talk about solutions the administration is working on for the economic crisis, and I gotta tell you, I felt the very last vestiges of hope for our country fade away as I listened.
It's possible that you are reading this and thinking "DUH! You're such a moronic idealist! The rest of us saw it coming when that neocon was elected GOVERNOR, never mind PRESIDENT!"
But you know, as much as I knew and even wrote about the fact that conservatives were never going to get exactly what we wanted from President Bush, I also never thought we'd actually see the revival of full-on FDR socialism during his presidency. I figured we'd not have to worry until Barack Obama became president and the trifecta of Obama-Pelosi-Reid had a chance to sink their collective socialist (haha) fangs into the wallets and freedoms of Americans.
I figured, if there is one thing that many Americans have in common, it's that we oppose socialist practices. We agree, fundamentally, that the government is not the solution to our problems. I should have known that assumption was terribly, tragically wrong.
A NRO reader emailed Jonah Goldberg this morning and rattled off a list of government's "solutions" that have been in place for years, some of them since FDR, and said that if all of these "solutions" couldn't stop us from having a severe banking/credit crisis, then shouldn't we be able to read the writing on the wall?
If Milton Friedman were taught in schools, if Friedrich Hayek were taught, would we be in this mess, I wonder? Would the President of the United States, who went to Yale for Pete's sake, actually be calling for government to save us all from ourselves?
I'm actually afraid to pick up an Ayn Rand book right now, for fear it will seem more like apocalyptic prophecy than anti-Soviet fiction.
If we had never learnt, as a nation, to rely on government to (forgive the term) bail us out every time we're in trouble, would we be in this mess? People are saving far less than they were even in 1980 - a few years ago, Americans were actually saving at a negative rate, counting on retirement plans and Social Security to be there when they need it. When things get bad, we declare bankruptcy and go on welfare. Instead of learning trades or promoting later-in-life higher education (saving up for college instead of diving right in with high interest rate loans), we decided everyone deserved a college education - and then asked the federal government to finance it through loans, boosting skyrocketing tuition rates when universities figured out that government would do whatever it took to make sure kids went to college, no matter the cost.
And then, someone decided that for the sake of multicultural equality, we needed to give mortgages to anyone who wanted one, regardless of income, job stability, or, once Bush was in office, citizenship status.
Is it any wonder that it all collapsed, in such a spectacular fashion?
Spending money is not a solution, it is a symptom of failure. Remember that Coen brothers flick, Fargo? How William H. Macy's character was in debt past his eyeballs, and how he decided that getting his wife kidnapped and getting half the ransom would solve the problem? And how, because he was willing to risk everything like that, people were murdered (and one got shoved through a woodchipper)? That's what the bailout is like, folks. Like we couldn't just deal with the problem, and now the consequences are deep, wide, and bloody.
Thanks to that bill, municipalities with bad debt can have it bought off by the federal government. But who do you think ends up with the bill, either way?
Taxpayers. You and me.
A vicious cycle. We make just enough money to pay our taxes, our mortgages/rent, and maybe a little extra. Taxes will go up, are going up as we speak. So we have a little less money to pay our mortgages. And we're the kind of people who take out loans to pay for other things, or put it all on credit cards thinking we can pay it off later. And taxes go up again, and we're making minimum payments on credit cards, and and and.
Government is not the solution to our problems. Government, in fact, is the problem. Barry Goldwater said in The Conscience of a Conservative. Ronald Reagan said it in 1964, in the "Time for Choosing" speech. The scariest part of reading Hayek's The Road to Serfdom and Friedman's Free to Choose is knowing that everything they said about the economy during FDR's reign, LBJ's reign, and beyond is true today. It hasn't changed, except the numbers are bigger.
So listening to President Bush's paternalistic, placating speech this morning, I felt that sinking in the pit of my stomach that I suspect one might have felt at the news of the Soviet invasion of Hungary. At the news of the building of the Berlin Wall. That nagging suspicion that we didn't win the Cold War at all, because we didn't win the war of ideas. And the certainty that we never stood a chance, because before the Cold War even began, socialism was spreading across our lands in response to the stock market crash of 1929. Socialism was fed to our parents with their breakfast cereal.
It's a dark, sad day in America. But it is, perhaps, one that we should have seen coming.
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