Mark Steyn's Blog, page 53

The Downgrade Begins

As the author of a suitably apocalyptic book to be released on Monday, I'm grateful to Standard & Poor's for providing the ultimate publicity tie-in. (Junk rating by the time of the paperback edition?) The frivolousness of the political theater in Washington this last month and its mostly fraudulent media coverage did huge damage to the United States. It confirmed to the world, as S&P's analysis suggests, that Washington is institutionally incapable of genuine reform. This was one of those it's-the-music-not-the-lyrics moments: As damaging as the specifics of the "deal" were, the broader sub-text of a political class pretending that it was meaningful was even more so.  

We don't have till 2021. As I say in my column tomorrow, we have till mid-decade to turn this thing around, or it's over. That's where the politico-media Beltway myopia failed the nation. It never occurred to any of the parties or the play-by-play commentators that their dramatically negotiated plans for - what was it now? - $7-12 billion of cuts in FY2012 would not be taken seriously by the world. That's the heart of the S&P critique - its remarks about "the effectiveness, stability, and predictability of American policymaking and political institutions". In other words, the "deal" only confirmed the nature of the problem.

Now that it's happened, it's hard to argue that there was anything very obviously triple-A about America in 2011. So ask yourself this: If in 2013 we're still talking in the terms of this week's deal, you want to bet we'll still be AA+*?

(*Oddly enough, $&P have downgraded the US to the initials of my book. Thanks, guys!)       

When Obama Hands You Lemons . . .

. . . the state enforcers won't let you make lemonade.

Iain Murray wrote yesterday about the spate of lemonade-stand crackdowns by this once great republic's depraved regulatory class. This is not a small thing. A land in which a child requires hundreds of dollars of permits to sell homemade lemonade in his front yard is, in a profound sense, no longer free: It is exactly the kind of micro-regulatory tyranny of which Tocqueville warned two centuries ago.

Guest-hosting for Rush a week or two back, I suggested en passant that we needed a children's version of the Tea Party -- a Lemonade Party. I see now that a concerned citizen is organizing a Lemonade Freedom Day for August 20th.

By the way, our fellow NR cruiser Ed Driscoll has posted an excerpt from my new book about another curious priority of the control freaks of the Brokest Nation In History: The church bake-sale pie crackdown. I hesitate to channel Martin Niemöller ("First they came for the kid next door's lemonade stand and I did nothing, then they came for the widder woman across the street's maple pecan pie"), but this is a sustained assault by the state on civic participation, and thus on citizenship itself.

The proper response of any self-respecting seven-year-old girl on being told she needs the state's permission to sell homemade lemonade is, "You'll never take me alive, copper!"

Managing the Liberal State More "Efficiently"

Andy's right. This is the wrong turf on which to fight. Indeed, it is a depressingly European argument - that the "right"-of-"center" party can through sheer attention to detail make the left-wing state run more efficiently. You never can. The ratchet effect of Big Government is such that the minute you turn your back it resumes its inexorable growth.

Any credible Republican candidate should be proposing the closing or wholesale privatization of departments, bureaus and agencies. If you're not, you're not serious.

My imminently forthcomingly imminent forthcoming book has a consistent message - that the projections for this and that for 2030, 2050, 2080 are all irrelevant. We have half-a-decade to turn this around. If we really intend (as is apparently foreseen by our bipartisan saviors) to add $7-10 trillion to the debt by 2020, then America is over - because clearly there is no intention ever to repay that money, and the world will make its dispositions accordingly.

As I mentioned a few weeks ago, the US Secretary of Education is the only education minister in the developed world with his personal SWAT team. That's to say, only in America can education bureaucrats execute warrants and kick your door down and stick a gun in your face. It's not a question of "capping" the rate of growth of the budget of the SWAT team. Nor of scrapping the SWAT team. It's about abolishing an entirely superfluous government department.

The Democrats want to plunge over the cliff at full throttle. Too many Republicans think it will be fine as long as we go over the edge in third gear.

One final thought: Victor Davis Hanson has a poignant vignette today - the death of Denise McVay, a member of California's dwindling productive class murdered by one of the ever swollen ranks of a leisured underclass. Read the offensively fatalistic shrug of a statement from what passes for law enforcement in that state. Anyone who thinks a post-prosperity America is in for genteel post-war Euro-style decline is deluded.  

Suddenly It All Makes Sense

If you're not impressed by the historic bipartisan resolution of the debt crisis in Washington, public health officials in British Columbia may be able to help you:

Vancouver Coastal Health To Hand Out $50,000 Worth Of Crack Pipes

On to the Next Landmark Achievement!

One can but admire the ability of ABC News headline writers to type with a straight face:

With Debt Crisis Averted, Obama Looks To Jobs

Them and Us

I always enjoy reading Brendan O'Neill, and am grateful for his robust defense of free speech against the pro-censorship left, but I think this is a wee bit unfair:

Now, as it happens, I disagree with pretty much everything Sarrazin says about the problems afflicting modern Europe. The key problem with the arguments made by him, Steyn, Phillips and others, all of whom say in a roundabout way that once Enlightened Europe is now capitulating to the demands of seriously separatist Muslim immigrants and their representatives, is that it presents an internal crisis of European culture as an external assault on the European citadel by the beard-and-burqa lobby. Their narrow critique of multiculturalism fails to understand that the origins of Europe’s profound crisis of identity lie in an inner moral malaise, in a loss of faith in Enlightenment values in London, Paris and Berlin, rather than in the antics of any external army of foreigners.

I can't speak for anybody else, but I've never said the problem is "an external assault" by "the beard-and-burqa lobby." Quite the opposite, in fact:

My book, supposedly Islamaphobic, isn’t even really about Islam. The single most important line in it is the profound observation, by historian Arnold Toynbee, that "Civilizations die from suicide, not murder." One manifestation of that suicidal urge is illiberal notions harnessed in the cause of liberalism. In calling for the introduction of Sharia, the Archbishop of Canterbury joins a long list of Western appeasers, including a Dutch cabinet minister who said if the country were to vote to introduce Islamic law that would be fine by him, and the Swedish cabinet minister who said we should be nice to Muslims now so that Muslims will be nice to us when they’re in the majority.

Ultimately, our crisis is not about Islam. It’s not about fire-breathing Imams or polygamists whooping it up on welfare. It’s not about them. It’s about us.

That's been my position for years: In fact, almost exactly half a decade ago, I was in Sydney giving a speech called "It's Not Them, It's Us."

A Post-American Planet

That thoughtful observer of the passing parade, Nancy Pelosi, weighed in on the “debt ceiling” negotiations the other day: “What we’re trying to do is save the world from the Republican budget. We’re trying to save life on this planet as we know it today.”

It’s always good to have things explained in terms we simpletons can understand. After a while, all the stuff about debt-to-GDP ratio and CBO alternative baseline scenarios starts to give you a bit of a headache, so we should be grateful to the House minority leader for putting it in layman’s terms: What’s at stake is “life on this planet as we know it today.” So, if right now you’re living anywhere in the general vicinity of this planet, it’s good to know Nancy’s in there pitching for you.

#ad# What about life on this planet tomorrow? How’s that look if Nancy gets her way? The Democrat model of governance is to spend $4 trillion while only collecting $2 trillion, borrowing the rest from tomorrow. Instead of “printing money,” we’re printing credit cards and pre-approving our unborn grandchildren. To facilitate this proposition, Washington created its own form of fantasy accounting: “baseline budgeting,” under which growth-in-government is factored in to federal bookkeeping as a permanent feature of life. As Arthur Herman of the American Enterprise Institute pointed out this week, under present rules, if the government were to announce a spending freeze -- that’s to say, no increases, no cuts, everything just stays exactly the same -- the Congressional Budget Office would score it as a $9 trillion savings. In real-world terms, there are no “savings,” and there’s certainly no $9 trillion. In fact, there isn’t one thin dime. But nevertheless, that’s how it would be measured at the CBO.

Around the world, most folks have to work harder than that to save $9 trillion. That’s roughly the combined GDPs of Japan and Germany. But in America it’s an accounting device. This is something to bear in mind when you’re listening to the amount of “savings” touted by whatever triumphant bipartisan deal is announced at the eleventh hour in Washington.

So I find myself less interested in “life on this planet as we know it today” than in life on this planet as we’re likely to know it tomorrow if Nancy Pelosi and her chums decline to reacquaint themselves with reality. If you kinda dig life on this planet as you know it, ask yourself this: What’s holding the joint up? As the old gag goes, if you owe the bank a thousand dollars, you have a problem; if you owe the bank a million dollars, the bank has a problem. If you owe the banks 15,000,000,000,000 dollars, the planet has a problem. Whatever comparisons one might make with Europe’s soi-disant “PIIGS” re debt per capita or deficit-to-GDP ratio, the sheer hard numbers involved represent a threat to the planet that Portugal or Ireland does not. It also represents a threat to Americans. Three years ago, the first developed nation to hit the skids was Iceland. But, unless you’re Icelandic, who cares? And, if you are Icelandic, you hunker down, readjust to straitened circumstances , and a few years down the line Iceland will still be Iceland and, if that’s your bag, relatively pleasant.

That’s not an option for the U.S. We are chugging a highly toxic cocktail: 21st-century spendaholic government with mid-20th-century assumptions about American power. After the Battle of Saratoga, Adam Smith replied to a pal despondent that the revolting colonials were going to be the ruin of Britain: “There is a great deal of ruin in a nation,” said a sanguine Smith.

That’s generally true. Americans of a certain bent looking at post-war France or Germany might reasonably conclude what’s the big deal about genteel decline. The difference, of course, is that Europe’s decline was cushioned by America. Who’s around to cushion America’s decline?

If the IMF is correct (a big if), China will be the planet’s No.1 economy by 2016. That means whoever’s elected in November next year will be the last president of the United States to preside over the world’s dominant economic power. As I point out in my rollicking new book, which will be hitting what’s left of the post-Borders bookstore business any day now, this will mark the end of two centuries of Anglophone dominance -- first by London, then its greatest if prodigal son. The world’s economic superpower will not only be a Communist dictatorship with a largely peasant population and legal, political, and cultural traditions as alien to its predecessors as possible, but, even more civilizationally startling, it will be, unlike the U.S., Britain, and the Dutch and Italians before them, a country that doesn’t even use the Roman alphabet.

#page#

The American economy has been “stimulated” to a bloody pulp by the racketeers in Washington, mostly to buy off approved interests. Meanwhile, as Nancy defends life on this planet today, the contours of life on this planet tomorrow are beginning to emerge.

Remember the Libyan War? Oh, come on. It was in all the papers for a couple of days. And then, oddly enough, the media lost interest in Obama’s war.

#ad# But it’s still going on, out there on the fringes of the map. “We are generally in a stalemate,” Adm. Mike Mullen, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, announced to a roomful of chirping crickets the other day. At the start of NATO’s desultory bombing campaign, the French and the British were demanding that Qaddafi be removed from power, leave Libya, and be put on trial at the Hague. Last week, they subtly modified their position: He can remain in Libya, but he definitely has to step down from power. Expect further modifications in their next ultimatum: He can remain in the presidential palace, but he has to move to the poky guest bedroom under the eaves.

Meanwhile, the Lockerbie bomber has been appearing at delirious pro-Qaddafi rallies. Remember the Lockerbie bomber? He was returned to Libya because he was terminally ill and only had three months to live. That was two years ago. It’s amazing what getting out of the care of the Scottish National Health Service can do for your life expectancy. Likewise, back in the spring, NATO declared that Qaddafi’s presidency only had three weeks to live. Like his compatriot, he seems disinclined to follow the diagnosis.

The Libyan War never caught the imagination of the American public, even though you’re paying for most of it. But in Tehran and Moscow and Beijing they’re following it. And they regard it as a useful preview of the post-American world. Absent American will, even a tinpot desert drag queen can stand up to the great powers and survive. The lesson of Obama’s half-hearted little war isn’t lost in the chancelleries of America’s enemies.

For dominant powers in decline, it starts with the money, for Washington as for London and Rome before it. But it never stops there. The horizons shrivel. Two-bit provocateurs across the map pick off remnants of the old order with ever greater ease.

America has had two roles in a so-called “globalized” world: America’s government was the guarantor of global order; America’s economy was the engine of global prosperity. Right now, both roles are up for grabs. And there are no takers for the former. Pace Nancy Pelosi, “life on this planet as we know it today” is going to change, and very fast.

--- Mark Steyn, a National Review columnist, is author of the forthcoming After America: Get Ready for Armageddon. © 2011 Mark Steyn

Dollar for Dollar

I agree with Andy. It's not a dollar-for-dollar match if Obama gets an extra trillion bucks in his pocket now in return for 900-and-whatever billion stretched out over ten years. That formula's a crock.

Furthermore, at some point the crock risks straining the ratings system beyond repair. Just as Obama and Boehner want credit for talking about cuts with having to cut anything, S&P and Moody's want credit for musing on downgrading without actually having to do it. That's understandable: downgrading the United States has consequences that downgrading Ireland and Portugal doesn't. But, having flopped out in 2008, they want something on the record this time round.

I don't think that will be enough. The European Union, you'll recall, was fulminating against the ratings gang a couple of weeks back, and threatening to criminalize them. I regard the EU as a pestilence and have no use for the Euro, but their complaint is not without merit - as I noted in my weekend column. Nobody in Greece, Portugal, Spain or Ireland is talking about "out years" and exciting plans for spending cuts in 2020. They're getting on with it now - and they're still being downgraded.

By contrast, both US political parties are playing croquet on the lawn in August 1914 - and the ratings agencies are stringing along with them. Whatever the comparisons of debt-to-GDP ratios between Greece, Ireland and the US, the actual hard dollar amount involved here is of an entirely different order. The Boehner plan tells us that real fiscal discipline is impossible within the US political system. At some point, the ratings guys have to call them on it - or render their system meaningless.  

The Debt Mountain Labored and Brought Forth a Mouse

With respect, Rich, your correspondent needs to get out of the House more. The $7 billion that he calls "a real, enforceable cut for FY2012" represents what the Government of the United States currently borrows every 37 hours.

If the CBO's scoring is correct - that it reduces the 2012 deficit by just $1 billion - then the "cut" represents what the United States borrows every five hours and 20 minutes. In other words, in the time it takes to photocopy and distribute Boehner's "plan", the savings have all been borrowed back.

As for the rest, I'm philosophically opposed to "entitlements" because they strike at one of the most basic principles of representative government - that a parliament cannot bind its successor. But the same objection applies to jelly-spined legislators announcing grand plans for bazillions of savings years after their term of office has expired. Who knows what'll be happening in 2017? Maybe North Korea will accidentally nuke the South Sandwich Islands and we'll be expected to chip in for reconstruction.

That leaves now. And, in terms of spending now now now, the entire political class has made itself a global laughingstock. A month of shuttling back and forth between the Capitol and the White House for "a real, enforceable cut" of $1-7 billion? Boehner might as well have gone to the Turks & Caicos for July and worked on his tan.

Downgrade's a-comin'.  

Islamophobia and Mass Murder

I have been away from the Internet for the weekend, and return to find myself being fitted out for a supporting role in Friday's evil slaughter in Norway. The mass murderer Breivik published a 1,500-page "manifesto". It quotes me, as well as several friends of NR - Theodore Dalrymple, Daniel Pipes, Roger Scruton, Melanie Phillips, Daniel Hannan (plus various pieces from NR by Rod Dreher and others) - and many other people, including Churchill, Gandhi, Orwell, Jefferson, John Locke, Edmund Burke, Bernard Shaw, Mark Twain, not to mention the US Declaration of Independence. Those new “hate speech” codes the left is already clamoring for might find it easier just to list the authors Europeans will still be allowed to read.

It is unclear how seriously this "manifesto" should be taken. Parts of it simply cut and paste chunks of the last big killer "manifesto" by Ted Kaczynski, with the occasional [insert-your-cause-here] word substitute replacing the Unabomber's obsessions with Breivik's. This would seem an odd technique to use for a sincerely meant political statement. The entire document is strangely anglocentric - in among the citations of NR and The Washington Times, there's not a lot about Norway.

Nevertheless, Breivik's manifesto seems to be determining the narrative in the anglophone media. The opening sentence from USA Today:

Islamophobia has reached a mass murder level in Norway as the confessed killer claims he sought to combat encroachment by Muslims into his country and Europe.

So, if a blonde blue-eyed Aryan Scandinavian kills dozens of other blonde blue-eyed Aryan Scandinavians, that's now an “Islamophobic" mass murder? As far as we know, not a single Muslim was among the victims. Islamophobia seems an eccentric perspective to apply to this atrocity, and comes close to making the actual dead mere bit players in their own murder. Yet the Associated Press is on board:

Security Beefed Up At UK Mosques After Norway Massacre.

But again: No mosque was targeted in Norway. A member of the country’s second political party gunned down members of its first. But, in the merest evolution of post-9/11 syndrome, Muslims are now the preferred victims even in a story in which they are entirely absent. A Tweeter thinks that "turning this scumbag's atrocity in Norway into a lesson about how Mark Steyn and his ilk are douchebags seems... opportunistic", but that's the least of it. Even by the elastic definitions of “Islamophobia”, the angle being pursued is bizarre and profoundly tasteless: A rambling Internet pdf is trumping the facts on the ground – trumping the specifics of what occurred, and the victims. This man Breivik may think he's making history and bestriding the geopolitical currents and the clash of civilizations, but in the end he went and shot up his neighbors. Why let his self-aggrandizing bury the reality?

Any of us who write are obliged to weigh our words, and accept the consequences of them. But, when a Norwegian man is citing Locke and Burke as a prelude to gunning down dozens of Norwegian teenagers, he is lost in his own psychoses. Free societies can survive the occasional Breivik. If Norway responds to this as the left appears to wish, by shriveling even further the bounds of public discourse, freedom will have a tougher time.