Era of 'shallow Americanism'

Waterbury Republican-American ^ | December 31, 2009 | Editorial

Posted on Thursday, December 31, 2009 11:31:43 PM by Graybeard58

"I hate this shallow Americanism which hopes to get rich by credit, to get knowledge by raps on midnight tables, to learn the economy of the mind by phrenology, or skill without study, or mastery without apprenticeship." — Ralph Waldo Emerson

It is in the spirit of delayed gratification that we decline to join the frenzy of decade-in-review commentary, at least until the first decade of the 21st century actually ends on Dec. 31, 2010. But those who share Emerson's disdain for instant gratification need not fret over the vagaries of the calendar. The past year provided ample illustrations of "this shallow Americanism" and its effect on U.S. policy, culture, possibly even its survival as a free nation.

Economists long have understood the concept of creative destruction in business and markets: Sam Walton enters the retail market with a business plan superior to that of his competitors; he gets rich and they vanish. A more recent example is Asian automakers building cars, mainly in Southern states, using nonunion labor. Rather than letting U.S. car companies adapt or die, the Bush and Obama administrations stepped in with $65 billion in loans that kept the old guard in Michigan unsteadily afloat. So: Both administrations substituted their own dubious knowledge for the wisdom of markets, refusing to let the automaking industry evolve at its own speed and in its own way.

National leaders were just as quick to intervene when jobless rates began climbing late last year. The Obama administration in February pushed through a $787 billion "stimulus" plan, promising it would hold the jobless rate under 8 percent. Instead, unemployment topped 10 percent; the best the administration can do is celebrate the recent decline in the rate of job loss. (Wise leaders will leave it to history to decide whether to credit federal policy with preventing Great Depression II.)

But if you work for the local, state or national government, you're probably still pulling down a paycheck. Bloomberg News' Joe Mysak reports U.S. companies have cut 6.29 percent of their work force since employment peaked in December 2007; state governments, 0.28 percent; local governments, 0.8 percent. So it can be said the "stimulus" worked, if its real purpose was to preserve the jobs of unionized government employees.

The accelerating budget deficits and long-term debt at the federal level, as well as in many states including Connecticut, testify to the ceaseless quest for instant gratification. Leaders can't or won't stop giving the people what they want — fat public-employee-union contracts, various forms of welfare, huge and wasteful government programs — and every day they delay, they add new and unimaginable layers of cataclysm to some future day of reckoning.

Americans and their leaders are so war-weary, eight years after 9/11, that President Obama dithered and poll-watched for months before making the right choice on a troop surge in Afghanistan. Chillingly, it's less a matter of no longer believing U.S. forces can prevail, than a lack of conviction that victory matters — an illusion the administration unwittingly encourages by resisting the impulse to talk of winning, and by identifying enemies, from the would-be Christmas Day airline bomber to Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, mastermind of the 9/11 attacks, as criminals to be dealt with in civil courts.

For Democrats in Congress, health-care reform is instant gratification squared. First, the finished product almost certainly will give them uncontested power over one-sixth of the U.S. economy. Second, the deals they cut — $100 million for Sen. Christopher Dodd, D-Conn., to build a new University of Connecticut hospital and bolster his re-election bid; the millions in Medicaid dollars for Nebraska, paid by taxpayers in other states, to silence Sen. Ben Nelson's objections to the prospect of publicly funded killing of unborn babies — add up to a shopping spree for pork-barreling politicians. ("Every state got something," said Sen. Charles Schumer, D-N.Y.) Mr. Obama and legislative leaders consistently have called for the utmost speed, ignoring constituents' pleas that they slow down.

The failure of Copenhagen and the scandal of Climategate notwithstanding, the global-warming juggernaut rolls on. Americans have grown increasingly doubtful of the validity of the "science" behind the climate warnings. Increasingly, it seems it would be easier to change the weather than to persuade U.N. bureaucrats, leading Democratic politicians and others in the global-government movement to abandon their scheme to assert control over how much energy we consume, what we buy, even how many children we have.

What's the solution to these and many other ills? Emerson might not wholeheartedly approve, but the solution may be found in another form of instant gratification — the one Americans will exercise, hopefully with energy and wisdom, on Nov. 2, 2010.