THE MYTH OF ABUNDANCE
When I was growing up it was unusual for families to have two cars in my middle class, leafy suburban hometown. Although wives normally did not work, virtually every adult had very green memories of the Great Depression when they had been intimately acquainted with the realities of scarcity. Families watched their pennies, paid their mortgages and contrived to send their kids to college if they could do so by frugality. It was assumed that in order to do A you would have to sacrifice B, in other words, if you wanted a new car you might have to do without a vacation trip and more besides. My parents double-paid their mortgage because they feared debt. That was the mindset of a generation well acquainted with the realities of scarcity. These considerations, of course, applied to healthcare in those days before technology and government combined to drive the costs into the stratosphere.
Today there are welfare families with big-screen televisions, iPhones, automobiles and an expectation that their basic needs, including healthcare, should and would be covered by the government if necessary, or even if required by convenience. The idea that they might live in a world of scarce resources does not occur to them because the welfare state has created a bubble-world of abundance for them. Unlike my parents, they do not feel scarcity. They may be envious of those who have more but that is a different emotion and a different state of mind. This state of mind is fed by politicians like Kamala Harris and poses an atmosphere in which it is safe for her to join other progressives in declaring that healthcare is a "right."
We conservatives believe that the decision about where to invest resources should be made by those who own the resources and by those who will be directly affected by the decision. We equate this decision-making with liberty. When my ancestor was told by George III that his Majesty and Parliament in London would make those decisions, he made war. He was well acquainted with the realities of scarcity. He was the original pioneer in his Valley, his son was murdered by Indians, his other son was a hunting companion of Daniel Boone. In other words, they live in a world in which getting through the winter was a real concern. The decisions he made were life-and-death and were very carefully measured because scarcity was the reality. Small wonder he objected on hearing that the decisions about where and how to allocate his resources should be made by a monarch 3000 miles across the sea.
Throughout my youth, despite the incursions into the marketplace by the new deal, we conservatives held to these principles, that those who have the resources and are most affected by the disposition of those resources should be the ones to decide where and how allocate them with the least possible redistribution or government interference. Later when I entered college in the early 60s, Camelot reintroduced the progressive view of the world. As part of a college program, we were required to read The Affluent Society over the summer and write a report first thing upon our return to college. Essentially, The Affluent Society, itself had an agenda, to rationalize the taking of our liberty and vesting it in the state.
Galbraith , the author, exploited his facility with a pen and succeeded in convincing a large portion of our people that the elites who run the think tanks and the universities as well as the government regulators are smarter than we are. His proof that we are stupid? We waste money on big fins attached to the back ends of our automobiles but fail to spend that money for the programs which later came to be known under the rubric, The Great Society. How much better to do away with all that useless chrome on automobiles and use that money thus saved to build schools and hospitals! In fact, so well did Galbraith succeed that the popular justification for the great society was laid down in this book and ultimately accepted by the public at large.
Vance Packard contributed his book, The Hidden Persuaders which told Americans that they were hopelessly manipulated by Madison Avenue and were too brainwashed to make clearheaded consumer choices. The inference again, we are too stupid to retain control over our own assets or to allocate our resources as we judge the best risk.
My conservative principles, although not yet tempered, were strong enough and clear enough to see that the question was individual liberty versus collective control. Once one accepts Galbraith's premise, that society exercising individual choice squanders its resources, the argument is virtually over. One must maintain the conservative high ground, that individual liberty is worth some inevitable waste. That waste is the price we pay for innovation, for growth, and ultimately for economic and political freedom. Finally, that waste, compared to the institutionalized waste committed by government, is cheap indeed. Government cannot cut waste because government itself is the ultimate moral hazard. Ultimately, the question is one of liberty, do you want to pay the price the Italians paid to make their trains run on time?
To college professors, the temptation to make the trains run on time is irresistible. Galbraith's career itself demonstrates that. These were the heady days on The New Frontier. We had thrown off the shackles of the boring 1950s and we had inherited from that decade wealth beyond our experience. The Kennedy new frontier professors were focused on how to get their hands on that wealth while forgetting how it was created. No, they did not want it for themselves, unlike today's professors who are handsomely stipended, they wanted a great society to do good with it. Lyndon Johnson gave them a chance and our eletes gave us The Great Society. We are learning from the likes of Kamala Harris that doing good ain't got no end.
Even today in this world of near infinite ability to print money (at least for a finite period of time) we concern ourselves, but only superficially, about the danger of "moral hazard," the risk that saving the profligate and the unwise by government intervention from the financial consequences of their folly only encourages profligacy, grievous waste of resources and irrational risk. We indulge in moral hazard simply because it is politically rewarding to do so. We provide federal insurance to those who build summer homes at the seashore at great risk of flooding, thus encouraging the building of those homes because the risk has been passed to the taxpayer.
We see crony capitalism at all levels from the awarding of taxicab medallions to the building of electric cars and, infamously, the subsidizing of unsound solar panel companies who coincidently donate heavily to Democrats. The last great credit crash of 2008 was generated in large part by the belief that there was no risk inherent in unsound mortgages because the government was there in the event of default. If German banks are at risk of bankruptcy because of Greek debt default, save the banks and pass the risk to the taxpayers. If the entire world financial system is about to crash in 24 hours, as the world's most eminent financial gurus told a flabbergasted President George Bush one afternoon in 2008, intervene! Print money!
I contend that we actually live not in the world of abundance but in a world of scarcity. Our resources are too scarce to admit as Kamala Harris does in one breath that we should have the equivalent of open borders and no enforcement by ICE and in the next breath demand that health care be free for all illegal immigrants. As Milton Friedman said, you cannot have open borders in a welfare state. But our current situation deceives us and leads politicians like Harris to indulge in fantasies. She can do this because, as the reserve currency of the world and as the still surviving economic superpower, we simply print money when we want more socialism. There is no reckoning. Yet when one is undeceived by the bubble, one comes to realize that we cannot live at our current standard without borrowing $1 trillion a year. We have no political will to live at a less opulent standard because we have no sense of scarcity.
We do not expect Marxist progressives to have an undeceived comprehension of the real world because their whole life turns on seeing the world in a way that simply baffles us. The progressive Weltanschauung is oxymoronic, progressives believe that the amount of wealth is static and fairness demands that what there it must be redistributed by government. At the same time, they myopically deny that their regulations, their taxes and their moral hazards all combine to freeze that pool of wealth and prevent it from growing as it failed to do so obviously under Obama. All the while they simply assume that the money will be there for the most fantastic and lavish welfare schemes such as those advanced by Camilla Harris on behalf of illegal aliens. Annastasia Occasional-Cortex is so flagrant and so ignorant that her wet dreams along these lines simply mark her as childish. But these leftist politicians uniformly get away with this nonsense because we live in a world of funny money where everyone wants to keep the music playing.
No, we cannot have universal free health care at any reasonable standard while we have open borders, thirteen super carriers, a new Space Force, while we also educate and medicate untold millions of illegal intruders, squander money at our educational institutions and subsidize crony capitalist enterprises unless we are able to continue borrowing $1 trillion a year.
This music will not play forever.
