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Obama Says A Baby Is A Punishment
Obama: “If they make a mistake, I don’t want them punished with a baby.”
... But forget the money, the deficit, the debt, the big numbers with the 12 zeroes on the end of them. So-called fiscal conservatives often miss the point. The problem isn't the cost. These programs would still be wrong even if Bill Gates wrote a check to cover them each month. They're wrong because they deform the relationship between the citizen and the state. Even if there were no financial consequences, the moral and even spiritual consequences would still be fatal. That's the stage where Europe is ...
... The story of the Western world since 1945 is that, invited to choose between freedom and government "security," large numbers of people vote to dump freedom every time — the freedom to make your own decisions about health care, education, property rights, and a ton of other stuff. It's ridiculous for grown men and women to say: I want to be able to choose from hundreds of cereals at the supermarket, thousands of movies from Netflix, millions of songs to play on my iPod — but I want the government to choose for me when it comes to my health care. A nation that demands the government take care of all the grown-up stuff is a nation turning into the world's wrinkliest adolescent, free only to choose its record collection.
And don't be too sure you'll get to choose your record collection in the end. That's Stage Three: When the populace has agreed to become wards of the state, it's a mere difference of degree to start regulating their thoughts. ...
... "Give people plenty and security, and they will fall into spiritual torpor," wrote Charles Murray in In Our Hands. "When life becomes an extended picnic, with nothing of importance to do, ideas of greatness become an irritant. Such is the nature of the Europe syndrome."
The key word here is "give." When the state "gives" you plenty — when it takes care of your health, takes cares of your kids, takes care of your elderly parents, takes care of every primary responsibility of adulthood — it's not surprising that the citizenry cease to function as adults: Life becomes a kind of extended adolescence — literally so for those Germans who've mastered the knack of staying in education till they're 34 and taking early retirement at 42. ...
Genteel decline can be very agreeable — initially: You still have terrific restaurants, beautiful buildings, a great opera house. And once the pressure's off it's nice to linger at the sidewalk table, have a second café au lait and a pain au chocolat, and watch the world go by. At the Munich Security Conference in February, President Sarkozy demanded of his fellow Continentals, "Does Europe want peace, or do we want to be left in peace?" To pose the question is to answer it. Alas, it only works for a generation or two. And it's hard to come up with a wake-up call for a society as dedicated as latterday Europe to the belief that life is about sleeping in.
... Conservatives often talk about "small government," which, in a sense, is framing the issue in leftist terms: they're for big government. But small government gives you big freedoms — and big government leaves you with very little freedom. The bailout and the stimulus and the budget and the trillion-dollar deficits are not merely massive transfers from the most dynamic and productive sector to the least dynamic and productive. When governments annex a huge chunk of the economy, they also annex a huge chunk of individual liberty. You fundamentally change the relationship between the citizen and the state into something closer to that of junkie and pusher — and you make it very difficult ever to change back. Americans face a choice: They can rediscover the animating principles of the American idea — of limited government, a self-reliant citizenry, and the opportunities to exploit your talents to the fullest — or they can join most of the rest of the Western world in terminal decline. To rekindle the spark of liberty once it dies is very difficult. The inertia, the ennui, the fatalism is more pathetic than the demographic decline and fiscal profligacy of the social democratic state, because it's subtler and less tangible. But once in a while it swims into very sharp focus. Here is the writer Oscar van den Boogaard from an interview with the Belgian paper De Standaard. Mr. van den Boogaard, a Dutch gay "humanist" (which is pretty much the trifecta of Eurocool), was reflecting on the accelerating Islamification of the Continent and concluding that the jig was up for the Europe he loved. "I am not a warrior, but who is?" he shrugged. "I have never learned to fight for my freedom. I was only good at enjoying it." In the famous Kubler-Ross five stages of grief, Mr. van den Boogard is past denial, anger, bargaining and depression, and has arrived at a kind of acceptance.
"I have never learned to fight for my freedom. I was only good at enjoying it." Sorry, doesn't work — not for long. Back in New Hampshire, General Stark knew that. Mr. van den Boogard's words are an epitaph for Europe. Whereas New Hampshire's motto — "Live free or die!" — is still the greatest rallying cry for this state or any other. About a year ago, there was a picture in the papers of Iranian students demonstrating in Tehran and waving placards. And what they'd written on those placards was: "Live free or die!" They understand the power of those words; so should we
Nailed It!
Moral Clarity BUMP !
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Classic Steynism...
Steyn is a blessing.
Succession of a few states and a freedom alliance without bureaucracy might be the only way to save the spark.
Thanks for posting!
Can someone explain to me what he is getting at in saying that California with 30something million people and Quebec with 7something million people have the same number of government employees? It would seem that this would be a “good” thing, that California, with more than four times the population “manages” with the same number of gov’t employees.
I love Mark Steyn but his point here has eluded me.
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Thanks for the post. As usual, Mark Steyn goes far, far beyond the usual superficial observation of societal decline.
I wonder, does anyone know if this speech is available in audio format? (I find that much of Steyn - particularly his wit - gets “lost in the translation” from speech to print.)
Well, almost. I think Steyn has made a mistake here. He seems to be looking at things as if there were still some hunk of Western Civilization that's still out there working properly, ready to pick up the slack.
It's a natural enough assumption that's worked pretty well for the last 600 years or so. In that scenario, parts of the West simply decline relative to whatever robust segment still exists, and new ideas eventually filter back into the other countries. But can we really assume that?
Rather than looking back on the history of the West, Mr. Steyn might be better served by looking back at Rome, which represented a monolithic and decaying culture that is probably more similar to what we have today.
Steyn quotes Charles Murray: "When life becomes an extended picnic, with nothing of importance to do, ideas of greatness become an irritant."
That's where we come to the real point: when life ceases to be an extended picnic, then what? That's the question that should be of real concern to us.
I read this piece when my Impromptus came yesterday. It was so good, I couldn’t wait to make lots of other people read it. Even for Steyn this is brilliant. It should be required reading in schools. That is, if schools still teach reading.
Mark Steyn is a treasure.
BTTT + bookmark
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