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Posted on 01/19/2012 4:04:41 AM PST by Kaslin
In Greek mythology, the prophetess Cassandra was doomed both to tell the truth and to be ignored. Our modern version is a bankrupt Greece that we seem to discount.
News accounts abound now of impoverished Athens residents scrounging pharmacies for scarce aspirin -- as Greece is squeezed to make interest payments to the supposedly euro-pinching German banks.
Such accounts may be exaggerations, but they should warn us that yearly progress is never assured. Instead, history offers plenty of examples of life becoming far worse than it had been centuries earlier. The biographer Plutarch, writing 500 years after the glories of classical Greece, lamented that in his time weeds grew amid the empty colonnades of the once-impressive Greek city-states. In America, most would prefer to live in the Detroit of 1941 than the Detroit of 2011. The quality of today's air travel has regressed to the climate of yesterday's bus service.
In 2000, Greeks apparently assumed that they had struck it rich with their newfound money-laden European Union lenders -- even though they certainly had not earned their new riches through increased productivity, the discovery of more natural resources, or greater collective investment and savings.
The brief Euro mirage has vanished. Life in Athens is zooming backward to the pre-EU days of the 1970s. Then, most imported goods were too expensive to buy, medical care was often premodern, and the city resembled more a Turkish Istanbul than a European Munich.
The United States should pay heed to the modern Greek Cassandra, since our own rendezvous with reality is rapidly approaching. The costs of servicing a growing national debt of more than $15 trillion are starting to squeeze out other budget expenditures. Americans are no longer affluent enough to borrow hundreds of billions of dollars to import oil, while we snub our noses at vast new oil and gas finds beneath our own soil and seas.
In my state, Californians for 40 years have hiked taxes; grown their government; vastly expanded entitlements; put farmland, timberland and oil and gas lands off limits; and opened their borders to millions of illegal aliens. They apparently assumed that they had inherited so much wealth from prior generations and that their state was so naturally rich, that a continually better life was their natural birthright.
It wasn't. Now, as in Greece, the veneer of civilization is proving pretty thin in California. Hospitals no longer have the money to offer sophisticated long-term medical care to the indigent. Cities no longer have the funds to self-insure themselves from the accustomed barrage of monthly lawsuits. When thieves rip copper wire out of street lights, the streets stay dark. Most state residents would rather go to the dentist these days than queue up and take a number at the Department of Motor Vehicles. Hospital emergency rooms neither have room nor act as if there's much of an emergency.
Traffic flows no better on most of the state's freeways than it did 40 years ago -- and often much worse, given the crumbling infrastructure and increased traffic. Once-excellent K-12 public schools now score near the bottom in nationwide tests. The California state university system keeps adding administrators to the point where they have almost matched the number of faculty, although half of the students who enter CSU need remedial reading and math. Despite millions of dollars in tutoring, half the students still don't graduate. The taxpayer is blamed in constant harangues for not ponying up more money, rather than administrators being faulted for a lack of reform.
In 1960 there were far fewer government officials, far fewer prisons, far fewer laws and far fewer lawyers -- and yet the state was a far safer place than it is a half-century later. Technological progress -- whether iPhones or Xboxes -- can often accompany moral regress. There are not yet weeds in our cities, but those too may be coming.
The average Californian, like the average Greek, forgot that civilization is fragile. Its continuance requires respect for the law, tough-minded education, collective thrift, private investment, individual self-reliance, and common codes of behavior and civility -- and exempts no one from those rules. Such knowledge and patterns of civilized behavior, slowly accrued over centuries, can be lost in a single generation.
A keen visitor to Athens -- or Los Angeles -- during the last decade not only could have seen that things were not quite right, but also could have concluded that they could not go on as they were. And so they are not.
Washington, please take heed.
Thanks
Sadly a lot of what is written could easily describe where I live,South Australia.
mark
There are some successful socialist nations in the world but they do not operate under Democrat principles. Example Canada, Australia, and Sweden are successful socialist nations. They have cradle to grave, high taxes. They share three common traits, one large geography, small population and willingness to exploit its natural resources that help subsidize the socialist programs. These nations do not have open borders and they want immigrants that bring immediate talent and wealth to the nation. CA is large in size, but they refuse to exploit its resources and willing to have anyone come into the state as long as they will vote for the Democrat party and support local Chamber of Commerce for cheap labor. Result is employed immigrant has such a low salary that they immediately are entitled to welfare, food stamps and etc. Since CA wants to treat the entire state as a Yellowstone National Park, no resources can be mined, drilled or harvested. The only thing CA is willing to do is tax and tax. Will American socialists (Dem Party) be willing to exploit natural resources for income and cut back illegal immigration? Never because they will not win elections that way. Thus the socialist utopia done American style will go bankrupt.
bfl
“small population”
small HOMOGENEOUS population....
The costs of the entitlement state are already taking an axe to US Military strength. They will cause more and more Americans to be willing to support higher taxes on "the rich" to keep it going a few more years. States are increasingly making social-policy decisions - legalizing casino gambling, e.g. - for no other reason than "we need the money." Immigration policy will increasingly be discussed, as it already is in Canada and Europe, in terms of the need to keep the taxes flowing in.
Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid have completely changed this country and its likely future.
VDH is beating a dead horse. He should choose life and follow Art Laffer. He should like Art Laffer leave California and take his business, lock, stock, and barrel elsewhere.
Laffer chose Tennessee.
You got it. Like an addict getting money in any way possible for his next fix. Beg, borrow, steal (like make someone else pay higher taxes) or compromise morals (like prostitution for an addict or legalizing gambling for a state). It all comes back to wanting to live above our means at a national level. And when the check comes due it gets ugly.
Sweden is in decline. It was in 4th place in the 70’s and has steadily declined since. Classic case of ‘tragedy of the commons’?
Storm clouds ahead, prepare accordingly.
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I would opine that the main key is the willingness (and the opportunity) to exploit natural resources for income. If a country has vast wealth of minerals or forests etc. it can appear to be doing very well as long as those resources can be sold to other countries but there must be an extraordinary income source that does not depend on the industry of the citizens because the collectivist type of government kills initiative to the point that no one wants to work hard unless he can find a way to shelter his production from the ravages of vultures in government. The idea of socialism actually working in an economy that depends on the hard work of individuals is laughable to anyone who is not willfully blind to reality.
Of course “working” is a term that must be defined. Even with extraordinary income socialism can work only if you consider a country of children who have not learned to accept adult responsibility as working.
I think a great illustration of what has happened is the fact that I, born in 1944, was looked on as an oddity at best and a failure at worst because I did not have a wife and children by the time I turned 23! Any young man who tries to do that at such a young age now would be considered very unrealistic and irresponsible. It would be hard to find a male of 23 outside the military now who can support himself alone.
I finally married two days after my 28th birthday and people were amazed! I had waited so long that most had decided I intended to be single until death. Now young people think 28 is too young to consider marriage.
sobering indeed, but obvious to anyone who bothers to pay attention...Thanks Sir...
Civilization is indeed crumbling and may go as far as the pyramids coming down, if the muslims have their way.
Granted, it's not a straight-line decline as there are high marks, but the general trend seems to be down away from American exceptionalism.
They shouted that Marxism will not work. It won't. That it inevitably ends in disaster. It does.
They've been shouting that the Mainstream Newsmedia is dangerously misleading the American people. It is.
They have been shouting warning for decades; yet millions of Americans refuse to listen!
The people of the world fall naturally into two groups: the Cassandras and the Stone Deaf! It's hard to know which is worse off.
Cassandra has been cloned! But millions refuse to listen! No matter how loud the screams!
That is the tragedy of Cassandra. To see but to be unable to warn.
I know just how she feels.
BTW--note tagline.
I’ve been photographing the streets and subways of New York for the past 30 years. When young people today look at my shots from the 1980’s, they are aghast. To them, New York of the 1980’s is almost unrecognizable. And they are right. Some older people are nostalgic for “the good old days.” For example, they remember the Times Square of the 80’s… And what they remember is not so much the danger but the grittiness and (for lack of a better word) the authenticity. Yes, there was sleaze, but there were also video arcades, cheap movies, restaurants, and weird places. These same people resent the “Disney-ification” of Times Square and the gentrification of virtually all of Manhattan and many areas of the boroughs, and the loss of cheap housing and local stores everywhere.
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