why ‘social democracy’ is in our future
Wow, great editorial. Excerpt (emphasis added), plus some comments…
Yet, one thing we do know: Many Americans now believe many things about their government that are false, and they expect much from the government that the rulers cannot provide. The public at large embraces myths about what the government can do, what it actually does, and how it goes about doing it. Only people enamored of such myths can support, for example, a gigantically expensive health-care “reform” at a time when the present value of the government’s promised future Social Security and Medicare benefits alone amounts to several times the current GDP. (I am disregarding here the interested parties who expect to reap short-run pillage from an intrinsically doomed system.) Until more people come to a more realistic, fact-based understanding of the government and the economy, little hope exists of tearing them away from their quasi-religious attachment to a government they view with misplaced reverence and unrealistic hopes. Lacking a true religious faith yet craving one, many Americans have turned to the state as a substitute god, endowed with the divine omnipotence required to shower the public with something for nothing in every department – free health care, free retirement security, free protection from hazardous consumer products and workplace accidents, free protection from the Islamic maniacs the U.S. government stirs up with its misadventures in the Muslim world, and so forth.
Points made by blog entry (my paraphrasal):
- therapy and diagnosis are different – if you want a support group for your ideology, consult the relevant right- or left-wing news source (depending on your bias); if you want a diagnosis, don’t be upset when one is given
- the general public disagrees on “the problem”
- the general public disagrees on “the solution”
- the (US) public is increasingly replacing belief in formal religion with the (informal) quasi-religious belief in government as the provider (rather than God)
- there is no immediate, “magic bullet” solution
- we should be incredulous of “magic bullet” solutions (flat tax, “public option” in healthcare, etc)
This corresponds with an observation of mine that the US is heading toward Fabian socialism (philosophically): in practice, social democracy. Western Europe is ahead of us in this regard (“ahead of us” is bad, in this case). Think of social democracy as a mix between democracy and socialist ideals. It’s the idea that “communism didn’t work out, but the underlying ideas were valid.”
Of course, that’s false. The irony in all this is that when countries are “converted” into socialist-style democratic systems, the people don’t get to compare such systems with what things would have been like absent those systems. Some people might think of the good ol’ days, but others will naturally prefer the system that “takes care of them” (absent God, someone’s gotta do it!), and while the non-socialist alternative might be substantially better in practice, there’s no way of 1) proving it cogently to the public, or even 2) returning to such a system, since governmental systems win constituencies that prevent such systems from improving over time (Social Security can’t be reformed for this reason).
So we’re left with a deeply flawed system that’s trending worse toward a maddeningly avoidable fate. Well, at least we get eloquent speeches out of all this.