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发帖数: 29846 | 1 Mark Steyn：美国正在走向香蕉共和国；联邦政府再分配财富规模是历史上最大的，神
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American Banana Republic
The decay of a free society doesn’t happen overnight, but we’re getting
there.
By Mark Steyn
‘This is the United States of America,” declared President Obama to the
burghers of Liberty, Mo., on Friday. “We’re not some banana republic.”
He was talking about the Annual Raising of the Debt Ceiling, which glorious
American tradition seems to come round earlier every year. “This is not a
deadbeat nation,” President Obama continued. “We don’t run out on our tab
.” True. But we don’t pay it off either. We just keep running it up, ever
higher. And every time the bartender says, “Mebbe you’ve had enough, pal,
” we protest, “Jush another couple trillion for the road. Set ’em up, Joe
.” And he gives you that look that kinda says he wishes you’d run out on
your tab back when it was $23.68.
Still, Obama is right. We’re not a banana republic, if only because the
debt of banana republics is denominated in a currency other than their own
— i.e., the U.S. dollar. When you’re the guys who print the global
currency, you can run up debts undreamt of by your average generalissimo. As
Obama explained in another of his recent speeches, “Raising the debt
ceiling, which has been done over a hundred times, does not increase our
debt.” I won’t even pretend to know what he and his speechwriters meant by
that one, but the fact that raising the debt ceiling “has been done over a
hundred times” does suggest that spending more than it takes in is now a
permanent feature of American government. And no one has plans to do
anything about it. Which is certainly banana republic-esque.
Is all this spending necessary? Every day, the foot-of-page-37 news stories
reveal government programs it would never occur to your dimestore caudillo
to blow money on. On Thursday, it was the Food and Drug Administration
blowing just shy of $200 grand to find out whether its Twitter and Facebook
presence is “well-received.” A fifth of a million dollars isn’t even a
rounding error in most departmental budgets, so nobody cares. But the FDA is
one of those sclerotic American institutions that has near to entirely
seized up. In October 1920, it occurred to an Ontario doctor called
Frederick Banting that insulin might be isolated and purified and used to
treat diabetes; by January 1923, Eli Lilly & Co were selling insulin to
American pharmacies: A little over two years from concept to market. Now the
FDA adds at least half-a-decade to the process, and your chances of making
it through are far slimmer: As recently as the late Nineties, they were
approving 157 new drugs per half-decade. Today it’s less than half that.
But they’ve got $182,000 to splash around on finding out whether people
really like them on Facebook, or they’re just saying that. So they’ve
given the dough to a company run by Dan Beckmann, a former “new media aide
” to President Obama. That has the whiff of the banana republic about it,
too.
The National Parks Service, which I had carelessly assumed was the service
responsible for running national parks, has been making videos on Muslim
women’s rights: “Islam gave women a whole bunch of rights that Western
women acquired later in the 19th and 20th centuries, and we’ve had these
rights since the seventh century,” explains a lady from AnNur Islamic
School in Schenectady at the National Park Service website, nps.gov.
Fascinating stuff, no doubt. But what’s it to do with national parks? Maybe
the rangers could pay Dan Beckmann a quarter-million bucks to look into
whether the National Parks’ Islamic outreach is using social media as
effectively as it might.
Where do you go to get a piece of this action? As the old saying goes, bank
robbers rob banks because that’s where the money is. But the smart guys rob
taxpayers because that’s where the big money is. According to the Census
Bureau’s latest “American Community Survey,” between 2000 and 2012 the
nation’s median household income dropped 6.6 percent. Yet in the District
of Columbia median household income rose 23.3 percent. According to a 2010
survey, seven of the nation’s ten wealthiest counties are in the Washington
commuter belt. Many capital cities have prosperous suburbs — London, Paris
, Rome — because those cities are also the capitals of enterprise, finance,
and showbiz. But Washington does nothing but government, and it gets richer
even as Americans get poorer. That’s very banana republic, too: Proximity
to state power is now the best way to make money. Once upon a time Americans
found fast-running brooks and there built mills to access the water that
kept the wheels turning. But today the ambitious man finds a big money-no-
object bureaucracy that likes to splash the cash around and there builds his
lobbying group or consultancy or social media optimization strategy group.
The CEO of Panera Bread, as some kind of do-gooder awareness-raising shtick,
is currently attempting to live on food stamps, and not finding it easy.
But being dependent on government handouts isn’t supposed to be easy.
Instead of trying life at the bottom, why doesn’t he try life in the middle
? In 2012, the top 10 percent were taking home 50.4 percent of the nation’s
income. That’s an all-time record, beating out the 49 percent they were
taking just before the 1929 market crash. With government redistributing
more money than ever before, we’ve mysteriously wound up with greater
income inequality than ever before. Across the country, “middle-class”
Americans have accumulated a trillion dollars in college debt in order to
live a less comfortable life than their high-school-educated parents and
grandparents did in the Fifties and Sixties. That’s banana republic, too:
no middle class, but only a government elite and its cronies, and a big
dysfunctional mass underneath, with very little social mobility between the
two.
Like to change that? Maybe advocate for less government spending? Hey, Lois
Lerner’s IRS has got an audit with your name on it. The tax collectors of
the United States treat you differently according to your political beliefs.
That’s pure banana republic, but no one seems to mind very much. This week
it emerged that senior Treasury officials, up to and including Turbotax
Timmy Geithner, knew what was going on at least as early as spring 2012. But
no one seems to mind very much. In the words of an insouciant headline
writer at Government Executive, “the magazine for senior federal
bureaucrats” (seriously), back in May:
“The Vast Majority of IRS Employees Aren’t Corrupt”
So, if the vast majority aren’t, what proportion is corrupt? Thirty-eight
percent? Thirty-three? Twenty-seven? And that’s the good news? The IRS is
not only institutionally corrupt, it’s corrupt in the service of one
political party. That’s Banana Republic 101.
What comes next? Government officials present in Benghazi during last year’
s slaughter have been warned not to make themselves available to
congressional inquiry. CNN obtained one e-mail spelling out the stakes to
CIA employees: “You don’t jeopardize yourself, you jeopardize your family
as well.”
“That’s all very ominous,” wrote my colleague Jonah Goldberg the other
day, perhaps a little too airily for my taste. I’d rank it somewhere north
of “ominous.”
“Banana republic” is an American coinage — by O. Henry, a century ago,
for a series of stories set in the fictional tropical polity of Anchuria.
But a banana republic doesn’t happen overnight; it’s a sensibility, and it
’s difficult to mark the precise point at which a free society decays into
something less respectable. Pace Obama, ever swelling debt, contracts for
cronies, a self-enriching bureaucracy, a shrinking middle class preyed on by
corrupt tax collectors, and thuggish threats against anyone who disagrees
with you put you pretty far down the banana-strewn path.
— Mark Steyn, a National Review columnist, is the author of After America:
Get Ready for Armageddon. © 2013 Mark Steyn | I******I
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