After America by Mark Steyn

Author:Mark Steyn
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Tags: Politics
Publisher: Regnery Publishing
Published: 2011-07-27T10:00:00+00:00

THERE GOES THE NEIGHBORHOOD

The ruling class divides its subjects into Representation and Taxation categories. Favored groups are those that will expand the dependent class and, therefore, the dependent-administration class. Single women vote 60-something percent for Big Government, in part because, for unwed mothers, government is an absentee father you can always rely on to mail the check.8 About 20 percent of U.S. households are unmanned. Thirty percent of rural women living alone exist below the poverty line.9 One-third of all female-headed households live in poverty.10 Which suits government just fine, because then you’re more willing to serve as a pliant, dependent subject of the benign Sovereign. These worsening statistics do not demonstrate a need for Big Government. They are a consequence of Big Government.

But how pliant will you be when the money runs out and the programs get cut? The “austerity” riots in Greece, France, and the United Kingdom suggest the answer to that.

As for the taxation class, when the statists confiscate more of your dwindling earnings to prop up the wages and pensions of the government workforce and the benefit checks of the dependent class, what do you get in return? The security of the Nanny State? You’ve still got a job, you’ve still got a home, and all that does is make your property and place of employment a target for those who don’t.

Remember our gentleman from 1890 taking a whirl on the time-machine. First we shunted him forward to 1950: wow, was he astonished! Then we pushed him ahead another six decades: this time, not so much. The TV’s flatter, the fridge has an ice-dispenser in the door, but there is no sense, as there was in mid-century, of a great transformative leap. American energy has ebbed palpably; he is seeing the republic in stasis. Suppose we nudge him on just a little further, not decades but a few years—to that same ordinary house lot on a residential street.

His old home still stands, but as he gets his bearings he notices everything seems a little shabbier; even the electronic toys are dinged and scratched, as if the owners have foregone the new models. He looks out back through the bay window: strung across the grass is a sagging clothes line, which he can’t recall seeing back in 2011. But, compared to a washer, it’s “environmentally friendly,” right? So was the hedge, but that’s gone, and the fence is topped with barbed wire. He turns ’round. The front window has bars on it. Outside the car is small and old, and has more color-coded government permits down the driver’s side of the windshield than ever before. But the yard is a mess, as if passers-by are tossing trash in it. And the house across the road—the old Alden place, back in his day—is boarded up.

He steps outside. He’s never seen the street like this. In 1890, it was a pleasant residential neighborhood, never wealthy but neat and maintained. Now half the homes look abandoned. There are “For Sale”

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