I wrote the op-ed below when I was suffering from sinus blockage and extreme fatigue in the aftermath of the flu – the most miserably ill I’ve been in a long time.
Suffice it to say, I’m not very happy with the effort. There’s all kinds of things I wanted to say to make the point more forcefully. The point being a set of questions:
What the hell makes us think we can run up a multi-trillion dollar debt and not ruin our country?
After watching centrally-planned economies fail all over the place during the 1980s and 90s, what makes us think we’re so damned brilliant we can nationalize significant fractions of our economy and make it work?
Those two are some of the more obvious things pretty much everyone can see. A point most Americans can be forgiven for missing, because it’s not a datum that’s given much publicity in coverage of world news, is: When drastic shifts in the demographic make-up of countries often precedes civil wars and the breakup of nations, what makes us think we are an exception?
When all of Europe is demonstrably in demographic decline, and their welfare states are mathematically provable to be unsustainable in the long-run (i.e. one-two generations max) why are our elites looking to them for a model of our social welfare institutions?
I could think of a number of others, but it pretty much boils down to: What makes us think we’re immune to the consequenses of every damn dumb course of action that’s brought down other great nations throughout history?
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