Viewing with alarm

It occurs to me I haven’t viewed with alarm lately. Don’t judge me, I’ve had my own problems to deal with.

Viewing with alarm is of course part of a pundit’s stock in trade, a venerable tradition going back for centuries. We must view with alarm all of the current trends that will lead to the end of civilization as we know it if unchecked.

Civilization has been falling for a while now but hasn’t hit bottom yet.

On the other hand, all predictions of social collapse come true – eventually.

And I must confess to a certain uneasiness about the state of the union. In part that could be because face it, I’m old. As Allan King said, 65 is not middle aged. I don’t know any 130-year-old men. The old always think the world is falling apart.

Except that sometimes it is.

For another, I have two young children and I’m worried they’re not being prepared for a life with rough spots. And by prepared I mean educated with knowledge and skills to sell in the marketplace, and a certain tough-mindedness necessary to make their way in a cruel and unfair world.

So in no particular order, these are some of the things I find alarming.

People don’t realize our resources are finite. I had this conversation the other day with a friend on the left, and by the way those friendships are harder to maintain these days and that’s alarming too.

I made a remark about how the federal budget should be handled like a rational family handles theirs, i.e. figure out how much you have to spend and then argue about what to spend it on.

He claimed the federal budget is different. I said they’re alike in the only way that matters, they’re finite.

He and a lot of others don’t see it that way. Which leads to the next problem.

If we’re not buying nice things (free college, universal health care, etc) then it’s because some mean and spiteful skinflints want you to be poor, unhealthy, and unhappy.

Many of you have probably had small children give you that attitude. They grow out of it eventually. If you’ve had a spouse with that attitude, you’re probably divorced.
Then there’s Jacobinism, it’s the fault of “the one percent.” A one percent that doesn’t seem to include pop stars and athletes but does include employers.
Well to some extent it is. The country is not run by a company of poor men. What’s different these days is not the inequality of wealth. It’s how they got that way; through productivity, or politics.

Americans have never really resented the wealthy, as long as they felt the game was being played fair. But I believe there’s a large and growing consensus that it’s not.
Well it isn’t. The path to riches is mined with complicated regulation and tax codes that make life miserable for would-be entrepreneurs. But the lower rungs of the ladder haven’t been all sawed off yet, to mix a metaphor.

But a lot of the problem is at the lower end too. With 25 to 70 percent of children being raised in single-parent households (depending on the specific demographic) and schools failing to teach how to count money much less make it, then fewer people are going to climb that ladder.

So the narrative goes, if the current lamentable situation was caused by active malice it can be cured by the right guy. And in this election cycle we have two candidates on white horses ready to cure all our ills, just give them the power and forget that pesky Constitution.

To some degree all candidates promise this. The days when someone could run on a platform of, “I’ll be a good steward of the public funds, run things reasonably well, and if a crisis happens on my watch I can handle it” are over. Nowadays candidates have to run by convincing the electorate of the urgent necessity for radical change only they can bring about.

But this time an alarming number of people on both sides seem to be buying it. And that’s how republics fall.