On Thursday, I linked to and wrote about, approvingly, this article by Peggy Noonan where she makes the argument that there is something fundamentally wrong in America that is being ignored by its elites, many of whom have adopted an “I’ve got mine” attitude and act more to protect their own interests than advance those of the country.
Over at The Unrepentant Individual, Brad Warbianny argues that Noonan has missed the point about what is really wrong.
The implicit assumption Noonan makes, which is the entire root of the error she so eloquently makes, is the thought that government this big. Of course, an enormous country, with a $10T economy, comprised of 50 competing semi-autonomous states, facing threats from within and without, can’t be managed by a single person, or a single bureaucracy. In fact, it’s simply too large and too complicated to be successfully managed by a central government at all. This has been proven over the last century by Russia, China, the EU, and every major nation which has attempted any sort of central planning.
Given Noonan’s roots in the Reagan Administration, I’d be surprised if she consciously makes this assumption, but I suppose that anyone who has spent the majority of their career inside the Washington Beltway is susceptible to falling victim to the pernicious idea that government can be the solution to our problems.
This isn’t what I took away from her column, though. I took it to be as more of an indictment of our culture, and the culture of America’s elites, than a lament that government is incapable of doing the tasks it has undertaken.
Let’s face, in many ways, it we live in a very shallow society. People are apt to pay more attention to Jennifer Aniston and Brad Pitt’s divorce than the future of Social Security. We spend countless hours engaged in inane cell phone conversations and fewer and fewer hours keeping aware of what’s actually going on in the world around us.
As Noonan seems to recognize, the state of America’s elites is even worse. By and large, the Founding Fathers were the elites of 18th Century America — businessmen from the North, landed aristocracy from the South. Yet they dedicated themselves to the expansion of liberty for all, albeit imperfectly at the time. Does anyone believe that the graduating classes of Harvard, Yale, and Princeton would do the same today ? Maybe after they earned enough to finance the lease on the new BMW, but not before then.
But, then again, maybe we shouldn’t be waiting for the next Thomas Jefferson to be coming from the Ivy League anyway. And, in that regard, Brad makes a final point which I agree with entirely:
Peggy’s right. The wheels are falling off and the state is being crushed under its own weight. There are only two possible remedies to this situation. Either we step back from the brink, and reform our government to ensure that it gets back to responsibilities it can handle, and leave the rest to states, communities, private groups and individuals themselves. Or, we continue full-speed into the chasm and watch it all come crashing down around us, and those who can manage it will pick up the pieces and (hopefully) set it right. I’d prefer the former, but like Peggy, I’m not too sure we’re going to get there. But the first step is accurately explaining the problem. As long as we’re relying on some unnamed “elites” to save us, we’re doomed.
It seems like neither Peggy, Brad, nor I are entirely optimistic about the prospects for the future. That only makes it more important that we fight like hell.
