Tuesday, December 11, 2012

Should America try to compete with Communism to see who can create the better utopia?

Blogger Stuart Schneiderman quotes columnist Janet Daley, who writes in the London Telegraph:

Having won the Cold War and succeeded in settling the great ideological argument of the 20th century in favour of free-market economics, the nations of the West managed to bankrupt themselves by insisting that they could fund a lukewarm form of socialism with the proceeds of capitalism.

The United States has now acquired an electorally powerful liberal bourgeoisie who are convinced, as their European counterparts have been for several generations, in spite of all evidence to the contrary, that public spending is inherently virtuous, that poverty can be cured by penalising wealth creation, and that government intervention can engineer social “fairness”. But just when some of Europe’s political class has begun to appreciate the dangers of this philosophy – that taken to its logical conclusion, it leads to economic stagnation and social division – America seems to have decided that it is the quintessence of enlightened sophistication.

Present levels of public spending and government intervention in the US, Britain and Europe are unsustainable. The proportion of GDP which is now being spent by the governments of what used to be called the “free world” vastly exceeds what it is possible to raise through taxation without destroying any possibility of creating wealth, and therefore requires either an intolerable degree of national debt or the endless printing of progressively more meaningless money – or both.

Schneiderman is not completely pessimistic:

Perhaps in four years the American electorate will come to its senses. By that time, however, we will be living in a new America.

Read more here: http://stuartschneiderman.blogspot.com/2012/12/decline-and-fall-of-west.html

1 comment:

Infidel de Manahatta said...

The American electorate, sadly, will not come to its senses. In a decade, maybe less, I expect full fledged rioting in the streets as the public demands a broke America to "give them more free stuff."