Does socialism equal happiness?

I got quite a bit of feedback from my last column, the one in which I mourned the apparent demise of our great nation. I came very close to rewriting that piece because I thought the tone might have been overly pessimistic, but apparently lots of other people are feeling the same way I am right now. I think we’re all looking hard for a silver lining to the cloud that is hanging over us and we’re just not finding it.

A few of the people who wrote to me wondered what I might do if the country really does go into the tank and stays there for the duration. Would I give up and search for greener pastures in some other country? In my case that’s very unlikely for a lot of reasons, at least in the short term, but it is an interesting question to ponder. If you decided to leave America, where would you go?

Since I’ve never actually travelled outside the United States, I have a hard time coming up with a reasonable answer to that question. But I’m not the type of person to let a lack of knowledge and experience stop me from expressing an opinion on a subject, so I decided to take a look at the various surveys that have been done in recent years that ranked countries based on the relative happiness of people who live there to see if any of them stood out.

One country seemed to keep coming out on top in most every “happiness index” I could find. According to the vaguely scientific polling I was able to compile, the happiest spot on the planet is Denmark. Now if you’re like me, your knowledge of Denmark can probably be summed up by saying “that’s somewhere in Europe, isn’t it?” But if this is as close as we can get to heaven on earth, maybe we should look into this country a little more closely.

Right away I have to warn you that if “socialism” is a dirty word to you, you aren’t going to like Denmark. They believe in very high taxes and lots of big government programs there. The average “Joe the Plumber” in Denmark ponies up about half his income to the government. That’s the bad news. The good news is that education (all the way through college), health care, child care, elder care, and a whole lot of other goodies are provided for every citizen.

That’s all well and good, but of course like any socialist country there’s a price to be paid for all that “evening out.” Everybody has enough, but nobody has a whole lot. People don’t go to Denmark to seek their fortune. They really have a different way of looking at life in a place like that.

I believe that for someone who was born and raised in America it would be hard to get used to a way of life that is that laid back. America has always aspired to greatness. From the very beginning, people came here to do big things. They came to found churches, to make their fortunes, to achieve.

I believe that spirit is still alive today, and that is what is making our present situation so hard to bear. We’re not used to managing our expectations. A fall is always much worse when it comes from a great height.

Nevertheless, it appears that we may be on the road to being a lot more like Denmark. If we elect a guy who wants to “spread the wealth around” and who believes that health care is a “right”, it is likely that we’ll be moving a lot closer to that socialist ideal of a government that is very large, very expensive, and very involved in every aspect of the lives of its citizens.

I just don’t know if it’s going to make us happy.

The sun begins to set on another great civilization

If there is one thing that is becoming increasingly clear in this season of election year politics and financial catastrophe it is this: the Great American Experiment is rapidly drawing to a close. Representative democracy was a nice idea on paper, and we made a pretty good run of it, but ultimately it seems to be unsustainable.

Its basic flaw has become obvious – it invests too much trust in human nature. The individuals who drew up the plans for our form of government were a unique collection of intelligent, self-sacrificing souls who sought to create a nation that would encourage all its citizens to live and work as they saw fit without interference from their government. They had witnessed firsthand how the human spirit is constricted and deformed by an all-powerful, self-serving form of government and they wanted to show the world a better way.

I believe they would have been astounded by how well their plan succeeded. People have been flocking to our shores for over 200 years because it’s hard to keep it a secret when you create a place where people can build a good life for themselves by the sweat of their brow and even worship God in whatever manner they choose without fear of getting their head chopped off. Most of us don’t appreciate how unusual that opportunity is, but few people who have lived on this earth have ever experienced it in the abundance that we have.

And now, I fear, we are members of the generation that will see that dream come to an end. For some time we have demanded that our government provide us with a cure for all our ills, and anyone who advanced a claim that he could cure those ills was rewarded with a plush seat in the halls of power. The price for those cures has proven to be much too steep, but we have long since abandoned the long view in these matters.

People weren’t saving enough for retirement, so the government created a mandatory retirement program. Older Americans and the poor could not afford health care, so the government created a mandatory health care program to take care of them. They also created programs to “fix” the education system, the environment, the housing industry, and on and on. Billions of dollars (much of it financed with deficit spending) is spent each year to solve every crisis, and every new crisis (the War on Terror, hurricane relief, big business “bailouts”) demands a new solution and more money that we don’t account for.

Watching the presidential and vice presidential debates is severely distressing for anyone who believes that our biggest problem is our own failure to shoulder sacrifices and accept responsibility for our shortcomings. The Democrats proudly carry the standard of government in the role of a compassionate Big Brother and the Republicans give lip service to their long-dormant principles of small government even as their actions brand them as hypocrites. (Note how quickly the GOP’s principled stand on the $700 billion bailout of the financial industry crumbled as another $100 billion in pork was added to buy enough votes to pass. Of course it worked. It always does.)

No matter who wins the election in November, the course of the nation is already set. The government will continue to try and spend its way into our hearts until the deficit falls over and collapses on top of us. At that point the consequences of our collective irresponsibility will begin to dawn on many more people, but there won’t be much we can do about it then except to take our place next to other great civilizations that have collapsed after rotting from the inside.

A bad case of election year apathy

Usually when we’re this close to a major election I use this space to praise a candidate I favor or (more often) to slam one that I think is especially deserving of my wrath. But not this year. I hate to admit it, but I feel so disconnected from the political process and the direction our country is heading at this point that I can’t generate much interest in this election or in any of the people who are running for office.

I think the massive failure of our financial system and the government’s “let the taxpayers bail us out, again” response to it has proven to be the last straw for me. I believe we are traveling down a path from which there will likely be no turning back, and at the end of this trip I fear that we will not recognize the country we are living in.

If you’ve read any of my previous columns, you already know that the federal government’s out-of-control spending and our crushing national debt has long been a major issue for me. So you can probably imagine my dismay in the wake of this recently announced plan to dedicate nearly a trillion more dollars that we don’t have to bail out a bunch of big corporations that have been run into the ground.

Frankly, I can’t even wrap my mind around the kind of thinking that leads a supposedly intelligent, well-educated group of adults to conclude that this is a wise course of action, but really this is a fitting final chapter for an administration whose mantra has always been “spend, spend, spend…and by the way here’s a tax cut.” And it wouldn’t be Bush program unless it included a little nose-thumbing directed at the US Constitution. Consider this quote from the treasury secretary’s draft proposal for the bailout plan:

“Decisions by the Secretary pursuant to the authority of this Act are non-reviewable and committed to agency discretion, and may not be reviewed by any court of law or any administrative agency.”

Go back and read that again. What that is saying, very plainly, is that the secretary of the treasury would have absolute authority to spend $700 billion of your money as he sees fit and would be answerable to absolutely no one. Period.

What country are we living in here? It can’t be the United States of America, can it? To be sure, it is not the country that our founders envisioned. They came up with an excellent plan, and so long as we followed it we were, I believe, as close to an ideal place to live as the world has ever seen.

But that nation no longer exists, and the Constitution does not seem to be any sort of obstacle to those who wish to manipulate our finances and personal lives as it pleases or benefits them. Neither of the two major parties has shown any inclination to arrest that trend, and thus neither of them deserves my vote.

Is this the end of American Dream? Are we truly witnessing the final phase of the “Great Experiment”? Perhaps, but I hope not. I believe there is some possibility that the storm that has begun raging on Wall Street and in Washington DC (one that I believe is going to get much worse in the coming years) could, at long last, convince a majority of Americans that our government is truly broken and in need of an overhaul.

I don’t think that such an overhaul is going to occur while our government is in the hands of those individuals pleading for your vote during commercial breaks from “Dancing with the Stars.” We need change all right, but all we are getting from Republicans and Democrats is more “nanny state” nonsense wrapped in different packages. And I just can’t distinguish the lesser of evils anymore.