Public Finance

America 3.0 [bumped]

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James C. Bennett, author of The Anglosphere Challenge (Rowman & Littlefield, 2004), and Michael J. Lotus (who blogs at Chicagoboyz.net as “Lexington Green”), are proud to announce the signing of a contract with Encounter Books of New York to publish their forthcoming book America 3.0.

America 3.0 gives readers the real historical foundations of our liberty, free enterprise, and family life.  Based on a new understanding of our past, and on little known modern scholarship, America 3.0 offers long-term strategies to restore and strengthen American liberty, prosperity and security in the years ahead.

America 3.0 shows that our country was founded as a decentralized federation of communities, dominated by landowner-farmers, and based on a unique type of Anglo-American nuclear family.  This was America 1.0, as the Founders established it.  The Industrial Revolution brought progress, opportunity and undreamed-of mobility.  But, it also pushed the majority of American families into a new, urban, industrial life along with millions of unassimilated immigrants. After the Civil War, new problems of public health, crime, public order, and labor unrest, on top of the issues of Reconstruction, taxed the old Constitution.  Americans looked for new solutions to new problems, giving rise to Progressivism, the ancestor of modern liberalism.

America 3.0 shows that liberal-progressive solutions to the challenges of America 2.0 relieved some problems, and kicked others down the road.   But they also led to an overly powerful state and to an overly intrusive bureaucracy.   This was the beginning of America 2.0, the America we grew up with, which dominated the Twentieth Century.

America 3.0 argues that the liberal-progressive or “Blue State” social model has reached its natural limits.   Even as it continues to try to expand, it is now dying out before our eyes.   We are   now living in the closing years of the 20th Century “legacy state.”  Even so, it has taken the shock of the current Great Recession to make people see the need for change.  As a result, more and more Americans are calling for a return to our founding principles.  Freedom and individualism are on the rise after a century-long detour.

America 3.0 shows that our current problems can be and must be transcended with a transition to a new America 3.0, based on modern technology, decentralized communities, and self-reliant families, and a reassertion of fiscal responsibility, Constitutionally limited government and free market economics.   Ironically the future America 3.0 will in many ways be closer to the original vision of the Founders than the fading America 2.0.

America 3.0 gives readers an accurate, and hopeful, assessment of our current crisis.   It also spotlights the powerful forces arrayed in opposition to the needed reform.  These groups include ideological leftists in media and the academy, politically connected businesses, and the public employees unions.  However, as powerful as these groups are, they have become vulnerable as the external conditions change.   A correct understanding of our history and culture, which America 3.0 provides, shows their opposition will be futile.  The new, pro-freedom, mass political movement, which is aligned with the true needs and desires of Americans, is going to succeed.

America 3.0 provides readers a program of specific “maximalist” proposals to reform our government and liberate our economy.  America 3.0 shows readers that these reforms are consistent with our fundamental culture, and with our Constitution, and will make Americans freer and more prosperous in the years ahead.

America 3.0 provides a “software upgrade” for the Tea Party and for all activists on the Conservative and Libertarian Right.  It provides readers with historical evidence and intellectual coherence, to channel the energy and enthusiasm of the rising mass political movement to renew America.

America 3.0 shows that our capacity for regeneration is greater than most people realize.  Predictions of our doom are deeply mistaken.   We are now living just before the dawn of America’s greatest days.  Within a generation, positive changes beyond what we can currently imagine will have taken place.   That is the America 3.0 we are going to build together.

(Cross-posted from the America 3.0 blog.)

Saving Greece Without Germans

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The Greeks do not need Germany to come bail them out. Russia was in something of a similar situation in the mid-1800s and resolved their financial and strategic difficulties by selling Alaska to the United States. At the time Russia feared that they had to sell Alaska or lose it to British Colombian expansion.

There are over 6,000 islands in Greece of which only 227 are inhabited. These 5500+ are all assets that could be used to satisfy Greece’s debts either by concession, Hong Kong style, or outright sale as Russia’s Alaska holdings were sold. At the very least this is an option that should be talked about. Strategically, a sale could be offered to France, Italy, or the UK (I do not believe the US would be interested) that would create interesting possibilities of introducing a buffer state between the remaining Greek Aegean territory and Turkey. The islands themselves may or may not be worth much but their economic zones, fisheries, and resource possibilities are intriguing.

The idea ultimately may turn out to be insufficient by itself to save Greece. But you really don’t know until you present the idea and so far nobody seems to be pursuing it. I find it odd that a proven method for raising money that does not require default or endanger the EU is not even on the table for consideration.

The Economist Publishes a Monstrous Lie

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Gov. Rick Perry has famously called Social Security a ponzi scheme, a monstrous lie. The Economist magazine, in covering the story has now told its own monstrous lie. It is lying via a graph it included with the story.

Deceptive Social Security finance graph from the Economist
SS fantasy finances, Economist version

The legally mandated 2011 Social Security Trustee Report lays out the actual fund exhaustion date as 2023 on page 3 of the report. So, 2023, 2037, what’s the difference? Electorally, it’s a very big deal. If you’re a current beneficiary today at age 66, you would be 78 in 2023, right at the edge of your life expectancy but more likely than not you would be alive. You would be 92 in 2037 and more than likely dead. If a senior is going to be alive when the big Social Security benefit cut kicks in, it is within their planning window and consequently the chances that they will be a Perry voter go up. Up to now, attempts at reforming Social Security were done so early that the crisis was only going to affect somebody else. Now, every senior who grasps when the crisis will hit knows it will hit them when they are going to be older, weaker, and even more unemployable than they are now. By putting out a pretty, lying graph, the Economist gives ammunition to the left-leaning mass media to write their own stories that also minimize the number of seniors who grasp the truth.

In short, the Economist is putting false numbers out there, ones that will have an effect of lulling seniors into a poorer financial state right when they will be old and frail and unable to do anything about it. What happened to their editors, their fact checkers, their sense of decency? Is everybody to be sacrificed for the electoral convenience of US Democrats in the 2012?

Perry Can’t Claim All the Credit

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It is very strange as a Texan to read people in other states lecturing us about how Texas’s supposed good economy is all a mirage.

I mean, I’m right here in Texas and I know what both a good economy and bad economy look like in Texas. Being told by people out of state that Texas doesn’t have a good economy right now is akin to someone on the Internet claiming that it’s raining cats and dogs in Austin when I can look out my window and see sunshine and clear blue skies.

Most of these weird arguments are coming from leftists whistling past the graveyard. Texas governor Rick Perry is basing his presidential aspirations on Texas’s relatively sound economy, so that has brought a lot of delusional people out of the woodwork, all desperately trying to sell the idea that the Texas economy actually sucks. Well, it doesn’t.

In reality, the strongest argument against Perry is that Texas has the weakest governor of any of the states, so he can’t claim the primary credit for Texas’s performance as he might in other states.

Most other state constitutions concentrate significant power in the office of the governor and the governors often have near sole control over the executive branch. The Texas constitution divides executive power over several state offices.  The Texas governor must share power with the lieutenant governor, the speaker and the state comptroller. All state senior executives are elected in their own right as are many of the state boards. So, the executive branch’s contribution to economically sound government in Texas is the result of a broad political culture of responsibility that elects a lot of good people to many offices, instead of being the result of a single insightful leader (e.g., Christie in New Jersey).

Texas is sound today because of the actual depression we struggled through alone during the period from 1984-1994 as a result of the oil bust. We jettisoned a century of southern-populist quasi-socialism because we ran out of other people’s money and were forced by circumstance to adopt a free-market approach. An entire generation of future politicians and voters got a hard lesson in the dangers of high government spending 20 years before the rest of the nation did. We learned to keep government small and business-friendly because we had to in order to survive.

Since we learned our lesson, the people of Texas have repeatedly elected pro-economic-creative, pro-growth and small-government politicians to all offices across the state. Perry deserves some credit for our sound economy because he has been one of the principle political leaders of the last decade but, frankly, if it hadn’t been Perry it would have been someone else just like him, because that is what the political culture of Texas demands. Perry is a cork bobbing in a torrent of responsible Texans en masse.

In the end, it is not political leadership but the wisdom and discipline of the people that counts in America. Texas is better off than the rest of America because our depression taught us all that it is economic-creatives that generate a sound economy and not government. If the rest of the country doesn’t learn that lesson, it won’t matter if Perry or another responsible candidate is President or not.