Posted by Jim Lindgren:
Mark Steyn's Lecture to Students.
http://volokh.com/archives/archive_2009_05_10-2009_05_16.shtml#1242366587
As I contemplate Northwestern law School's graduation address on
Friday, I can attest that I've never sat through one as interesting as
[1]Mark Steyn's lecture at Hillsdale College (tip to Instapundit).
In most of the developed world, the state has gradually annexed all
the responsibilities of adulthood�health care, child care, care of
the elderly�to the point where it's effectively severed its
citizens from humanity's primal instincts, not least the survival
instinct. Hillary Rodham Clinton said it takes a village to raise a
child. It's supposedly an African proverb�there is no record of
anyone in Africa ever using this proverb, but let that pass. P.J.
O'Rourke summed up that book superbly: It takes a village to raise
a child. The government is the village, and you're the child. Oh,
and by the way, even if it did take a village to raise a child, I
wouldn't want it to be an African village. If you fly over West
Africa at night, the lights form one giant coastal megalopolis: Not
even Africans regard the African village as a useful societal
model. But nor is the European village. Europe's addiction to big
government, unaffordable entitlements, cradle-to-grave welfare, and
a dependence on mass immigration needed to sustain it has become an
existential threat to some of the oldest nation-states in the
world.
And now the last holdout, the United States, is embarking on the
same grim path: After the President unveiled his budget, I heard
Americans complain, oh, it's another Jimmy Carter, or LBJ's Great
Society, or the new New Deal. You should be so lucky. Those
nickel-and-dime comparisons barely begin to encompass the wholesale
Europeanization that's underway. The 44th president's
multi-trillion-dollar budget, the first of many, adds more to the
national debt than all the previous 43 presidents combined, from
George Washington to George Dubya. The President wants Europeanized
health care, Europeanized daycare, Europeanized education, and, as
the Europeans have discovered, even with Europeanized tax rates you
can't make that math add up. In Sweden, state spending accounts for
54% of GDP. In America, it was 34%�ten years ago. Today, it's about
40%. In four years' time, that number will be trending very
Swede-like.
But forget the money, the deficit, the debt, the big numbers with
the 12 zeroes on the end of them. So-called fiscal conservatives
often miss the point. The problem isn't the cost. These programs
would still be wrong even if Bill Gates wrote a check to cover them
each month. They're wrong because they deform the relationship
between the citizen and the state. Even if there were no financial
consequences, the moral and even spiritual consequences would still
be fatal. That's the stage where Europe is.
America is just beginning this process.
BTW, at Northwestern Law, we've had Joe Biden, Dick Durbin, Bob
Kerrey, and Janis Reno, to name a few.
References
1.
http://www.hillsdale.edu/news/imprimis/archive/issue.asp?year=2009&month=04
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