Mark Steyn Is A Genius

Disexceptionalizing America [Mark Steyn]


Rich, James Bennett puts it very well. In my piece on American decline for NR a couple of issues back, I tried to emphasize something that I think U.S. conservatives are too complacent about — the impact of Big Government on free peoples:

American exceptionalism would have to be awfully exceptional to suffer a similar expansion of government and not witness, in enough of the populace, the same descent into dependency and fatalism. As Europe demonstrates, a determined state can change the character of a people in the space of a generation or two.

And not just Europe. John O'Sullivan once suggested the entire post-war history of Canada could be summed up in Monty Python's "Lumberjack Song": The eponymous lumberjack hymning the manly virtues of a rugged life "leaping from tree to tree . . . down the mighty rivers of British Columbia" in the preamble has morphed by the third verse into a transvestite in high heels, suspenders, and a bra. From Canada 1945 to Canada 2000 in nothing flat.

Or take Scotland. Most anywhere you go around the planet, from Hong Kong to Hudson's Bay, almost everything that works was created and developed by Scotsmen. Now the whole joint's a statist swamp where government spending accounts for 75 percent of the economy and the menfolk idle away their days on a diet of drugs and fried Mars Bars with a life expectancy in the less salubrious parts of Glasgow getting down to West African standards. They'll never make any contribution to the world again.

Or consider Geert Wilders's address at the House of Lords today, a Dutchman citing Churchill, the Mother of Parliaments, desperate victims of Nazi-ruled Europe listening on their radios for the BBC's famous "This is London . . ." To a significant percentage of the British people and to the entirety of their ruling elites, these are not inspirational evocations of their glorious inheritance but something between a lost language and prima facie evidence of why Wilders is so dangerous he needs to be put on trial.


Second Amendment types insist the same thing could never happen here, but they underestimate the transformative power of government at their peril . . .

Quote Of The Day

"As I understand it, what we're supposed to miss about US newspapers will be the "layers of fact-checking" and rigorous editing. In reality, a significant percentage of American newspapering is little more than provincial wannabes doing New York Times karaoke..."
- Mark Steyn

The Solution For Bills That Are Too Big To Read

Mark Steyn brings it into focus with this post on NRO (emphasis added):

"Rep. John Conyers can't see why lawmakers should read the laws they make. What's the point? They wouldn't understand 'em anyway:

“I love these members, they get up and say, ‘Read the bill,’” said Conyers.

“What good is reading the bill if it’s a thousand pages and you don’t have two days and two lawyers to find out what it means after you read the bill?”

As Betsy Newmark comments:

At least some representative's aides somewhere have read some part of the bill so that should be enough, right? Who says that when you're rejiggering over one-sixth of the US economy and incurring massive future debt that you need to know what it is you're voting on.

Thousand-page bills, unread and indeed unwritten at the time of passage, are the death of representative government. They also provide a clue as to why, in a country this large, national government should be minimal and constrained. Even if you doubled or trebled the size of the legislature, the Conyers conundrum would still hold: No individual can read these bills and understand what he's voting on. That's why the bulk of these responsibilities should be left to states and subsidiary jurisdictions, which can legislate on such matters at readable length and in comprehensible language.

As for optimum bill size, the 1773 Tea Act, which provoked the Boston Tea Party, was 2,263 words. That sounds about right."

H/T Instapundit

Mark Steyn At His Best

I haven't posted any Mark Steyn for a while and this was just too good to pass up:

We're In The Fast Lane To Bailoutistan

"See the USA in your Chevrolet!" trilled Dinah Shore week after week on TV.
Can you still see the USA in your Chevrolet? Through a windscreen darkly.

General Motors now has a market valuation about a third of Bed, Bath & Beyond, and no one says your Swash 700 Elongated Biscuit Toilet Seat Bidet is too big to fail. GM has a market capitalization of about $2.4 billion. For purposes of comparison, Toyota's market cap is $100 billion and change (the change being bigger than the whole of GM). General Motors, like the other two geezers of the Old Three, is a vast retirement home with a small money-losing auto subsidiary. The UAW is AARP in an Edsel: It has three times as many retirees and widows as "workers" (I use the term loosely). GM has 96,000 employees but provides health benefits to a million people.

How do you make that math add up? Not by selling cars: Honda and Nissan make a pretax operating profit per vehicle of around $1,600; Ford, Chrysler and GM make a loss of $500 to $1,500. That's to say, they lose money on every vehicle they sell. Like Henry Ford said, you can get it in any color as long as it's red.

In the 20th century, most advanced nations made automobiles but only America made them mythic: "Drive the USA in your Chevrolet!" sang Dinah. "America's the greatest land of all!" America had road movies. With car chases. Thelma and Louise drove their vehicle off the cliff and, unlike the Old Three, they didn't demand American taxpayers come along for the ride. But, if you didn't want to hit the open road, you could just hang around, being cool. In Chuck Berry's immortal quatrain:

"Riding along in my automobile
My baby beside me at the wheel
Cruising and playing the radio
With No Particular Place To Go."

Not if you were a European teen. Cruising was an American activity. A Saturday night out for a Brit meant hanging around at a rain-streaked bus shelter hoping the night service would show up. Even if you had a particular place to go, you had no means of getting there.

So many areas of endeavor that once embodied the youth and energy of this great land are now old and sclerotic. I include, naturally, my own industry. I loved the American newsrooms you saw in movies like "The Front Page," full of hard-boiled, hard-livin' newspapermen. By the time I got there myself, there were no hard-boiled newspapermen, just bland, anemic newspaperpersons turning out politically correct snooze sheets of torpid portentousness. The owner of The Los Angeles Times and Chicago Tribune recently filed for bankruptcy protection. The New York Times is mortgaging its office to fund debt repayment. The Detroit Free Press is cutting out home delivery except on Thursdays, Fridays and Sundays, thereby further depressing sales of delivery trucks in the Motor City.

The newspapers blame the Internet, just as Detroit blames Japan. But the Japanese have problems of their own. One day they'll get theirs. That's the beauty of capitalism. Nothing is forever. The big railroad barons smoking cigars and enjoying pheasant under glass in the dining car on the Atchison, Topeka and Santa Fe thought Henry Ford was a schmuck. Who'd want to ride around in that thing? Next thing you know, everyone's getting their kicks on Route 66:

"You'll see Amarillo
Gallup, New Mexico
Flagstaff, Arizona
Don't forget Winona
Kingman, Barstow, San Bernardino."

Ah, California. The Golden State! To a penniless immigrant named Arnold Schwarzenegger, it was a land of plenty. Now Arnold is an immigrant of plenty in a penniless land. What's the motto on the license plates? "Ah'll be back …for more of your money!" In California you don't have to be an orange to have your pips squeezed. The Terminator makes Gray Davis look like Calvin Coolidge. Care to terminate a government program, Governor? Hey, great idea! We'll hire 200 people to do an impact study on terminating the Department of Impact Study Regulation and get back to you in a decade. And when Gov. Girlyman has run out of state taxpayers to fleece for his ever-more-bloated bureaucracy, he'll go to Washington to plead for a federal bailout of Cantaffordya.

California! The state that symbolizes the American Dream! If you can make it there, you'll make it anywhere!

No, wait, that's New York. "This is the worst fiscal downturn since the Great Depression," announced New York Gov. Paterson. So what's he doing? Why, he's bringing in the biggest tax hike in New York history. If you can make it there, you'll be paying state tax on it, sales tax, municipal tax, a doubled beer tax, a tax on clothing, a tax on cab rides, an "iTunes tax" on downloads from the Internet, a tax on haircuts, 137 new tax hikes in all. Call Albany today and order your new package of tax forms, for just $199.99, plus 12 percent tax on tax forms and 4 percent tax-form application fee partially refundable upon payment of the 7.5 percent tax-filing tax. If you can make it there, you'll certainly have no difficulty making it in Tajikistan.

Hey, and who needs to make it there when you can just get appointed there? Gov. Paterson is said to be considering appointing Princess Caroline of Kennedy to Hillary Clinton's vacant Senate seat. After two and a third centuries of republican experiment, America has finally worked its way back to the House of Lords.

"Friends Say Kennedy Has Long Wanted Public Role," Anne Kornblut assured readers in an in-depth Washington Post tongue-bath. She hasn't "long wanted" it to the extent of, you know, running for dog catcher in Lackawanna and getting – what's the word? – "elected," but, if you have a spare Senate seat, she's graciously indicated that she'd be prepared to consider accepting it. As lady-in-waiting Anne Kornblut pointed out, Caroline is highly qualified, being "the author of several books." It's true! She's an experienced poetry editor. She edited "The Best-Loved Poems Of Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis." Jackie Kennedy wrote poems? Of course! She wrote so many poems that some are better loved than others.

See the USA from your Chevrolet: An hereditary legislature, a media fawning its way into bankruptcy, its iconic coastal states driving out innovators and entrepreneurs, the arrival of the new Messiah heralded only by the leaden dirge of "We Three Kings Of Ol' Detroit Are/Seeking checks we traverse afar," and Route 66 looking ever more like a one-way dead-end street to Bailoutistan. Boy, I sure could use a poem by Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis right now, even one of the lesser-loved ones.

"I feel like I lost my country," the Hudson Institute's Herbert London said the other day, wondering whatever happened to the land of opportunity and dynamism. But I'm more of an optimist. Maybe Princess Caroline will be appointed CEO of GM and all will be well. Or maybe Bed, Bath & Beyond will put wheels on the Swash 700 Elongated Biscuit Toilet Seat Bidet.
And on that cheery note let me wish you a very Hopey Changemas.

Free Mark Steyn

David Warren has an interesting article in the Ottawa Citizen:

"The writings of Canada's most talented journalist, Mark Steyn, went on trial in Vancouver on Monday, in a case designed to challenge freedom of the press. It is a show trial, under the arbitrary powers given to Canada's obscene "human rights" commissions, by Section 13 of our Human Rights Act.

I wrote "obscene" advisedly. A respondent who comes before Canada's "human rights" tribunals has none of the defences formerly guaranteed in common law. The truth is no defence, reasonable intention is no defence, nor material harmlessness, there are no rules of evidence, no precedents, nor case law of any kind. The commissars running the tribunals need have no legal training, exhibit none, and owe their appointments to networking among leftwing activists.

A farce, but a farce that has huge consequences for Canada: for by such methods free speech and free press are being snuffed out. The Left may think they have found the ideal method to silence anyone who challenges their insane, "politically correct" ideas, but have instead created a monster that can as easily eat them next."

I would suggest that these "human rights commissioners" spend some serious quality time with Alexander Solzhenitsyn's "The Gulag Archipelago" if they want to see how this is going to turn out for them. And a passing familiarity with the history of the French Revolution wouldn't hurt either.

Quote Of The Day - The Welcome to NYC Edition

"Is this how we are perceived in the world? In New York recently I got in a cab and, having said where I wanted to go, was asked where I was from. "London."

My wise-guy cabbie grinned and said, "Yeah? You Shia or Sunni?"
- Nigel Farndale in The Telegraph

CWCID: Mark Steyn

Steyn On McCain

Mark Steyn from NRO:

"I'm getting a bit tired of Senator McCain's anti-business shtick. The line about serving "for patriotism, not for profit" is pathetic. America spends more on its military than the next 35-40 biggest military spenders on the planet combined: Where does he think the money for that comes from?

As for his line about "some greedy people on Wall Street who need to be punished", aside from being almost entirely irrelevant to the subject under discussion (the subprime "crisis"), it reveals, I think, one of the most unpleasant aspects of McCain. For a so-called "maverick", he's very comfortable with the application of Big Government power, and the assumption of Big Government virtue. Undoubtedly there are "greedy people on Wall Street". Why should he and his chums be the ones who decide whether they need to be "punished"? If greed is to be punishable, why doesn't he start with a pilot program applied to, say, the United States Senate and report back to us in five years how that's going?"

CWCID: Instapundit

Steyn On Thompson

I usually agree with Mark Steyn and often enjoy his wry sense of humor. But in this instance, I wonder if he is putting the cart before the horse. In the grand scheme of things it would seem more important to have great ideas first and then campaign by talking about those ideas. Instead we are treated to a relentless 24 hour news cycle of who said what about whom, who got softball questions, who planted questions, blah, blah, blah ...

I refer you to Newt Gingrich's comment about this early, early campaign season when he pointedly said "This is stupid." After all, are you voting for the candidate with the best ideas or the one that comes off the best in some meaningless YouTube debate?

From NRO:

Fred's sails in the sunset [Mark Steyn]


I wrote about the Republican and Democrat presidential candidates last weekend, and got a lot of mail from Fredheads and others demanding to know why I hadn't mentioned Senator Thompson. The reason is I've no handle on what it is he thinks he's doing. Every time I see a Fred policy plan, he seems to have by far the best ideas, and the necessary zeal for reform, on taxes, Social Security and much else. But every time you see him in these TV debates he has the listless air of a bored grandparent at a dreary school play.

And seeing him live in person isn't that easy to do. I get campaign e-mails about New Hampshire appearances by John McCain and Mrs Clinton and lots of others. Mitt's guys clogged up my in-box with so many urgent releases in the hours after last night's debate that it's seriously impacting my ability to order generic Viagra and e-mail my bank details to Nigerian dictators' wives. But nary a word from Fred.

What's the strategy here? Why does he have great ideas but no campaign?

Totalitarianism Lite

Mark Steyn recently wrote at NRO:

“To require law enforcement to police every routine area of social interaction is to render civilized life impossible and to make more and more citizens the arbitrary victims of a kind of Totalitarianism Lite.”

How true.

Since we no longer hold people accountable for their actions at the appropriate level nor do we have agreed upon standards for civilized behavior anymore, the unwitting result is that we all suffer from an extremely subtle and invasive form of totalitarianism in a country that used to pride itself on its rugged individualism.

A case in point – I was once phoned by our young miss, who at the time was about 12, and told that she had been chased home by a group of girls from her school that were intent on beating her up. She was understandably upset and had run all the way home with this group in hot pursuit. When I arrived home we went back to the school to visit the vice principle who after hearing us out told me, since the incident had not occurred on school property, he could not do anything. He assured me that the girls in question were frequently in trouble at school and that he wasn’t the least bit surprised by their behavior. Then he suggested that I file a police report!

After I finished laughing he again urged me to contact the police. When I told him that I thought the police had more important things to do he said that filing a police report was what he would do. I again assured him that I did not think the police needed to be involved and that the parents could and, more importantly, should be the ones to solve the problem. He provided me with everyone’s phone numbers after we came to an understanding about how I had obtained them.

I am happy to report that after a number of phone calls and more than a few adult discussions about appropriate behavior apologies were offered all around and accepted. End of problem.

But what of the school administrator who felt so strongly about involving the police? What about all the ridiculous restrictions placed on our institutions which, in turn, actually contribute to and promote this type of behavior? When did we as a nation devolve into citizens who were unable to mediate the problems of a handful of pre-teens without the intervention of the police?

Perhaps most importantly, why are people so comfortable with this state of affairs and what is it doing to our national character?

Cheeseburger Imperialists

Who could possibly combine NASA's underwhelmingly reported correction of their global warming statistics together with The New Republic's fake Iraq diary story and top it off with spot on commentary about how the United States is viewed throughout the world?

Why, Mark Steyn, of course.

Words Of Wisdom From Mark Steyn

Mark Steyn, Columnist to the World, accurately points out just exactly which state wields power in the Middle East. And just think what it will be like when they have a nuclear weapon.

Failure to solve Palestinian question empowers Iran: "Saudi-Egyptian-Jordanian opportunism on Palestine has caught up with them: It's finally dawned on them that a strategy of consciously avoiding resolution of the 'Palestinian question' has helped deliver Gaza, and Lebanon and Syria, into the hands of a regime that's a far bigger threat to the Arab world than the Zionist Entity. Cairo and Co. grew so accustomed to whining about the Palestinian pseudo-crisis decade in decade out that it never occurred to them that they might face a real crisis one day: a Middle East dominated by an apocalyptic Iran and its local enforcers, in which Arab self-rule turns out to have been a mere interlude between the Ottoman sultans and the eternal eclipse of a Persian nuclear umbrella. The Zionists got out of Gaza and it's now Talibanistan redux. The Zionists got out of Lebanon and the most powerful force in the country (with an ever-growing demographic advantage) are Iran's Shia enforcers. There haven't been any Zionists anywhere near Damascus in 60 years and Syria is in effect Iran's first Sunni Arab prison bitch. For the other regimes in the region, Gaza, Lebanon and Syria are dead states that have risen as vampires."