Noonan: We’re governed by callous children

Peggy Noonan’s latest Wall Street Journal column has made the rounds, but given how poignant it is, I felt it deserved a post. She  takes on Washington, the intelligentsia’s careless attitude and the consequences.

The biggest threat to America right now is not government spending, huge deficits, foreign ownership of our debt, world terrorism, two wars, potential epidemics or nuts with nukes. The biggest long-term threat is that people are becoming and have become disheartened, that this condition is reaching critical mass, and that it afflicts most broadly and deeply those members of the American leadership class who are not in Washington, most especially those in business.

It is a story in two parts. The first: “They do not think they can make it better.”

Jimmy Carter called it malaise.

This is historic. This is something new in modern political history, and I’m not sure we’re fully noticing it. Americans are starting to think the problems we are facing cannot be solved.

Noonan’s finger points directly at the political class – and with good reason. Rahm Emannuel, right hand man of the President, is most famous for his ravenous statement, “Never let a good crisis go to waste.” Many a journalist can recall the “excitement” felt in Congress during the stock market meltdown in 1987. Rather than facing down problems, as required in the job description, the current President laments his actual day-to-day duties as a distraction from his real agenda.

Emanuel’s statement was both cruel and revealing. It’s also the truth. Politicians these days are far from the public servant mode, they run from town hall meetings, they haul off angry constituents at their offices. Local officials in Arizona are attacking bloggers who dare report on their misdeeds. That these people view our hardship as opportunity isn’t surprising.

Neither are the results. The country elects people on the promise that their leadership will fix these problems. But the solutions are almost always to hand over more power, more taxes, more freedom. It’s hard to find a recent solution made by either party that hasn’t left us worse off.

This is historic. This is something new in modern political history, and I’m not sure we’re fully noticing it. Americans are starting to think the problems we are facing cannot be solved.

Part of the reason is that the problems—debt, spending, war—seem too big. But a larger part is that our government, from the White House through Congress and so many state and local governments, seems to be demonstrating every day that they cannot make things better. They are not offering a new path, they are only offering old paths—spend more, regulate more, tax more in an attempt to make us more healthy locally and nationally. And in the long term everyone—well, not those in government, but most everyone else—seems to know that won’t work. It’s not a way out. It’s not a path through.

The solution – go Galt.

And so the disheartenedness of the leadership class, of those in business, of those who have something. This week the New York Post carried a report that 1.5 million people had left high-tax New York state between 2000 and 2008, more than a million of them from even higher-tax New York City. They took their tax dollars with them—in 2006 alone more than $4 billion.

You know what New York, both state and city, will do to make up for the lost money. They’ll raise taxes.

I talked with an executive this week with what we still call “the insurance companies” and will no doubt soon be calling Big Insura. (Take it away, Democratic National Committee.) He was thoughtful, reflective about the big picture. He talked about all the new proposed regulations on the industry. Rep. Barney Frank had just said on some cable show that the Democrats of the White House and Congress “are trying on every front to increase the role of government in the regulatory area.” The executive said of Washington: “They don’t understand that people can just stop, get out. I have friends and colleagues who’ve said to me ‘I’m done.’” He spoke of his own increasing tax burden and said, “They don’t understand that if they start to tax me so that I’m paying 60%, 55%, I’ll stop.”

Which is easy for most to understand, outside the campus or the statehouse, but not our best and brightest in the Ivy League corridors or the Ivory Towers of D.C. Taxes discourage behavior. If you tax earnings, you discourage earnings. Those projected numbers disappear in the wind, a reason why the current Congressional health care plan is a disaster from the start. It relies completely on taxing high-dollar health care packages. What happens when those are taxed? People stop buying high-dollar health care packages. Wait, no money? We have to tax somebody else. Taxes are needed to run an efficient society, sometimes a tax raise is good, but spending as policy is bad. So is making some earners work through August to pay their bill to Uncle Sam every year.

It is a curious thing that those who feel most mistily affectionate toward America, and most protective toward it, are the most aware of its vulnerabilities, the most aware that it can be harmed. They don’t see it as all-powerful, impregnable, unharmable. The loving have a sense of its limits.

When I see those in government, both locally and in Washington, spend and tax and come up each day with new ways to spend and tax—health care, cap and trade, etc.—I think: Why aren’t they worried about the impact of what they’re doing? Why do they think America is so strong it can take endless abuse?

Because it always has? Because they don’t care? Why do unions threaten to strike when their company is on the verge of bankruptcy? The first logical question in any situation, be it taxing, benefits, wages or other wise – how can we keep this thing afloat? How do we make a profit and stay alive, because without the company there are no taxes, no wages, no benefits and no union.

Actions have consequences, but the current generation doing the leading has never had to face them.

I think I know part of the answer. It is that they’ve never seen things go dark. They came of age during the great abundance, circa 1980-2008 (or 1950-2008, take your pick), and they don’t have the habit of worry. They talk about their “concerns”—they’re big on that word. But they’re not really concerned. They think America is the goose that lays the golden egg. Why not? She laid it in their laps. She laid it in grandpa’s lap.

They don’t feel anxious, because they never had anything to be anxious about. They grew up in an America surrounded by phrases—”strongest nation in the world,” “indispensable nation,” “unipolar power,” “highest standard of living”—and are not bright enough, or serious enough, to imagine that they can damage that, hurt it, even fatally.

We are governed at all levels by America’s luckiest children, sons and daughters of the abundance, and they call themselves optimists but they’re not optimists—they’re unimaginative. They don’t have faith, they’ve just never been foreclosed on. They are stupid and they are callous, and they don’t mind it when people become disheartened. They don’t even notice.

And they don’t pretend to care. Obama’s landmark stimulus bill – our saving grace from our near-depression – back-loaded all its spending into 2011 and 2012. While the economy is in tatters and continues to worsen, Washington has fought over health care for five months.

Noonan hits on something here. Ironically enough, givin her limo Republican leanings, she may have found the pulse of the tea party movement. People sense the lack of interest of the political class, the lack of initiative, the lack of leadership. People sense something is amiss. Lets hope were not too far along where we can’t change it.

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