For Deliverance from the Present, We Must Move on from the Twentieth Century
Let It Go
If you look at the grand sweep of Western history, the Twentieth Century stands out as an aberration. Particularly, the trend toward massive governments, dominating ideologies, and society-tying, wealth-draining government programs were odd aberrations from all of what came before and what appears on the horizon.
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Economics and Government Bloat
Take the way the United States government currently spends money: it would be considered insanity to the West of the Belle Epoque, a jaw-dropping amount of spending and similarly ridiculous reasons for spending. Of the expense items, before the early 1900s, the Dept. of Defense budget, VA budget, interest expense, and some miscellaneous items, like the self-funding Post Office, would have been seen as reasonable, Constitutional ways for the government to spend money. All the others would have been seen as insanity, yet they make up by far the majority of what is spent:
Similarly, most of the means of taxation would have been seen as both insane and unconstitutional. The income tax didn’t exist, as it was still unconstitutional and was seen as a shocking violation of privacy. The death tax didn’t exist, nor did the gift tax, and both would have been seen as unconscionable restraints on the transfer of private property.
What that old mindset created was a free and prosperous world. With the exception of a few modern technological innovations, most of what we use and rely upon, from the car and lightbulb to sewage and steel structural beams, were invented during this time. And the innovation continued because the smart could make a killing off of it and not be taxed to death. AJP Taylor, describing the era, wrote:
Until August 1914 a sensible, law-abiding Englishman could pass through life and hardly notice the existence of the state, beyond the post office and the policeman. He could live where he liked and as he liked. He had no official number or identity card. He could travel abroad or leave his country for ever without a passport or any sort of official permission. He could exchange his money for any other currency without restriction or limit. He could buy goods from any country in the world on the same terms as he bought goods at home. For that matter, a foreigner could spend his life in this country without permit and without informing the police. Unlike the countries of the European continent, the state did not require its citizens to perform military service. An Englishman could enlist, if he chose, in the regular army, the navy, or the territorials. He could also ignore, if he chose, the demands of national defence. Substantial householders were occasionally called on for jury service. Otherwise, only those helped the state who wished to do so. The Englishman paid taxes on a modest scale: nearly £200 million in 1913-14, or rather less than 8 per cent. of the national income. … broadly speaking, the state acted only to help those who could not help themselves. It left the adult citizen alone.
But now, however, both the modern forms of taxation and modern ways of spending those tax dollars (and much more) do exist. Your stock market transactions, gifts between family members, and private income details are pried into by DC bureaucrats so that a feckless government can spend millions studying the effect of AIDs on Hispanic immigrants1 and “ensure and support local integration, social cohesion, economic inclusion and protection” for Venezuelan illegal immigrants.2 William McKinley’s government wasn’t spending money on such programs, nor on the real money-drainers like Social Security and “income security” programs. Instead, it funded a small army and effective navy through industry-protecting tariffs. But, even with the privacy-invading, private property-confiscating taxes in place, illegal immigrant aid programs and entitlement spending mean that America is nearly $36 trillion in debt, and that’s before considering the unfunded liabilities.3
Government taxing and spending are just the start of our economic woes, though both are well past the point of crowding out private market economic activity. In addition to being unleashed to tax and spend increasingly insane amounts since 1900, the government has been unleashed from a regulatory perspective.
Not that long ago, private companies were more or less free to do as they pleased, so long as they didn’t break slim legal codes that essentially amounted to poisoning, killing, or defrauding people. Then along came Progressivism, which kicked off the process of regulating companies for regulation’s sake. First, they were broken up and split apart because their percentage of market share was too high or their owners were too rich and powerful. Then, farmers were soon being dragged to court because they grew grain against FDR’s wishes.4 Next came the Civil Rights Act and affirmative action, with companies being punished for asking prospective employees to take basic IQ or competence tests.5 Now, it’s essentially illegal to dig a ditch6 and a Civil Rights Act violation to fire employees for not being on time.7
The same sort of regulations apply to private and public life. Also not that long ago, a man was free to build what he wanted on his own land, live life as a faithful Christian, and speak freely about any issue, using what words he wanted. Then came the regulators, lawmakers, and litigious enemies of civilized society. Now girls are arrested for using mean words,8 Christmas displays are effectively illegal, and praying outside an abortion (child murder) clinic will get you thrown in jail.9
Altogether, those impositions have led to immense economic and social costs. As the Mercatus Center found,10 “Had the amount of regulation remained at its 1949 level, 2011 GDP would have been about $39 trillion—or 3.5 times—higher than it was, which translates to a loss of about $129,300 for every person in the United States . . . By distorting the investment choices that lead to innovation, regulation has created a considerable drag on the economy, amounting to an average reduction of 0.8 percent in the annual growth rate of the US GDP.” And that’s just the regulations. The massive debt-to-GDP ratio America now has (well over 100%), has also been shown to dramatically decrease GDP growth.11 And, of course, there’s the cost to social cohesion, belief in the system, and general quality of life that come from so much regulation, invasive taxation, and disgust at spending programs.
Similarly, personal economic behavior for the worse is an evident result of the 20th-century changes. Namely, Americans have gone from being self-employed to being lifelong employees. Whereas around 50% of Americans were self-employed in 1900, and many of those who were employees had reasonable hopes of becoming self-employed in commerce or farming, now only around 10% of the workforce is self-employed. Regulations, taxes, and governmental hostility to independence have made it near-impossible for the average American to be his own man and run a small business.
Corporate behavior has been impacted as well. Before the mid-20th century, the American government wasn’t just funded by tariffs but used them to protect domestic industry from foreign undercutting. President McKinley famously used them to stabilize the economic environment and allow higher wages, thus cooling tensions between labor and capital. Then came globalism and the free trade movement,12 and with it, the “giant sucking sound” of American industry fleeing to places with less regulation, lower taxes, and no government-enabled unions. Now America is close to being unable to build warships or semi-conductors,13 both of which it used to be the best in the world at building.
And where does the blame for all of that lie? The centralizing nature of the 20th century, and what government did during it. Before Teddy Roosevelt, an essentially turn-of-the-century president, all of this would have been seen as insane. But, then came Progressivism, and with it pro-welfare ideas, a pro-regulation mindset, and a willingness to increase forms and rates of taxation to fund it all. So now we have a spending albatross, a debt millstone, and an Atlas-like regulatory burden.
Ideology
The other, related aspect of the massive change wrought by the adoption of ideology. Before Progressivism, there wasn’t really a dominant “ideology” in America that led to obviously insane decisions and demands. It’s true that America was committed to the vague concept of “democracy,” and abolitionism dominated the minds of the Puritan Northeast for a few decades.
But, in reality, democracy was more of a concept than an ideology, and was limited across most of the country until the latter part of the 20th century. Similarly, abolitionism was about a specific issue rather than being a worldview, generally, and died with the issue.
Other than that, America was much like Lee Kuan Yew’s Singapore in that it cared more about creating prosperity, stability, and ordered liberty than the mindset used to reach them.14 So, we sometimes had free trade and sometimes had protection. We sometimes had an expansionist mindset (Louisiana, Texas, California) and sometimes were isolationist (avoiding the Wars of the French Revolution and Napoleon, the Franco-Prussian War, etc.). We sometimes had easy paper money and sometimes had gold. Though each issue at times became dominating, such as the gold standard and bimetallism at the end of the 19th century, those were opinions rather than being a dominating system of ideals translated into public policy, or ideology.
Then, along came ideology. First, it was Progressivism, the general idea that humanity is progressing and social reform is always needed and valuable. That brought everything from anti-monopoly laws to eugenics. Then along came communism, with foreign anarchists originally leading the charge and FDR’s government of pinkos and Soviet spies later replacing them. They, blinded by their visions of a classless, propertyless society, worked to enact their vision regardless of the bloodbath in Russia. Fascism never took hold as an American ideology but did enter the general public’s consciousness as something that bad people are, the ideology of evil.
Replacing both progressivism and communism in the aftermath of World War II and the early Cold War was “liberal democracy,” which in reality means state-enforced egalitarianism. It blended the classless dreams of communism with the constant demands for social reform of progressivism, adding on top of it the view that “one man, one vote” mass democracy is sacrosanct as a concept.15 This not only still dominates as the ideology of the ruling class, but was the ideology behind everything from the Civil Rights Act to the intentional destruction of Rhodesia.16
Regardless of the individual ideology at play in each circumstance, the same pattern holds. America went from being a place governed by McKinley-style men who cared about results, not the path taken to reach them, to a society dominated by total, if often incoherent, worldviews and the policies attached to them. So Alger Hiss worked to establish communism despite the millions dead in the Holodomor, Reagan created MLK Day despite his base hating the communist-composed civil rights types, and voting became seen as sacrosanct despite America’s roots as a landed-voting republic that functioned much better than Carter’s Black Panthers-dominated world.
Not only is that change odd, as it flies in the face of common sense, but it has exacerbated the other problems with the 20th Century. For example, the Social Security millstone can’t be changed because “democracy” won’t allow it - too many voters would rather bankrupt the country than see it cut.17 Similarly, the “income security” and similar spending lines would be seen as incomprehensibly ridiculous to an American of 1850, but now are seen as untouchable because of egalitarian, progressive thinking about social aid and reform. On a similar note, the privacy issues surrounding income taxation are seen as unimportant because the totalizing and leveling impulse of egalitarianism inculcates the view that society is a coherent whole, rather than a collection of individual sovereigns who can tell the regime “no!”
Moving On
The thing is, America has to move on from those trainwrecks of the 20th Century if it is to survive. As it currently stands, the disparate impact thinking created by the Civil Rights movement is a civilization killer, as no one competent can be hired if an incompetent minority wants the job as well.18 The national debt is becoming expensive enough to be a civilization killer, as the interest expense crowds out necessary spending and the vast amount of money pumped out leads to ever more inflation. The egalitarian policies of the regime, from soft-on-crime policing to Section 8 housing, have utterly killed cities and regions. Free trade has eviscerated American industry and created a vast class of former factory workers now impoverished, angry, and often addicted to deadly opiates like fentanyl. Illegal immigration is expensive and has displaced American citizens who want to work and live in the jobs and towns overrun by government-sanctioned illegals. And so on. There might be “much ruin in a nation,” but it can still only stand so much.
All of those problems could have been avoided as late as Pat Buchan’s day, and he drew attention to them while also articulating strategies to fix them. Like Lee Kuan Yew or McKinley, he was a pragmatist rather than an egalitarian ideologue.
But, now the cancer has set in deeply enough that salvation is far from assured. Even if all discretionary spending, including defense were cut away, the interest expense and entitlements would be enough to cause a deficit. So, even Elon’s Department of Government Efficiency would, at most, be putting a band-aid on a sucking chest wound. There are only so many ways a $36 trillion debt can be dealt with, after all, and if entitlements can’t be touched and a default is unconscionable, then that leaves massive inflation…which will bring more pain, but is the only other option.
The same is true of immigration. There are probably 30 million illegal immigrants in America,19 their children are considered citizens, and when legal immigrants are considered, around 14% of America’s population is foreign-born. Another 27% of Americans are second-generation immigrants.20 It remains to be seen if America can survive such a massive immigration wave, as deporting half the country seems unlikely, but there never being a multicultural mass democracy that succeeded is worrisome, as are the ethnic blood feuds brought to America by such immigration.
Similar problems present themselves with everything from the fertility rate to reviving moribund American industry: once shredded by bad policy, bringing back anything from babies to machine tool production is quite difficult.
But, if any of those problems are to be fixed, doing so will require moving past the 20th century. A great book on this is America 3.0.21 Essentially, the root of most of our current problems is that everything had an albatross placed on it by the centralizing, Big Government impulse of the Twentieth Century, and so it’s impossible to fix the problem without removing the albatross.
Take the national debt. If high inflation and default aren’t going to happen, the only way to get out of that burden is productivity increases that increase (real, not government-created) GDP to a point where the debt-to-GDP ratio falls. As discussed above, our economy is only a third of what it would be with saner regulations; 1899-style regulations would drive it even higher. Similarly, taxes and federal spending drive down economic growth tremendously. So, the way out of the debt would be slashing regulation, decimating the bureaucracy a few times over, cutting spending to the bone, getting rid of non-tariff taxes, and letting the economy rip until the debt is no longer an issue. It might not work, but it’s the only potentially positive way out. It’s also an anti-Tentieth-century idea, as it would involve removing the onion-like layers of caked-on regulations, taxes, and diktats that have so constrained the American economy for a century rather than caking more on.
All the other issues would need to be handled in a similar way. The way to draw companies, particularly industrial ones, back in is by slashing taxes and regulations, not passing yet more acts that add yet more burdens. The way to fix family formation is to allow young men to grow and prosper, not berate them for acting as their ancestors did. And so on. We don’t want flaming rivers or acid rain, but otherwise most regulation is only pointless and adds immense cost without any corresponding value.
Additionally, we need to get past ideology and back to pragmatism. This doesn’t just mean chasing away those who actually hold ideological beliefs, such as socialist Bernie Sanders or egalitarian Kamala, but no longer using various ideological isms as a specter with which to haunt the other side. “Fascism” and “communism” are now, with extremely rare exceptions, no longer real. It’s time to let them die out as ideas by no longer suggesting they exist. Socialism and egalitarianism, by contrast, are quite real and must be destroyed. Lee Kuan Yew made Singapore a success by acting pragmatically. President McKinley saved America and her prosperity by acting in a like manner. It’s time we pick up the standard and do the same.
The tentacles of centralization, government programs, and ideological insanity can be chopped away. Doing so will, however, require re-adopting the views of government and personal responsibility of our 19th-century ancestors and rejecting the 20th century. This is, effectively, what Javier Millei has done to great effect in Argentina; once a land of hyperinflation, its inflation rate is now commensurate with America’s thanks to his slashing of government programs, jobs, and spending. America needs such a man, one who brings a return to that glorious time of nearly non-existent taxes, a tiny state, and a gargantuan increase in innovation and prosperity that came from letting men innovate and live free. Other than some bits of Apollo-related technology, after all, most of what we use and rely upon, from lightbulbs to plumbing, came from the 19th century, not the 20th. We’re just trying to hold onto what remains of their world.
Altogether, it’s time to move past the ideas and policies of the most disastrous century, the one that began with glittering Victorian fox hunts and balls and ended with the crack and rap.
“From Third World to First” is a great book on this
“We don’t want flaming rivers or acid rain…”. No we don’t.
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