National Indolence

"A government big enough to give you everything you want is big enough to take away everything you have." – US President Gerald Ford

"Left-wing politicians take away your liberty in the name of children and of fighting poverty, while right-wing politicians do it in the name of family values and fighting drugs. Either way, government gets bigger and you become less free."- Harry Browne

While I’m a big fan of the Tea Party movement, one thing that it lacks is a clear vision and purpose. What are they opposed to and why? A simple answer is an opposition to a huge government debt (Obama has added more to the national debt than all prior presidents combined!) and the long-term effects this debt will have. But a better answer can be found in a lecture given by Canadian author/journalist Mark Steyn to Hillsdale College in New Hampshire in March 2009. It is titled “Live Free or Die”.

"The President [Obama] 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."

European-style Big Government is not cheap and or even mathematically possible in the long run. It consists of “unsustainable entitlements that turns the entire nation into a giant Ponzi scheme.” But Mark goes beyond the rhetoric of the Tea Parties to show that the real problem is NOT cost but rather the very nature of the entitlements:

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. … When governments annex a huge chunk of the economy, they also annex a huge chunk of individual liberty. You fundamentally change the relationship between the citizen and the state into something closer to that of junkie and pusher—and you make it very difficult ever to change back.

Mark Steyn describes five stages on the path to Indolence and loss of liberty.

Stage 1: "The benign paternalist state promises to make all those worries about mortgages, debt, and health care disappear."
This is the fun and easy stage. Everybody wins!

Stage 2: "The state as guarantor of all your basic needs becomes increasingly comfortable with regulating your behavior."
As AIG, Chrysler, and bank TARP recipients have learned, government handouts come with strings.

“If you're a business, when government gives you 2% of your income, it has a veto on 100% of what you do. If you're an individual, the impact is even starker. … Under Britain's [free] National Health Service, for example, smokers in Manchester have been denied treatment for heart disease, and the obese in Suffolk are refused hip and knee replacements.”

But instead of fearing the new rules, citizens of every Western nation are eagerly dumping freedom for government ‘security.’ Sacrificing “the freedom to make your own decisions about health care, education, property rights, and a ton of other stuff.”

It's ridiculous for grown men and women to say: I want to be able to choose from hundreds of cereals at the supermarket, thousands of movies from Netflix, millions of songs to play on my iPod—but I want the government to choose for me when it comes to my health care.

Stage 3: "When the populace has agreed to become wards of the state, it's a mere difference of degree to start regulating their thoughts."

[Today] too many of the institutions healthy societies traditionally look to as outposts of independent thought—churches, private schools, literature, the arts, the media—either have an ambiguous relationship with government or are downright dependent on it.

Stage 4: "dissenting ideas and even words are labeled as ‘hatred.’ In effect, the language itself becomes a means of control."
In American the rights of Free Speech are being eroded as anything controversial is labeled as ‘hate speech.’ Consider the furor over Miss California for publicly saying she is opposed Gay Marriage.

Stage 5: Stupor - "Give people plenty and security, and they will fall into spiritual torpor,"

"When life becomes an extended picnic, with nothing of importance to do, ideas
of greatness become an irritant. Such is the nature of the Europe syndrome." -
Charles Murray in In Our Hands.

"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." - Mark Steyn

Bottom Line

Mark Steyn summarizes the five stages of Indolence as:

1. Stimulus or bailout


2. Comes with quid pro quo strings attached


3. You’re told what to do


4. You told what you’re forbidden from doing or saying


5. Results in the infantilization of a population with no responsibilities or cares

The results can be demonstrated by a Dutchman commenting upon the accelerating Islamification of Holland,

"I have never learned to fight for my freedom. I was only good at enjoying it."