By Alan
Caruba
One of the great parlor games of
pundits, politicians, journalists, and just about everyone else is predicting
the future.
There’s a wonderful book, “The Experts
Speak”, that is filled, page after page, with predictions and pronouncements by
people of presumed wisdom and knowledge, all of which turned out to be often
hilariously wrong. In 1913, regarding Einstein’s theory of relativity, Ernst
Mach, a professor of physics at the University of Vienna, said, “I can accept
the theory of relativity as little as I can accept the existence of atoms and
other such dogmas.”
I prefer optimists to pessimists and
the co-authors of “America 3.0: Rebooting American Prosperity in the
21st Century—why America’s
Greatest Days Are Yet to Come”, James C. Bennett and Michael J. Lotus, are
optimists.
In his foreword to the book, Glenn
Harlan Reynolds, better known as the “Instapundit”, cites the late economist,
Herbert Stein, who said “Something that can’t go on forever, won’t”, noting that
“The American 2.0 approach, which delivered stability and prosperity to many for
decades, is now more problem than solution, as banks fail, bureaucrats flounder,
and the economy fails to deliver the jobs—or the tax revenues—need to keep the
whole enterprise going.” Reynolds, however, agrees that “The Jeffersonian
individualism that was embodied in in America 1.0 never really went away.” And
that’s the good news.
Bennett and Lotus begin by saying, “We
are optimistic about the long-term prospects for American freedom and
prosperity. You should be, too.” They do not believe the nation is “on an
inevitable road to tyranny and poverty. Predictions of the end of America are
deeply mistaken,” but they do say that “The current politico-economic regime is
falling apart.”
I think most people will agree with
that as a deeply divided America struggles to deal with slow economic growth, a
Marxist President, and the final gasp of a government that has expanded to a
point of demonstrating the wisdom of the Constitution’s limits on its size and
role. The Tea Party movement and the founding principles of the Republican Party
are all about those limitations.
As Obamacare fails dramatically,
Americans across the political spectrum will want to return to a more
manageable, less intrusive government. They did that when they elected Ronald
Reagan. America needs a leader to emerge
who will bring the two factions together and, if history is a guide, they will
find one. It will not be easy because two generations have passed through the
liberal indoctrination of its schools and because the nation’s media, composed
of those graduates, is dominated by liberals.
Another factor is demography, the
study of populations. Americans are living longer and the effects of that are
undermining the future of progressive programs such as Social Security and
Medicare. At some point they will have to be reformed, along with the rising
costs of medical care.
Americans, since the early years of
the last century have gone back and forth between progressive programs and a
yearning for less control from centralized government. The income tax, the
government’s “safety net” introduced following the Great Depression, the growth
and decline of unions, and even Prohibition demonstrate this ambivalence.
Obamacare is likely to be repealed just as Prohibition
was.
America 1.0 stretched from the century
the preceded the Revolution and extended to the Civil War. It was a largely
agrarian society of farmers with the emphasis on individual responsibility. It
was, as well, a society based on the nuclear family, a structure that remains
today, though is under attack by liberals. America 2.0 saw the rise of
industrialization and, following World War Two, the nation as a superpower in
the world.
America 2.0 is crumbling, say the
authors, and that “we are in the midst of slow but wrenching transition to an
emerging America 3.0.” It will be “an even bigger transition, from industrial to
an individualized-and-networked economy that we are undergoing
now.”
One of the elements of the transition
that the authors recommend is the abolishment of the federal income tax and
replacing it with a national consumption tax, saying that “The required
disclosure of personal economic information required in filing tax forms
constitutes perhaps the largest single invasion of civil liberties in America,
violating the spirit of the Fourth Amendment’s guarantee against search and
seizure of personal information without a judicial
warrant.”
Here again, putting the Internal
Revenue in change of enforcing Obamacare will likely trigger a backlash against
it, the income tax system, and generate a return to the individual rights
enumerated in the Constitution.
Then, too, the world is also changing
as Islamism seeks to drag its population back to a dark age of feudalism and
slavery. The wave of terrorism is generating a backlash, even in nations where
Islam is the dominant faith. America, in the process, has learned it cannot
export its unique democratic system and engage in “nation building.” The
original faith in the United Nations to deter wars has faded and the growth of
various regional organizations will likely replace it.
The co-authors of “America 3.0” say
“We can sketch only the bare outlines of what an America 3.0 defense and foreign
policy might be like in reality. But those policies must be consistent with what
can actually be achieved by American power, with a renewed focus on securing the
global commons for trade, maintaining our alliances, and defending the American
free and prosperous way of life.”
We are living in times of both rapid
and slow change, and America has the mechanism—the Constitution—to make the
changes needed to adjust and the strength to protect itself from enemies,
domestic and foreign, in a global economy. It won’t be easy and it will not be
fast enough for most, but America will remain a dominant agent for change.
© Alan Caruba, 2013
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