- The Future With Andy Stern (Or Obama) At The Helm

As catastrophic as the numbers may seem, fixing social security isn’t that tough. Apply a means test; extend the retirement age by 5 years and presto…fiscal solvency for another generation or two. Medicare is tougher but not impossible to fix by using the same sort of logic. Take it away from the people who have it but don’t need it. Also take it away from the people who need it but haven’t earned it. Then add in a little more free market to increase efficiency and if you aren’t there already, then you are close enough that you can reach your goals with a little tweaking.

None of this will happen of course, because the thing we need to change isn’t our medical insurance regulation or even the people in congress, but our sense of entitlement. We need to come to the understanding that all the good things in our life shouldn't be provided to us by the government, and the bill for those good things shouldn't be given to someone else; specifically… the rich. We've tried that and the numbers won't add up.

The biggest problem with the Obama - Pelosi - Reid view of the future is that the rich have no intention of letting people like them loot their coffers. The reason the rich are rich, for the most part, is because they are smarter than the people who aren’t. They can hide their money well enough so that the kids from the short bus at the IRS will never find it. But even if they could get every dime from the rich that they believe they’re entitled to, there aren’t enough of ‘the rich’ to go around. When you look at the numbers you discover that there are far too many non-rich people to be supported in such luxury by the few remaining rich.

Of course, you could solve all of these problems with a flat tax. A tax that applies to everyone will get a benefit from the fact that there are so many people, instead of being limited by it. And by providing everyone with a bill for the things they get from government, it will also reduce demand for them and therefore lower costs. This is the most basic rule of economics… the law of supply and demand. Raise demand without effecting supply and prices go up… lower demand without effecting supply and prices go down. Nothing will lower demand of free government stuff by no longer making it free.

You may want a government provided widget so long as someone else has to pick the tab, but when you are also presented a bill for the widget it raises all sorts of new questions in your mind. This is why Medicare is bankrupt. They provide stuff that people want without providing them with a bill. So naturally, the demand for the stuff they provide skyrockets, while supply remains constant, and prices respond accordingly.

But that presents a problem for Obama – Pelosi – Reid et al, because limiting the demand of government stuff is the last thing they want. Still… like I said… if we can get past that idea… that the poor are entitled to something simply by virtue of being poor… then the numbers become pretty easy to fix. It can be done pretty easily by anyone who meets 2 simple intellectual requirements:

1. A realistic view of how modern economics works.
2. The courage to take away something that voters have been getting for free.

And this is why I think we’re going to fail at this effort. There are people in government who meet requirement number 1, but there is no one… not a single soul in the entire elected classes, who meets requirement number 2, and our means of electing people to office prohibits us from electing any who do. "Vote for me because I'll stop letting you drink on the house... you've had too damned much already!" is not the kind of thing that wins election. Well maybe it does... but not until you're already so bad off that even you, the previously free drinker, also sees the problem. (Glenn Beck's drunk analogy is actually better suited to this discussion than the elitist right will ever give him credit for.)

Then of course there is the last fiscal problem we’re currently ignoring, and it’s potentially the most serious. We have an entire class of people who work in government, who believe that the whole purpose of government is to get them a standard of living which is higher than the rest of us who don’t. If this isn’t tyrannical I don’t know what is, but in order to undo it it’s another one of those basic cultural questions. We’d either need to make civil service unions illegal, or take away the right to vote for anyone in a government job, or affect some other means of limiting their authority.

The last thing we used to accomplish that goal was the flintlock rifle. I hope it won’t take something like that again, but I won’t bet against it. Mark Steyn has a (another) great quote about the future role of the civil service unions in the coming American collapse:


President Ford liked to say: “A government big enough to give you everything you want is big enough to take away everything you have.” Which is true enough. But there’s an intermediate stage: A government big enough to give you everything you want isn’t big enough to get you to give any of it back. That’s the point Greece is at. Its socialist government has been forced into supporting a package of austerity measures. The Greek people’s response is: Nuts to that. Public-sector workers have succeeded in redefining time itself: Every year, they receive 14 monthly payments. You do the math. And for about seven months’ work: For many of them, the work day ends at 2:30 p.m. And, when they retire, they get 14 monthly pension payments. In other words: Economic reality is not my problem. I want my benefits. And, if it bankrupts the entire state a generation from now, who cares as long as they keep the checks coming until I croak?


That’s Andy Stern’s vision of the future for America. And so long as he (or someone with a world view like his) is on the committee, and making all the rules for how government works, that’s the way it’s going to be.