Fighting on Fatal Terrain

posted at 12:35 am on May 20, 2009 by Doctor Zero
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Where, if one fights with intensity he will survive, but if he does not fight with intensity he will perish, it is fatal terrain. If there is no place to go, it is fatal terrain. On fatal terrain, you must do battle.

- Sun Tzu, The Art of War

I thought Michael Steele gave a pretty good speech on Tuesday. He needed to. He’s been the unsteady head of a confused and demoralized party. I believe conservatives should direct their energies toward reforming and directing that party, because as weak, wrong-headed, and frustrating as it can often be, it’s their best vehicle for taking part in the political process and influencing the direction America is taking. I wouldn’t quarrel with most of the criticisms I hear leveled at the Republican Party, and I completely understand the desire to junk it and start over with something more energetic, aggressive, and philosophically sound. I just don’t think there is enough time for us to do that. Several doomsday clocks are ticking down, and the first of them will begin to strike midnight soon. The America that conservatives are dedicated to conserving is fighting on fatal terrain, and we have work to do. I really hope Mr. Steele follows up on that speech.

Today we learned that, in addition to bailing out foreclosed mortgages, we’ll also be on the hook for subsidizing reduced penalties for people with credit card problems. We’re also turning $15 billion in loans to General Motors into a gift. We gave a trillion dollars to various Democrat constituencies in the “stimulus” bill. We poured $700 billion into the Troubled Assets Relief Program, to rescue the banking industry. We’ll blow another trillion on the national health care plan that will supposedly be rammed down our throats at the end of the year. The tidal wave of spending is dizzying. Huge stacks of money are flying in every direction.

The fairy tale sold to the voters over the past year is a lie. Government funding does not appear magically from thin air, or flow painlessly from the gold-plated vaults of billionaires who will never miss it. Washington doesn’t create wealth – it prints money. It doesn’t add any resources to the American economy – it could, by opening up new sources of oil, but that is the last thing Barack Obama and his party are interested in doing. Soon the bills for all this madcap spending are going to come due. So far, much of the Obama agenda has been funded by deficit spending, mandates on businesses, and costs added to various consumer products, such as automobiles. The first wave of massive direct tax increases will be coming next year, but they’ll be presented as taxes on the evil rich. The Democrats will try to hold off the middle class tax bite until after the midterm elections. The Democrat strategy is to rig the system so the voters no longer have meaningful choices to make in 2010, 2012, or beyond.

In the battle between collectivism and liberty, which Americans generally describe as the struggle between liberalism and conservatism, the collectivists have a huge tactical advantage: there are endgame scenarios that allow them to nail down a permanent victory. Liberty has no checkmate moves. The cultural, political, and economic freedom that conservatives are fighting to defend can always be lost again later. No victory in the name of capitalism or individualism will ever be complete and everlasting, because soon enough the next gang of snake-oil salesmen will come along, to tell the populace how they’re shameful for wanting to earn the good life, but virtuous for demanding that government give it to them. It’s interesting how voters can be easily stampeded into adopting massive state programs that can never be reversed, or even meaningfully reduced… but they’re willing to believe that free-market solutions, which can naturally be altered or discontinued at will, are too risky to attempt.

Socialized medicine is one of the most dangerous doomsday scenarios, and it’s right around the corner. On the day we nationalize health care, fifteen percent of our $14 trillion economy passes forever into state control. It will be incredibly difficult to persuade the electorate to vote health care back into the public sector, because the other side will tell them this is tantamount to voting for their own death, and the death of their children and elderly parents. The forces controlling, and profiting, from socialized health care will have an army of hard-core lower-income dependents marching behind them, and their boots will be on the necks of the increasingly destitute middle class of an economically ruined America, terrified of losing their “free” medicine.

The progressive tax system has devolved into something dangerously close to a doomsday scenario. It is a perpetual motion machine for endless tax and spending increases, in which nearly half of the electorate has been removed from the income tax rolls. When Democrats finally manage to deform the system enough to turn tax consumers into an absolute majority, it will be tough to persuade them to adopt a fairer, flatter tax structure that makes them start paying again. What interest does a person who pays nothing have in reforming the system, especially when the only people “suffering” from confiscatory taxation are the evil rich?

In the end, however, the collectivists will face the irony of a final apocalypse that everyone but them could see coming from decades away: their ideas don’t work, and they will crash. The bankruptcy of Social Security will begin a complete systemic collapse, irreversible by any policy that could be implemented by the United States government, as it exists today. Social Security was originally supposed to go bankrupt in the 2040s, but the date has been moving forward with increasing speed. Recessionary economics and irresponsible government spending might have dragged it as close as next year, by some estimates. The American social welfare system will not survive the implosion of Social Security.

Back in the early Nineties, I was astonished to read projections that the taxpayers of the 2020s would be expected to fork over something like seventy percent of their income just to fund the government, and that included lower-income taxpayers. This assumed government spending remained constant, which of course it hasn’t. Current Congressional Budget Office projections for the next ten years assume unemployment settles back down to about 5%, and most of the revenue needed by the government can be siphoned from the upper income brackets. We all know that tax hikes on the rich never produce the kind of revenue liberals assume it will, because the rich find ways to evade the taxes, and ultimately begin moving personal and business assets offshore to escape them, or sheltering their money in ways that don’t benefit the economy. Those taxes trickle down to the middle class awfully fast, when they don’t bring in the revenue Washington thinks it needs. Crushing middle-class tax rates, and commensurate levels of unemployment and reduced GDP, sound much more likely. Who’s going to want to live that way? Why would 95% of the adult population haul itself out to work hard at jobs, then cheerfully hand over seventy percent of their income to the government?

No one should have to live that way. Our mission, as conservatives, is to keep it from ever coming to that. Today we fight on fatal terrain for freedom and capitalism. The comparable terrain for socialists will be fatal for everyone. We have a duty to keep the battlefront from moving there, if we can.

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