Has the conservative elite really failed?

There is no truth-telling here: to absolve Americans of their greed, indolence, and cupidity in the great home price bubble of 2008-2006 is the biggest lie of all. Americans caught a ride on a $6 trillion wave of foreign capital inflows, and thought the free money would be there forever. The smartest kids got MBA’s and law degrees instead of learning engineering.

Worst of all, we are suffering from our collective failure to bear children. Our population is aging as a result, so the demands on working taxpayers to support retirees will rise drastically. Most of the rise in entitlement spending is the mechanical result of demographics.We have the choice of paying more taxes, or getting lower Medicare and Social Security payments, or retiring later, or attracting more working-age skilled immigrants to bear more of the tax burden. Do the math. The main reason the deficit is so intractable is because we as a people preferred other things to raising children. Once again, indolence and hedonism threaten to undo our prosperity. With its fertility rate of 1.3, Italy is a goner; whether it goes bankrupt in 2012 or 2022 is a minor question, for it will go bankrupt sooner or later, as 60% of its population retires by mid-century. We are suffering a milder case of the same disease.

In a much, much graver crisis, the greatest of all of our leaders, Abraham Lincoln, told the American people that the terrible Civil War was their fault–for owning slaves, and tolerating the ownership of slave–and that the suffering must continue until every drop of blood drawn by the lash was requited by one drawn by the sword. We have chiseled these words on his monument, but we do not read them, because we do not like the implication that we might suffer because of our mistakes.