Kevin D. Williamson - The End Is Near and Its Going to Be Awesome: How Going Broke Will Leave America Richer, Happier, and More Secure

The End Is Near, and Its Going to Be Awesome

How Going Broke Will Leave America Richer, Happier, and More Secure

Kevin D. Williamson

For my father,

who taught me more than he knows

When the Stranger says: What is the meaning of this city?

Do you huddle close together because you love each other?

What will you answer? We all dwell together

To make money from each other? or This is a community?

And the Stranger will depart and return to the desert.

O my soul, be prepared for the coming of the Stranger,

Be prepared for him who knows how to ask questions.

T. S. ELIOT, CHORUSES FROM THE ROCK

Contents

iPencil

It has been said that only God can make a tree. Why do we agree with this? Isnt it because we realize that we ourselves could not make one? Indeed, can we even describe a tree? We cannot, except in superficial terms. We can say, for instance, that a certain molecular configuration manifests itself as a tree. But what mind is there among men that could even record, let alone direct, the constant changes in molecules that transpire in the life span of a tree? Such a feat is utterly unthinkable! I, Pencil, am a complex combination of miracles: a tree, zinc, copper, graphite, and so on. But to these miracles which manifest themselves in Nature an even more extraordinary miracle has been added: the configuration of creative human energiesmillions of tiny know-hows configuring naturally and spontaneously in response to human necessity and desire and in the absence of any human master-minding! Since only God can make a tree, I insist that only God could make me. Man can no more direct these millions of know-hows to bring me into being than he can put molecules together to create a tree.

Leonard Read, I, Pencil, 1958

I hope that this book still is being read a few years from now, because my admiration for Apples iPhone will by then seem faintly ridiculous, like Howard Wagners enthusiasm for his new wire-recording machine in Death of a Salesman. From the point of view of 2013, though, the iPhone is a thing of beauty and wonder, a constant connection to much of the worlds useful information, a supplementary digital brain that also allows one to make telephone calls and play Angry Birds.

In his classic essay I, Pencil, economist Leonard Read considers the incomprehensible complexity involved in the production of a simple No. 2 pencil: the expertise in design, forestry, mining, metallurgy, engineering, transportation, support services, logistics, architecture, chemistry, machining, and other fields of knowledge necessary to create a product so common, so humble, and so cheap as to have become both ubiquitous and disposable. Reads conclusion, which is one of those fascinating truths so obvious that nobody appreciates it, is that nobody knows how to make a pencil. Nobody is in charge of the operation, and nobody understands it end-to-end. From the assembly-line worker to the president of the pencil company, thousands or millions of people have tiny, discrete pieces of knowledge about the process, but no coordinating authority organizes their efforts.

That is the paradox of social knowledge: Of course we know how to make a pencil, even though none of us knows how to make a pencil, and pencils get made with very little drama and no central authority, corporate or political, overseeing their creation. A mobile phone is a much more complicated thing than a No. 2 pencil, but both are the products of spontaneous orderof systems that are, in the words of the Scottish Enlightenment philosopher Adam Ferguson, the products of human action, but not of human design.

Complex though it is, the iPhone is also a remarkably egalitarian device: The president of the United States uses one, as does the young Bengali immigrant who sold me my coffee this morning. The iPhone lives downtown in the Financial District, and up in the South Bronx. It lives in all five boroughs of New York, in all fifty states, in Zurich and Bombay and Lagos and Buenos Aires, connecting the well-off and the not-so-well-off. It is still beyond the reach of the global poor, but it is getting more affordable and more accessible every year. It is for that reason that I have chosen this commonplace miracle as a symbol and as a benchmark against which to compare the less satisfactory features of life in the early twenty-first century. I do so in full expectation that in a few years the current iPhone will seem to us as archaic and clumsy as that gigantic Motorola cinder block that was the most coveted status symbol of Wall Street masters of the universe in the early 1980s. If you are reading this book a few years after the time of its publication, and the iPhone of 2013 seems to you hopelessly out of date, like a 1973 Ford Pinto or a videocassette recorder or a rotary-dial Bakelite telephone, then that fact will be the best evidence I can present for my argument.

The purpose of this book is to attempt to answer a question: Why is it that the telephone in my pocket gets better and cheaper every year, but many of our critical institutions grow more expensive and less effective? Why does the young Bengali immigrant have access to the same communication technology enjoyed by men of great wealth and power, but at the same time she must send her children to inferior schools, receive inferior health care, and age into an inferior retirement? And how is it that Apple can make these improvements while generating so much profit that one of its most serious corporate challenges is managing its cash mountainabout $100 billion at this writing, and headed toward $200 billion by some estimateswhereas government at all levels is running up enormous debts to fund stagnating or declining services?

One class of goods and services experiences regular and reliable improvements in price and quality, and that class is not limited to high-tech goods such as the iPhone. Food and clothes today represent a much smaller share of household expenses than they did a generation ago, and middle-class people have access to things that either did not exist a generation ago or were restricted to the very wealthy. A poor man today owns better shoes than a middle-class man did a few decades ago. Air travel was such a rarefied luxury good that the evocative phrase jet set endures even into a time in which international travel is available to the middle class, and even to the poor.

But there is another class of goods that either stagnates or follows an opposite trajectory: lower quality, higher price. These goods include education, health insurance, and many basic government services. The deterioration of these key sectors has significantly and needlessly lowered the quality of life for millions of people. Better phones and organic kale are not going to be all that useful to people whose lack of education and marketable skills is driving them toward Third World standards of living, or who are going to be bankrupted in late middle age by a dysfunctional health-care system. My analysis here will focus largely on the case of the United States, but the story is the same in many other advanced countries. There are relatively good models of politics (Switzerland, Canada, Australia), middling ones (the United States, the United Kingdom), and relatively poor ones (Mexico, India, Brazil), but dysfunction is the rule in all political enterprises, from the blue-ribbon winners to basket cases such as Venezuela or North Korea.