- Feb 12, 2007
- 59,439
- 24,106
With high unemployment and underemployment (only 47% of adults have full time jobs today), high levels of out of wedlock births, devolving standards of education (many kids graduate who are de facto illiterate), and massive government debt, our current system is headed for a crash.
What will replace it? The following contains a vision for America 3.0 which massively descopes government and puts the focus back on the nuclear family...the core institution for western liberty.
Where they differ from other analyses is that they see the roots of American exceptionalism, our penchant for liberty and individualism, stretching far back -- more than 1,000 years -- beyond 1776. Back to the Anglo-Saxon invaders of England after the fall of the Roman Empire.
Drawing on the 19th century historians Edward Augustus Freeman and Frederic Maitland and contemporary scholars Emmanuel Todd, Alan Macfarlane and James Campbell, they argue that the Anglo-Saxons brought with them a unique institution, the absolute nuclear family, "the continuous core of our distinct American culture."
In nuclear families, individuals, not parents, select spouses; women have comparative freedom and equality; children have no rights of inheritance; grown children leave parents' homes and are not bound to extended families.
On each point this is contrary to longstanding family patterns in the rest of the world.
This enduring family pattern has consequences. It has made Americans liberty-loving, individualistic, keen for equal opportunity but not equal outcomes, venturesome, mobile and suspicious of big government.
(snip)
World War II policies put 16 million Americans in uniform, rationed food, controlled wages and prices, and converted factories to war production. "The end of World War II," Bennett and Lotus write,"was the moment of maximal centralism and minimal autonomy in America."
Wartime success gave great prestige to America 2.0 and confidence that it could continue in place indefinitely. But with economic change it started sputtering. "2.0 corporations, unions and governments," the authors write, "have been rendered unworkable."
Big corporations flailed, and government got bloated. Lower birth rates meant there wouldn't be enough taxpayers to finance benefits for the elderly.
Responses included deregulation in the 1970s, lower tax rates in the 1980s, welfare reform in the 1990s. But that was not enough.
Barack Obama has made the trajectory worse, the authors say. They ridicule "the strange assumption that Americans genuinely want government-run health care." Polls back them up.
They believe public debt is unsustainable and call for discharging much of it in bankruptcy ("the Big Haircut"). They grant that the Treasury can keep selling bonds, but only so long as other countries' credit is worse.
They see families moving far out in the exurbs (using self-driving cars) and earning money increasingly from individual enterprises rather than W-2 jobs. Therefore we should abolish the federal income tax and devolve government except for defense, civil rights and free internal trade to states and localities.
Most ambitiously, they would allow states to split into parts or to form compacts with other states, so likeminded citizens can have congenial policies.
Looking abroad, they see "a global collapse of the 2.0 model." America should continue to purchase weapons (but get rid of defense procurement rules) and maintain our alliances.
But the U.S. should give up on nation-building and democratization. Other cultures -- Iraq, Afghanistan -- simply don't share our concepts of freedom.
America's main task is to police "the world's maritime and aviation commons" -- which Britain or America have been doing off and on for three centuries.
With Its Roots in the Nuclear Family, the Nation Evolves Into America 3.0 | RealClearPolitics
What will replace it? The following contains a vision for America 3.0 which massively descopes government and puts the focus back on the nuclear family...the core institution for western liberty.
Where they differ from other analyses is that they see the roots of American exceptionalism, our penchant for liberty and individualism, stretching far back -- more than 1,000 years -- beyond 1776. Back to the Anglo-Saxon invaders of England after the fall of the Roman Empire.
Drawing on the 19th century historians Edward Augustus Freeman and Frederic Maitland and contemporary scholars Emmanuel Todd, Alan Macfarlane and James Campbell, they argue that the Anglo-Saxons brought with them a unique institution, the absolute nuclear family, "the continuous core of our distinct American culture."
In nuclear families, individuals, not parents, select spouses; women have comparative freedom and equality; children have no rights of inheritance; grown children leave parents' homes and are not bound to extended families.
On each point this is contrary to longstanding family patterns in the rest of the world.
This enduring family pattern has consequences. It has made Americans liberty-loving, individualistic, keen for equal opportunity but not equal outcomes, venturesome, mobile and suspicious of big government.
(snip)
World War II policies put 16 million Americans in uniform, rationed food, controlled wages and prices, and converted factories to war production. "The end of World War II," Bennett and Lotus write,"was the moment of maximal centralism and minimal autonomy in America."
Wartime success gave great prestige to America 2.0 and confidence that it could continue in place indefinitely. But with economic change it started sputtering. "2.0 corporations, unions and governments," the authors write, "have been rendered unworkable."
Big corporations flailed, and government got bloated. Lower birth rates meant there wouldn't be enough taxpayers to finance benefits for the elderly.
Responses included deregulation in the 1970s, lower tax rates in the 1980s, welfare reform in the 1990s. But that was not enough.
Barack Obama has made the trajectory worse, the authors say. They ridicule "the strange assumption that Americans genuinely want government-run health care." Polls back them up.
They believe public debt is unsustainable and call for discharging much of it in bankruptcy ("the Big Haircut"). They grant that the Treasury can keep selling bonds, but only so long as other countries' credit is worse.
They see families moving far out in the exurbs (using self-driving cars) and earning money increasingly from individual enterprises rather than W-2 jobs. Therefore we should abolish the federal income tax and devolve government except for defense, civil rights and free internal trade to states and localities.
Most ambitiously, they would allow states to split into parts or to form compacts with other states, so likeminded citizens can have congenial policies.
Looking abroad, they see "a global collapse of the 2.0 model." America should continue to purchase weapons (but get rid of defense procurement rules) and maintain our alliances.
But the U.S. should give up on nation-building and democratization. Other cultures -- Iraq, Afghanistan -- simply don't share our concepts of freedom.
America's main task is to police "the world's maritime and aviation commons" -- which Britain or America have been doing off and on for three centuries.
With Its Roots in the Nuclear Family, the Nation Evolves Into America 3.0 | RealClearPolitics
