by Victor Davis Hanson<\/p>\n
PJ Media<\/em><\/p>\n One of the sad characteristics of contemporary Western society is the tendency to embrace noble lies. These are assertions and acts that don\u2019t square with reality, with what we see and hear \u2014 and are voiced for apparently noble social purposes. Here are a few politically-incorrect examples.<\/p>\n 1)\u00a0Debt and Deficits<\/em>. At our current rate we will very soon pile up between $18 and $20 trillion in accumulated national debt. We use the euphemism \u201cstimulus,\u201d talk of massive borrowing in terms of percentages of GDP, and casually pontificate about \u201cinflating\u201d our way out of the debt. The fact is that the borrowing is now so massive that there is no way to pay back what we owe without massive cutbacks in accustomed services, and a probable decline in the apparent standard of living. I say \u201capparent\u201d since many of the essentials that we are accustomed to \u2014 everything from sophisticated psychiatric counseling for long-term inmates, frivolous law suits, duplicate and needless medical procedures, to government employee expense accounts, farm subsidies, or grants to the arts and media \u2014 are not that essential and will gradually begin to disappear. Raising taxes will be in the short-term offered as a solution, but it won\u2019t for long increase net aggregate revenue since it will eventually discourage economic activity.<\/p>\n And we lack both the patience and guts to cut taxes, and then use the long-term larger revenue stream, coupled with massive spending cuts, to balance the budget. In short, we will invent euphemisms like \u201cstimulus\u201d and \u201cfurlough\u201d as the money runs out, and Americans adjust to a lower standard of living. One can already drive in rural central California and see roads that are cracked and full of potholes, random dogs that are not licensed, and thousands of trailer-rentals on blocks and garages-turned-into-rentals, as the government has given up on its old regulation and let large swaths revert to the 1940s and 1950s. I fear that any sixth grader from my 1965 primary school down the road could have read far better than an average contemporary high school graduate of my local community.<\/p>\n This decline is not inevitable, given an expanding population, the prior investments of noble generations, continually evolving technology, and spreading globalization, but it is inevitable given the therapeutic culture, and present high-tax, high-spend, redistributive gospel of the present government. No one on either side of the political divide simply says the present borrowing is staggering, unsustainable, and must be paid back by real sacrifice. So we lie on, as if Greece should be our model.<\/p>\n 2)\u00a0Israel<\/em>. We are inundated with constant talk of the \u201cMiddle East crisis\u201d and \u201cthe need to restart the peace process.\u201d<\/p>\n Why? Is there a new Goldstone report on Tibet? Are the American people sleepless over the divided city of Nicosia? The brutal Turkish occupation of Greek Cyprus? The rough Russian annexation of Ossetia? The callous treatment of Muslims by the Chinese?<\/p>\n Of course not. A noble lie is that there is a \u201cMideast crisis\u201d at all. \u201cOccupied land\u201d is not unusual. Palestinians are no more refugees than Cypriots or Tibetans. The IDF is far more moral a military force than the Russian or Chinese or Turkish army.<\/p>\n The reality? Hating Israel as a unique aggressor is simply predicated on five unspoken truths: 1) rampant anti-Semitism (one can hate Jews by the loftier notion of being \u201canti-Zionist\u201d; 2) fear of radical Islamic terrorists; there are apparently no radical Tibetans hijacking planes or blowing up Madrid train stations due to Spanish ties with communist China; 3) oil, oil, oil. The Cypriots cannot enlist the Greeks to withhold 500 billion barrels of oil in the Aegean from world markets. If such a fantasy were true, Nicosia would be on the front pages; 4) Israel is Western, like the U.S., and in a most un-Western neighborhood, so hating Israel is a mechanism of hating the U.S. on the cheap; 5) demography. If there were a billion-person Orthodox community energized by a half-billion Greek-speakers, we most certainly would wish to solve the \u201cCyprus crisis.\u201d<\/p>\n The truth? Money, fear, and age-old hatreds all are masked by \u201cprinciples\u201d and \u201cmorality.\u201d<\/p>\n 3)\u00a0Illegal immigration<\/em>. Do the math on remittances \u2014 $50 billion a year sent back to Latin America; perhaps $20-25 billion sent from California alone, mostly from illegal aliens.<\/p>\n The following thought will get one censored as cruel and inhuman: millions of California residents, here illegally, without English or high-school diplomas, somehow manage to rely in part on state subsidies for food, housing, education, legal help, and transportation to free up cash in the billions to be sent southward to Mexico.<\/p>\n In addition, much higher per capita rates of illegality, from gang activity to DUI arrests, characterize far too many of the illegal alien community, requiring state investments that outweigh the often argued advantages of increased sales taxes, Social Security deductions supposedly not drawn upon, cheap wages for unskilled labor, etc.<\/p>\n In other words, to suggest that a very sophisticated society is spending billions to educate, incarcerate, and treat millions from the former Third World is forbidden. And the corollary is even more bizarre still: millions risk their lives to flock northward to the United States, even as the premise of multiculturalism in the schools, affirmative action in the workplace, and the chauvinism manifested in popular culture is somehow that an oppressive Eurocentric America \u201cowes\u201d penance. Historians two centuries hence will remark on the anomaly of the notion that millions of Mexican nationals both wish to emigrate to the United States, but simultaneously once here to voice grievances against the culture they so wish to join \u2014 sort of like the old demonstrations against Prop. 13 when protestors used to wave the flag of the country they did not wish to return to and trample the flag of the country they so eagerly wished to remain in. A modest proposal: to send money to Latin America, one here without legal documentation would either pay a 10% surcharge on the transaction or show proof of catastrophic healthcare insurance.<\/p>\n 4) The image of the United States. Here we really enter into the world of the surreal. Privately the world\u2019s poor connive to enter and stay in the U.S. Publicly as they do so, their leaders fault America to no end. The Middle East is especially culpable \u2014 as millions of residents use every angle imaginable to enter America, even as the popular culture of the Middle East is decidedly anti-American. What is the logic of such anti-Westernism? That one can enter Europe or America, enjoy its benefits, and then help turn it into the homeland \u2014 as if by doing so it would still be attractive to the immigrant in the first place? If Denmark is Islamicized, would Muslims flee to Copenhagen to escape the oppression and poverty of Egypt or Syria? I fear that the ideology of a Major Hasan or a Westernized Mutallab or an Alabaman such as Hammami is not that unusual. It was no accident that an Atta or KSM spent quite a lot of time in either America or Europe.<\/p>\n 5)\u00a0The Left.\u00a0<\/em>What is going on with the rise of a leftist aristocracy? Al Gore becomes a multimillionaire railing about reducing our lifestyle in accord with the pseudoscience of his climate-change gurus? John Edwards built a mansion to better voice his sermons on \u201ctwo nations\u201d? From his estates, John Kerry limoed and jetted in Kennedy-fashion to warn us about a cruel jobless vision of George Bush\u2019s America?<\/p>\n A zillionaire Gates family, that has ensured there will be no federal inheritance taxes on their $50 billion, lectures on the benefits of higher inheritance taxes; a speculating Soros expounds on capitalism\u2019s sins; a billionaire, tax-savvy Buffet laments the too-low federal income tax; a multimillionaire, low-ratings Katie Courac bristles at Palinism as her network lays off\u00a0hoi polloi<\/em>. And on and on.<\/p>\n Yet rarely is voiced the common denominator. High Liberalism is now a psychological manifestation, by which the very rich, immune to both the realities of tough living and the hurt of high taxes, finds solace, self-worth, penance even, by sympathy for big government entitlement for the less fortunate whom they connive hourly to avoid. Prep schools are jammed with the children of those who damn charter schools and vouchers; environmentalism\u2019s most articulate advocates of small is better live in ways undreamed by the masses they wish to rein in. The greatest advocates of public expenditure, whether a Rangel, Geithner, or Daschle, are quite busy ensuring that they themselves will not have to pay for it all.<\/p>\n Yes, it\u2019s a mad, mad world, after all \u2014 proof positive that the enormous engine of capitalism, when married to the absolute freedom of Western democracy, results in some very funny things indeed. To make sense of it all the contradictions, we lie \u2014 increasingly about almost everything.<\/p>\n \u00a92010 Victor Davis Hanson<\/p>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" by Victor Davis Hanson PJ Media One of the sad characteristics of contemporary Western society is the tendency to embrace noble lies. These are assertions and acts that don\u2019t square with reality, with what we see and hear \u2014 and are voiced for apparently noble social purposes. Here are a few politically-incorrect examples.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_is_tweetstorm":false,"jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","enabled":false}}},"categories":[609],"tags":[],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p466Sb-tO","jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"jetpack-related-posts":[{"id":115,"url":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/when-big-deficits-became-good\/","url_meta":{"origin":1848,"position":0},"title":"When Big Deficits Became Good","author":"victorhanson","date":"January 16, 2013","format":false,"excerpt":"by Victor Davis Hanson Tribune Media Services As a senator and presidential candidate, Barack Obama said that he detested budget deficits. In 2006, when the aggregate national debt was almost $8 trillion less than today, he blasted George W. Bush's chronic borrowing and refused to vote for upping the debt\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Debt and Deficits"","block_context":{"text":"Debt and Deficits","link":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/ahref=\/index.php\/categories\/angry-reader\/categorylink\/a\/politics\/debt-and-deficits\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":2488,"url":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/is-the-president-in-recovery\/","url_meta":{"origin":1848,"position":1},"title":"Is the President in Recovery?","author":"victorhanson","date":"August 1, 2011","format":false,"excerpt":"by Victor Davis Hanson Tribune Media Services President Obama does not care much about deficits \u2014 other than worrying that big debt might matter in his re-election campaign. In his first three budgets, Obama borrowed nearly $5 trillion. Currently, the government is borrowing about 45 percent of everything that it\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Debt and Deficits"","block_context":{"text":"Debt and Deficits","link":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/ahref=\/index.php\/categories\/angry-reader\/categorylink\/a\/politics\/debt-and-deficits\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":12398,"url":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/victor-davis-hanson-the-spreading-debt-virus-5-potential-cures-for-30-trillion-problem\/","url_meta":{"origin":1848,"position":2},"title":"Victor Davis Hanson: The spreading debt virus \u2014 5 potential cures for $30 trillion problem","author":"victorhanson","date":"May 29, 2020","format":false,"excerpt":"Victor Davis Hanson \/\/ Fox News The current\u00a0U.S. budget deficit\u00a0could soon exceed a record $4 trillion. The massive borrowing is being driven both by prior budget profligacy and a hurried effort by the\u00a0Donald Trump\u00a0administration to pump liquidity into a quarantined America. The shutdown has left the country on the cusp\u2026","rel":"","context":"Similar post","block_context":{"text":"Similar post","link":""},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":1691,"url":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/how-could-we-be-so-stupid-let-us-count-the-ways\/","url_meta":{"origin":1848,"position":3},"title":"How Could We Be So Stupid? Let Us Count the Ways","author":"victorhanson","date":"April 20, 2010","format":false,"excerpt":"by Victor Davis Hanson PJ Media We are going to pile up another $3 trillion in national debt in just the first two years of the Obama administration. If the annual deficit should sink below $1.5 trillion, it will be called fiscal sobriety. Why, when we owe $12 trillion, would\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "April 2010"","block_context":{"text":"April 2010","link":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/ahref=\/index.php\/categories\/angry-reader\/categorylink\/a\/archives\/2010\/april-2010\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":5710,"url":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/after-obama\/","url_meta":{"origin":1848,"position":4},"title":"After Obama","author":"victorhanson","date":"April 11, 2013","format":false,"excerpt":"by Victor Davis Hanson Tribune Media Services We can imagine what lies ahead in 2017 \u2014 no matter the result of either the 2014 midterm elections or the 2016 presidential outcome. There will be no more $1 trillion deficits. About $10 trillion will have been added to the national debt\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "America's Future"","block_context":{"text":"America's Future","link":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/ahref=\/index.php\/categories\/angry-reader\/categorylink\/a\/americas-future\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":173,"url":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/the-kingdom-of-fairness\/","url_meta":{"origin":1848,"position":5},"title":"The Kingdom of Fairness","author":"victorhanson","date":"December 12, 2012","format":false,"excerpt":"by Victor Davis Hanson Tribune Media Services We are still borrowing more than $1 trillion a year. Barack Obama has added more than $5 trillion to the national debt in just his first term alone. Such massive borrowing is unsustainable. Someone somehow at some time has to pay it back.\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Debt and Deficits"","block_context":{"text":"Debt and Deficits","link":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/ahref=\/index.php\/categories\/angry-reader\/categorylink\/a\/politics\/debt-and-deficits\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]}],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1848"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1848"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1848\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1849,"href":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1848\/revisions\/1849"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1848"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1848"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1848"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}