Jim Manzi has a good post on the real implications of this disaster wending its way all too quickly down Pennsylvania Avenue.
What I find most appalling about it are the perverse incentives and moral hazards that it sets up. Buy more house than you can afford? No problem, the taxpayers will prop you up and keep you in it. Spending more than revenue in your state capital? Don’t sweat it, we’ll just steal money from other states so you can keep it up.
It is punishing the prudent and rewarding the irresponsible. And when you set up a system like that, you’ll get a lot less of the former and a lot more of the latter behavior. At some point, Atlas will shrug. I don’t know how far off we are from it, though.
[Update a few minutes later]
Welcome to the Great American Handout.
But where will Atlas go? There’s no gulch in the real world.
There are other countries competing for industry and business. China, Europe, or India may be interested in what the US rejects.
Unfortunately, now that George Costansa-Bush has left office we are now stuck with Cosmo Obama and his manziere approach to the economy.
Orville, I will thank you to refer to our president by his proper name: Barack Hoover Obama.
All this time we were wrong about what the H stood for.
I think the Great American Handout and the inevitable economic disaster to follow is going to be the secular crisis described in The Fourth Turning, a cultural shakeup on the order of the Revolution, the Civil War, and the Depression/WW2.
Eventually Atlas will shrug, but it’s completely unclear to me what America will look like afterwards. It could go either way — complete socialism or revitalized liberty.
Where would you move if you did? I sometimes think the Czech Republic might be nice. Those eastern european countries are in no hurry to put themselves under the yoke of socialism like Western europeans and we are.
My main fear living there would be the big Russian bear next door. (plus i don’t speak any of those languages).
Speaking Czech feels a lot like gargling half a cup of motor oil. I think you have to be born to it, have toned up your throat muscles from a young age. Otherwise, you’re liable to strangle on some long string of consonants and end your life as a Terry Schiavo test-case for European euthanasia law.