In offering a mixed review of Dambisa Moyo‘s new book, Kevin D. Williamson of National Review (author of his own Politically Incorrect Guide to Socialism) offers this description of the greatest threats ahead for Western societies:
The U.S. and Europe have the worst kind of problems: ones that are easy to understand but difficult to solve. Our worst problem is that democratic governments lack the kind of robust fiscal controls that prevent the political class from pillaging the productive economy to feather the nests of its own members and their clients. (China has relatively strong fiscal limitations: a police state and poverty.) The West is in trouble not because Beijing is lending us money, but because of why we are borrowing it: At every level ? federal, state, local, county, school district, sewage-treatment authority ? we have disfigured our institutions such that they function principally as wealth-transfer mechanisms for the benefit of the political class. The word for this is “corruption,” and it is at least as much a moral problem as an economic one. We are our own disease.
