Mark Steyn surveys his surroundings and concludes his latest “Happy Warrior” column for National Review with the following summation:
Most countries decay into statism through nationalization: Britain nationalized health care in the late Forties, France nationalized the banks in the early Eighties. But that’s not the American way. So the veneer of a private sector is maintained as an ever more implausible facade for a hyper-regulated statism: Big Government at one remove, subcontracted to nominally private paperwork shufflers across the land. In health care, banking, homeownership, college tuition, Americans now enjoy considerably less freedom of movement than citizens of openly statist nations in Europe.
As it happens, these are all the areas of life the prudent man is enjoined to take care of: Save for the future. Get an education. Buy property. Look after your health. Remorseless governmentalization of all four sectors is part of the ever greater sclerosis in America — and immensely time-consuming. … [S]o much of life is like that now, isn’t it? Not the rough-and-tumble of a free society or the homogenized mediocrity of socialism, but just the vast diversion of so much American energy into shuffling around the regulatory obstacles to daily life.
