My 15 year old daughter, Mallory, said to me the other day that she had read an article online that stated if the minimum wage in the US was raised to $15/hr, there would be far less poverty and a more equal distribution of wealth from the rich to the poor. Being cynical by nature, I explained to her that if the Fry Cooks at McDonald's were making $15/hr, a Big Mac would soon cost $9 and this would disproportionately affect the lower income families who might eat out at the chain; the bottom line is, the fat cats will still keep getting richer; not since Henry Ford has anyone seemed to care if employees were being paid enough to consume the goods they were making (just think of the people who actually make iPhones and Nikes).
Reading The End Is Near and It's Going to Be Awesome, it's clear that Kevin D. Williamson shares my daughter's enthusiasm for easy answers: in every area of government that he examines (from Social Security to Education to Law Enforcement), Williamson details the awful state of affairs in each, offers up what these programs should look like, but doesn't explain how to transition from one way of doing things to the other; essentially, he fails to explain how to wrest control from the fat cats who have entrenched power.
I did enjoy quite a bit of the political philosophy in The End Is Near and It's Going to Be Awesome, from the notion that "politics is violence" (just try not paying your taxes and see how long it takes before the men with guns show up at your door) to "the social contract is the only contract that somebody else can sign for you, without your consent, and still be held to be valid -- and a valid expression of your consent at that". And I also enjoyed the fact that Williamson remained bipartisan-- the problems in the US go beyond Democrats and Republicans and Libertarians; the problems are endemic to all of centrally planned politics.
Some bits that jibe with my own beliefs:
(On the impending bankruptcy of the entitlement/welfare state) The US government is, in an important sense, a promise -- a promise that is not going to be kept.
(On public education) With a market that is literally captive, ensured revenue with no meaningful accountability for performance, above-market compensation rates, heavy political protection from emergent competitors, and the biggest lobbying budget in Washington, the public schools have a setup that no robber baron or mafioso would have dared to dream of -- and summers off, to boot.
Some things that bothered me, leading me to wonder at the scholarly level of this book:
The English language has spread throughout the world (it is one of two official national languages of India) not because of unadulterated admiration for Anglo-American culture but because Chinese-speaking, German-speaking, and Hindi-speaking people wish to participate in the global economy, and speaking English makes that a great deal easier. Um, isn't English one of the official languages of India due to a hundred years of British rule in the subcontinent?
Also, Williamson name drops iPhones and Apple and Steve Jobs repeatedly-- was he getting paid for the product placements? He should be, for the amount of times it happens, and it seems out of place in a book that rails against vested interests.
And, several times, Williamson quotes long passages from his source material in which those books quote their source material. Isn't it Writing 101 to only quote primary sources?
I went into this book hoping to learn how the end of business as usual in American politics would be "awesome", but like Mal's uncritical enthusiasm for a seemingly simple solution to poverty, I think that Williamson's optimism is premature: with no systems suggested to move from a centrally planned government to the series of community-based and grassroots organisations that he proposes to take their place, I fear the result would be chaos; Hobbes' anarchic alternative to the Leviathan that Williamson dismisses out of hand. Awesome.
