How can we best guarantee that the U.S. will have a lot of future birthdays?
How can we best guarantee that the U.S. will have a lot of future birthdays?
A mericans are celebrating their nation’s 250th birthday in unique ways.
Amanda Roderick, who works at Idaho’s Madison County Fairgrounds, is petitioning local women to submit recipes with the family lore and traditions behind them for a great unveiling of 250 (or more) printed recipes this summer.
In Greenwich, Conn., an oversized red, white, and blue K9 statue named Yankee Doodle Doggie is popping up around town with a QR code linking to information about local America 250 events, such as a Saturday in the Park with George Washington — or at least an actor who plays him.
The Shasta County American Story Art Contest in Northern California is honoring a winner and two runners-up in four grade ranges for students who tell “the American story” through paintings, collages, and other creative works.
And earlier this week, in the latest installment of its year-long “Ideas That Made U.S.: Dialogues on Freedom” program, the Hoover Institution approached America 250 in a very Hoover Institution (which is to say not a very Yankee Doodle Doggie) way. It held a panel discussion — asking what conditions allowed the U.S. to reach 250 years old.
John Cochrane, aka “the Grumpy Economist,” pointed to limited government, a large market, property rights, and the rule of law. Americans, Cochrane explained, enjoy “a government of rights, not of permissions.”
Ross Levine, a Hoover senior fellow and research associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research, pointed to competition, justice, and stability as principles that explain the success of the American experiment.
Valerie Ramey, also a senior fellow at Hoover and a research associate at NBER, pointed to luck helping the colonies “breaking into independence just at the time of the Scottish Enlightenment.” She called the Constitution insufficient alone to ensure greatness. Liberia, after all, essentially ratified the same document to different results, she noted. She seconded three areas highlighted by Alexis de Tocqueville: geography, in terms of both the expanse of land and distance from Europe; laws; and the people’s mores, including education, which she notes yielded an 85 to 90 percent literacy rate in New England during the 1790s.
But what might prevent America from celebrating future birthdays? Why might we go the way of the Roman Republic or the Ottoman Empire or the Soviet Union?
While the panelists uniformly expressed bullishness for another American century, they volunteered various possible impediments to the American Dream. “The number of unaddressed dumpster fires is increasing,” Cochrane noted. “And the ability of our political system to handle basic things seems to be decreasing.” Those dumpster fires include education, immigration, new home construction hamstrung by permits, social programs disincentivizing work, and widespread distrust in public-health authorities. “We need a Marie Kondo cleaning up of the insane complexity of our public life.”
Ramey pointed to the horrible public education system. She also noted that the federal debt now eclipses 100 percent of the gross domestic product, a figure last seen in the wake of the Second World War and never glimpsed during peacetime in America.
Levine divulged, “I am very fearful that we are heading for a financial crisis bigger than 2008.” He emphasized bipartisan support for enormous federal deficits as a massive problem. The bond market pulling the plug, and interest rates soaring, would mean a disastrous outcome. Bipartisan support for gradual reductions in the debt would mean a more agreeable outcome.
“The problem isn’t the debt,” Cochrane countered. “The problem is a lack of a plan for repaying the debt.”
The economists, as economists do, fixated on economic questions. But a few challenges do not lend themselves to mathematical equations or even policy solutions. Can a nation succeed when a growing percentage of its inhabitants wish it to fail? With Americans increasingly sharing less in common in terms of race, religion, and even language with neighbors, what will unite us for the next 250 years? What becomes of a people who regard reading as an eccentricity and books as curios?
Many problems do not lend themselves to fixes at the political level. And if America’s vexations — political, cultural, and otherwise — appear beyond any alleviation, consider the problem our forebears faced. They faced a monarch “Quartering large bodies of armed troops among us,” “cutting off our Trade with all parts of the world,” “imposing Taxes on us without our Consent,” “depriving us in many cases, of the benefits of Trial by Jury,” and “suspending our own Legislatures,” among other offenses against free men. That they transcended such terrible conditions seems both deserving of celebration and a fount from which to draw inspiration.