Читаем After America полностью

Ask not for whom Bell tolls, it tolls for thee. As for murderous civil servants, you don’t have to go to Athens for that. In the New York Christmas snowstorm of 2010, the casualties of the city government’s incompetence went beyond the abandoned hot dog carts and buses and ambulances wedged into the snow banks of midtown Manhattan. A young woman gave birth in the lobby of a Brooklyn apartment house, but the baby died, because, in one of the most densely populated cities on earth, “first responders” were unable to get to her through the unploughed streets of Crown Heights until ten hours after her 911 call.¹⁰ In Queens, Yvonne Freeman, seventy-five, woke up with breathing difficulties, but she too died because the ambulance took hours to reach her.¹¹ As the can’t-do buffoon mayor floundered from one disastrous press conference to another, it emerged that the city might have been afflicted not merely by the weather but by something close to the municipal equivalent of treason. A councilman claimed that, when the storm began, Sanitation Department bosses instructed their plough drivers to delay snow clearance in New York’s outer boroughs in order to protest some planned (and fairly desultory) budget cuts.¹² The streets of Crown Heights weren’t unploughed because they were meteorologically stricken but as a conscious act of sabotage by public “servants.” That would make Mrs. Freeman, the Brooklyn baby, and others, victims of unionized manslaughter. As their Athenian comrades did, the public servants of New York prevented emergency crews from reaching those in peril, with fatal consequences. On the other hand, they did manage to clear the snow from outside the Staten Island home of Sanitation Department head honcho John Doherty, while leaving all surrounding streets pristinely clogged.¹³

Public-sector shakedown states are always unsustainable, but, though easy to launch, they’re hard to reel back. In 2010 the media reported the largest demonstration in a quarter-century had taken to the streets outside the Capitol in Springfield, Illinois, to demand, “Raise my taxes!”¹⁴ If you caught it with half an ear on the radio news, the gist seemed to be that these people were responsible and communitarian.

“Yes, people are hurting. That’s why we need a tax increase,” insisted Henry Bayer.

Who’s he? Well, he’s executive director of Council 31 of the American Federation of State, County, and Municipal Employees. Ah, right. So it’s not butchers, bakers, and candlestick makers chanting, “Raise my taxes!” It’s government workers.

Who live off taxes.

Taxes pay their salaries, benefits, and pensions. Government levies taxes on you and gives it to them. So Mr. Bayer and his chums might as well be yelling, “Gimme your money!” It’s no more communitarian than me standing in the street chanting, “Buy my book!”

Big unions fund Big Government. The union slices off 2 percent of the workers’ pay and sluices it to the Democratic party, which uses it to grow government, which also grows unions, which thereby grows the number of 2 percent contributions, which thereby grows the Democratic party, which thereby grows government…. Repeat until bankruptcy. Or bailout.

The “Raise my taxes!” protest was a subtler version of the Athenian riots—or a Trojan horse full of unionized Greeks. If the new class war is between “public servants” and the rest of us, some countries no longer have enough of “the rest of us” even to put up a fight. When the “public service” becomes as dominant as Greece’s, it is the market: you can’t cut back public spending without moving toward economic crisis and social catastrophe.

The bloated public service leached so much out of the Greek economy that the European Union decided that the least worst response was to allow them to do the same to the broader EU economy—just as the debauched public sector of California is pinning its hopes on federal largesse.

Greece is a great civilization, or it was. Now it’s a basket case. They set up a caring, compassionate, progressive society, and it’s bankrupted them.

In Greece, a female working in a “hazardous” job can retire with a full government pension at fifty. Initially, “hazardous” meant jobs like bomb disposal and mining. Ever fancied a career in bomb disposal? No? Don’t blame you, it’s kinda hazardous.

But, as is the way of government entitlements, the “hazardous” category growed like Topsy. Five hundred and eighty professions now qualify as “hazardous,” among them hairdressing.¹⁵ “I use a hundred different chemicals every day—dyes, ammonia, you name it,” 28-year-old Vasia Veremi told the New York Times. “You think there’s no risk in that?” Not to mention all those scissors.