Notes
1 I say “perhaps” because, whether the incentive is to create wealth, as in a market economy, or power, as in a nonmarket economy, the same kinds of people are likely to win the competition: the most competent, the hardest working and, perhaps, the most ruthless.
2 “Government by a privileged minority,” Webster's New World Dictionary (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1996). The term “aristocracy” originally referred to a government by the best citizens in the state.
3 Many observers consider the persistence of the rich in America to be both unacceptable and a symptom of incipient decline. See, for example, Kevin Phillips, Wealth and Democracy: A Political History of the American Rich (New York: Broadway Books, 2002).
4 In John Gray's words, “[C]ivil society is the matrix of the market economy.” John Gray, Post-Liberalism: Studies in Political Thought (Oxford: Routledge, 1993), 246.
5 Japan straddles this world, as an advanced postindustrial society with the trappings of liberal democracy but the soul of a civil society that is quite different from, and that developed largely independently of, Western-style democracy. Japan's distinctiveness would be far more apparent if it were not for the Western-style constitution and government imposed on Japan by the United States after World War II.
6 All labor is, in a literal sense, exploited if we accept John Roemer's Marxist definition: “[A] person is exploited if the labor that he expends in production is greater than the labor embodied in the goods he can purchase with the revenues from production.” John E. Roemer, Free to Lose: An Introduction to Marxist Economic Philosophy (London: Century Hutchinson, 1989), 161. But such a society would be a static one, indeed. Given that labor is also exploited under any other conceivable economic system (especially socialism and communism), we ought to prefer the system that maximizes the economic well-being of the worker.
7 The wealth gap between Bill Gates and America's poorest families is very nearly as large as was the wealth gap between the Sun Kings of Egypt and their slaves. The difference is not in the size of the gap but in the fact that Egyptian slaves would always be slaves, as would their children, whereas poor citizens in America can, and do, aspire to be the next Bill Gates.
8 Poverty in America is more closely associated with immigration—no sooner does one immigrant group move up the socioeconomic ladder than they are replaced by other aspiring, but very poor, “Americans.” In addition, poverty is also associated with America's semipermanent underclass associated mainly, but hardly exclusively, with our legacy of black slavery.
9 Abraham Maslow, Motivation and Personality (New York: HarperCollins, 1987), originally published in 1854.
10 Louise Bogan, “Women,” Blue Estuaries: Poems 1923–1968 (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1968). Bogan was actually speaking (ironically) of women.
11 As a random example, the French sent a few jet aircraft to Iraq, but these Mirages were so out of date that their antiquated radar left them dangerously vulnerable to Iraqi antiaircraft fire. No doubt the French pilots of these planes were as brave as their American counterparts. But their service on behalf of such an enfeebled society meant that they had to be escorted through the battle zone like noncombatants. The French were simply no match for a third world power like Iraq.
12 See, generally, the hilarious and sad article by Philip Shishkin, “How the Armies of Europe Let Their Guard Down: Guaranteed Jobs for Soldiers Leave Little Room to Train,” Wall Street Journal (February 13, 2003): 1, 7. The main point of Shishkin's article is that “Europe's military muscle has grown soft” mainly because “so much money is spent on pay and benefits that there is less left for the technology, weapons and other gear that modern forces need.” This, of course, is my point exactly: A providential society doesn't maintain a military force as a serious deterrent against possible aggression or to maintain their own security and integrity, but rather as an instrument of social policy to reduce unemployment, provide a social safety net, and respond to citizen demands for less work and more pay.
13 Tariffs have, in fact, been imposed on imported steel from time to time, most recently in 2002 (they were removed in 2003). However, these tariffs have been more about warning other countries against subsidizing their own inefficient steel industries than about subsidizing our own. Even so, tariffs are generally counterproductive because, among other things, although they may temporarily maintain employment in the targeted industry (e.g., steelmaking), they reduce employment in all the industries that must now pay more for steel.
14 Eurostat, 2.2.7-r1821-2012-03-13, available at http://epp.eurostat.ec.europa.eu/tgm/table.do?tab=table&language=en&pcode=tps00001&tableSelection=1&footnotes=yes&labeling=labels&plugin=1.
15 See Paul Berman's discussion of the role of resolve in the preservation of democracy: “What Lincoln Knew About War,” The New Republic (March 3, 2003).
16 Our friends would prefer America to be as irresolute as they; our enemies would prefer us to be as irresolute as our friends.
17 In fact, however, “By the war's end, the United States had an arms-making capacity that eclipsed that of England and France combined.” Ron Chernow, The House of Morgan (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1990), 189.
18 In 1914, Britain accounted for 8.3 percent of the world's GDP. It is interesting to compare Britain's pre-World War I “dominance” with America's dominance today: In 2011, America accounted for fully 23 percent of the world's GDP. International Monetary Fund, World Economic Outlook Database, January 24, 2012, http://www.imf.org/external/pubs/ft/weo/2011/02/weodata/index.aspx.
19 Even Ilya Zaslavsky, the main Gorbachev advisor during Perestroika, admitted that it was Reagan's policy of “negotiating through strength that brought the Kremlin to its knees.” David Remnick, Lenin's Tomb: The Last Days of the Soviet Empire (New York: Vintage Books, 1994), 323.
20 International Monetary Fund, World Economic Outlook Database.
21 China also faces a third challenge. Many economists have pointed out that when a rapidly industrializing society achieves a certain level of development—let's call it roughly $5,000 in capital per capita—growth inevitably slows down. While the exact mechanisms of this deceleration are a matter of dispute, the phenomenon has been observed in societies as different as the United States, the Soviet Union, post-war Germany and Japan, Taiwan, Singapore, Hong Kong, etc.
22 Somewhat similar arguments have recently been made, from very different political perspectives, by Zbigniew Brzezinski in Strategic Vision: America and the Crisis of Global Power (New York: Basic Books, 2012), and by Robert Kagan in The World America Made (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2012).
23 Phillips, Wealth and Democracy.
24 Phillips, Wealth and Democracy, 389 ff.
25 Illegal immigrants have so often been granted legalized status that the phrase “illegal immigrant” has little meaning.
26 A characteristic example, this time from the political left, is Edward Luce's Time to Start Thinking: America in the Age of Descent (New York: Atlantic Monthly Press, 2012).
27 For those of my readers who are too young to remember, Sputnik 1 was a Soviet satellite that successfully achieved an Earth orbit in October of 1957. Sputnik launched the Space Age, beating America into space and inaugurating the first of the long succession of lamentations about the poor quality of American scientific and technical education.
28 William Safire, “Myth America 2002” New York Times (July 8, 2002): A21.