Federal deficit-spending is impairing economic recovery and posing a grave threat to the future well-being, and even the safety, of Americans. We are looking at the real possibility of losing the dollar as reserve currency as well as the US position of financial and political leadership, and losing even the ability to fund a military capable of sustaining our country’s role as a world power.

If we do not want to condemn the next generations of Americans to a shrinking quality of life in a country which has declined into impotence, obscurity, and despair, we are going to have to make very significant and dramatic political changes.

Rembrandt van Rijn, Belshazzar’s Feast, 1635-8, oil on canvas, National Gallery, London

Essentially, we are seeing today, in both Europe and America, the arrival of the time in which the post-WWII Welfare State is proving financially unsustainable. The theory that the establishment elite could redistribute to the cannaile a sufficient quantity of the wealth produced by the productive sector of society to overcome the inherent disadvantages of sloth, intoxication, and criminality as a life-style, or at least to raise them to the level of the working classes, has proven to be futile, counterproductive, and a dream. The associated theory that labor cartels could successfully employ propaganda, intimidation, and governmental coercive force to deliver upper middle class life-styles permanently to modestly skilled workers has already failed conspicuously.

Communism collapsed a few decades ago, and the lesser gods of the religion of the Left are failing now. If you can’t have a Welfare State and you can’t have Trade Unionism either, it isn’t clear what there remains of an imaginable left-wing agenda.