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The current debt, recession, wars and political infighting have depressed Americans into thinking they soon will be supplanted by more vigorous rivals abroad. Yet this is an American fear as old as it is improbable.
In the 1930s, the Great Depression supposedly marked the end of freewheeling American capitalism.
The 1950s were caricatured as a period of mindless American conformity, McCarthyism and obsequious company men.
By the late 1960s, the assassinations of John and Robert Kennedy and Martin Luther King Jr., along with the Vietnam War, had prompted a hippie counterculture that purportedly was going to replace a toxic American establishment. Oil shocks, gas lines, Watergate and new rust belts were said to be symptomatic of a post-industrial, has-been America of the 1970s.
At the same time, other nations, we were typically told, were doing far better.
In the late 1940s, with the rise of a postwar Soviet Union that had crushed Hitler's Wehrmacht on the eastern front during World War II, communism promised a New Man as it swept through Eastern Europe.
Mao Zedong took power in China and inspired communist revolutions from North Korea to Cuba. Statist central planning was going to replace the unfairness and inefficiency of Western-style capitalism.
Yet just a half-century later, communism had either imploded or been superseded in most of the world.
By the early 1980s, Japan's state capitalism and emphasis on the group rather than the individual was being touted as the ideal balance between the public and private sectors. Japan Inc. continually outpaced the growth of the American economy.
Then, in the 1990s, a real estate bubble and a lack of fiscal transparency led to a collapse of property prices and a general recession. A shrinking and aging Japanese population, led by a secretive government, has been struggling ever since to recover the old magic.
At the beginning of the 21st century, the European Union was hailed as the proper Western paradigm of the future. The euro soared over the dollar.
Europe practiced a sophisticated "soft power," while American cowboyism was derided for getting us into wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. Civilized cradle-to-grave benefits were contrasted with the frontier, every-man-for-himself American system.
Now Europe limps from crisis to crisis. Its undemocratic union, when coupled with socialist entitlements, is proving unsustainable.
Symptoms of the ossified European system appear in everything from a shrinking population and a growing atheism to an inability to integrate Muslim immigrants or field a credible military.
For those who savor perverse policy incentives, the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (PPACA) is a gift that keeps on giving. Today's surprise is a counterintuitive tax that, under certain circumstances, is small for low- to middle-income families, bigger for high-income families, but ...
At first blush, the mercantilists' call for "free trade but fair trade" sounds reasonable. After all, who can be against fairness? Giving the idea just a bit of thought suggests that fairness as a guide for public policy lays the groundwork for tyranny. You say, "Williams, I've never heard anything ...
'Washington, D.C.'s workers enjoy the highest salaries of any U.S. city, with a median household income of $85,198," CNNMoney reported recently. It's even higher for the federal worker segment of the city, with an average wage last year for federal civilian workers of $81,258 per person (not per ...
Sometimes even small changes in process can have enormous symbolism. The incoming House Republicans, now in the majority, have been talking about keeping the House of Representatives out of Washington every third week during the new 112th Congress. It is hard to overstate the importance of this ...
Last week, The Wall Street Journal headline read "Companies Cling to Cash." The story reveals that U.S. companies are sitting on almost $2 trillion in cash, and that cash as a share of corporate assets is at the highest level since 1959. Hoarding cash is probably the right thing for companies to do ...
Posted By: dream77(250) on 12/29/2010 | 11:53 PM ET
The American Constitution has been *DESTROYED* over 223 years. Grand disrespect for the constitution among our leaders sworn to uphold it is now the norm, is not punished nor reversed, or hardly recognized by the numbing media. We have a present monetary system ILLEGAL where the constitution states only gold and silver are to be considered money. This system produced instability and grave danger to our liberty. All citizen have been stolen from, the robbery unjust. We are all poorer as a nation
Posted By: sendjobstochina(55) on 12/29/2010 | 11:25 PM ET
China/India cannot defeat USA industrially or miltarlly, it would be USA's own industrialist who would push it down to the third world status. as more and more jobs are being sent overseas, tax base is shrinking, nation has to support its own people and only way to do that is by printing more and more dollar to make up for the lost dollars to china/india.
Posted By: Xiphos(40) on 12/29/2010 | 9:18 PM ET
America will always change. And Americans will ALWAYS find a way. It's called Exceptionalism.
Posted By: cnptnow(1735) on 12/29/2010 | 9:05 PM ET
Second the Bravo!
Posted By: carl2003(30) on 12/29/2010 | 8:13 PM ET
Bravo. Well said.
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