By Victor Davis Hanson
Thursday, June 13, 2013
The Obama administration is facing scandals everywhere --
using the IRS to punish political enemies, seizing the phone records of
Associated Press and Fox News reporters, monitoring phone and email accounts of
millions, and making up stories about what happened in Benghazi.
In other words, the sort of government overreach that
hardly raises eyebrows in Russia, China and most of Africa and Latin America is
felonious here in the most free society in the world. Because of America's
unique Constitution, and especially the Bill of Rights, for over two centuries
Americans have taken as their birthright privacy and free expression, so that
even the slightest infringement becomes cause for outrage -- and correction.
We have wide margins of error in energy. President Obama
still keeps the Keystone Pipeline on hold. He's frozen almost all new gas and
oil leasing on America's vast public lands. Yet throughout the 2012 campaign,
the president boasted that gas and oil drilling in the United States had
reached all-time highs.
Despite, not because of, the president's efforts,
production rose due to a long history of protecting private property rights and
ownership of subterranean resources. This country also inherited a can-do
tradition of private enterprise by using innovative new technology to cut costs
and increase efficiency.
In contrast, much of Europe has outlawed fracking.
Elsewhere there is not the expertise to use sophisticated recovery techniques.
Only the United States allows the private oil and gas sector enough power so
it's not easily shut down. So, the president has the luxury of lauding record
production while doing his utmost to stop it.
With the Obama administration's scheduled Pentagon cuts
on top of the sequester reductions, about $1 trillion over the next decade will
be slashed from the military budget. But the president still is fighting a war
in Afghanistan, has intervened in Libya, and for two years has threatened to
use force to help topple Bashar Assad of Syria. Obama can oversee massive
military reductions, and yet projects force almost anywhere in the world,
precisely because he inherited the largest and most potent armed forces in the
history of civilization.
Elements of American universities are also increasingly
subject to global ridicule. Annual tuition customarily soars far beyond the
rate of inflation. Aggregate student debt is now unsustainable. A lost
generation of unemployed youth fails to translate their questionable degrees
into well-paying jobs.
Colleges waste money on the superfluous, from
rocking-climbing walls to diversity czars. College catalogs now include
offerings such as Dartmouth's "Queer Marriage, Hate Crimes and Will and
Grace: Contemporary Issues in LGBT Studies" and Harvard's "Race,
Gender, and Ethnicity in Martin Scorsese and Spike Lee."
American universities have the luxury of offering the
inane precisely because their math, science and computer departments, along
with their medical and business schools, would never offer such fluff. In other
words, the meritocratic protocols of institutions such as Caltech, MIT,
Stanford Medical School and Harvard Business School are so successful in
turning out the world's most gifted graduates that they can afford to subsidize
the widely publicized but otherwise shallow and politically correct nonsense.
The same paradox is true of the green movement. The
United States has the luxury to waste billions of dollars subsidizing a failed
Solyndra or insolvent electric car companies because it has the richest coal --
and soon, gas and oil -- deposits in the world.
Californians have shut down huge swaths of irrigated
farmland to save a bait fish in the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta and to restore
19th-century salmon runs in the state's rivers. Sometimes even more radically
they dream of blowing up the Hetch Hetchy dam to return to a pre-modern
landscape in the central Sierra Nevada Mountains.
These realities and fantasies assume that California
farmers will remain the most productive and innovative in the world, while
supplying both the cheapest and safest food in the nation. And only because
long-forgotten engineers once crafted a brilliant system of dams, canals and
hydroelectric projects can the present generation of Californians -- well fed,
watered and powered -- indulge in fantasies about discarding them.
At some point our margins of error will disappear, and
with them the indulgent toying with our freedoms, defense, energy, education
and food. Americans will then have to reawaken and act more like our
no-nonsense predecessors -- if our successors are to inherit what we have taken
for granted.
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