Dark Age Cancelled

Out here on the ultra benign left coast, where winter did not arrive, the bulbs flowered in early February, and the world got to see during the Olympics just how fabulous we are, it looks as if the Dark Age might have been cancelled.

Thomas Cromwell, who ran England while Henry VIII was having his manhood handed to him on a platter by Ann Boleyn, muses in Wolf Hall – last year’s Booker winner – about beheading the ever-present merchants of Doom, “because they were upsetting everybody and besides, are terrible for business.”

Five hundred years on, and plus ça change. Doom is retailed from every pulpit of the Modern Age, and we are chased morning to midnight by people whose only aim is to panic us into buying whatever it is they are selling. It’s like a tax – I’d put it at 20% of the GDP – an Armageddon tax.
But the threats are ramping down. The global warming racket has been exposed for what it is: A giant error made by the smartest among us, a scandal that will bring rationalization to science and the academy. It’s about time the universities were audited by the people who actually pay the fees, and why not start with science? Then move to the humanities, another viper’s nest of destructive thinkers. How much money have we wasted on this one faux catastrophe? Enough to build a house with solar panels for everyone in Africa I’ll bet.

Instead, California has been bankrupted by the green dream. Most of the pension funds of Cali’s public servants have been invested in green energy, green companies, green whatever. When will they pay off? Never. Green energy depends on massive government subsidy; wind, solar, and clean coal require an average of $30 subsidy per MWH while coal and oil require none, and last year was the biggest year for new oil finds in decades. Which is a good thing. Government everywhere has no money left. How many other states, provinces, and countries have thrown away tens of billions of dollars of pension funds for teachers and public servants? I’d bet quite a few. Who is going
to pay for their retirement?

Europe’s unemployment rate is cresting around 20% – half of that is due to their insane carbon regulations. Imagine all those lives constricted by stupid regulation. Imagine the creativity stifled. Imagine if that money had been put to profitable use. Imagine how much further along we’d be in solving intractable problems. Instead: Problems still here. Biosphere meltdown: Not.
In any case, since the seas are not about to boil, and the sky is no longer falling, what about the fact that there is no money anywhere? This too is a faux panic.

Or rather it’s a real panic about to be solved.

But, as always, we Canadians will have to look to south of the border for the solution. We long ago abdicated any leadership position in the thinking world to take up smarmy peacekeeping and moralizing, so we’ll not be able to summon up the steel it will take to solve the Juggernaut of boomer medical and retirement funding. As usual, the solution will come from America’s much maligned heartland, from people who did not take the Foreign Service exam after a couple years of heavily subsidized graduate school. From the truckers, ranchers, and farmers of our world. The agricultural caste, if you like. From small town mayors, bankers, and cops. From people who actually work for a living and produce something real and tangible.

The Tea Party movement is seen by many observers as the most significant new political movement since the 60s. Fred Kelly Grant, a former chief of the Organized Crime Unit in Baltimore, said to me recently, “My generation went to sleep and while it happened, our country was stolen from us. We’re taking it back.” Fred is the kind of person behind this movement, not the crackpots and cranks characterized by the liberal media. As Michael Novak put it in his titanic work, The Spirit of Democratic Capitalism, the American founders – creators of the most important political theory in history – were pragmatic thinkers first and foremost. What works? What creates the greatest good for the greatest number? The American founders (and I’d argue the Canadian, too) were pluralist, wanting a society and culture, that, if one sector was flubbing it big-time, another could come in, take over, and change it. No one owns the sun, no one wears a crown.

The intellectual caste has screwed everything up. The utopians have driven us into bankruptcy. That’s about to change. Stay tuned. The next 18 months will be the most exciting in politics in 100 years.