Excerpted from a great Mises Daily article by Lew Rockwell:
The trends are gleaned from US Census data, which provide a look at how economic downturns can devastate a society, and offer a glimpse into a theme that the Austrian tradition has long emphasized. Economics isn’t just about trade statistics, retail sales, or GDP. It is the very pith of life.
What the Census data indicate is that our mobility has been drastically curtailed from what it was a few years ago. The number of people who have not moved from one home to another, from one community to another, has risen substantially. . . .
Another trend is the delay in marriage. For the first time since the data have been tracked, the share of women 18 and older who are married fell below 50 percent. The share of the population age 25 to 34 that is unmarried jumped from 34.5 percent in 2000 to 46.3 percent nine years later. This is a massive social trend, dictated by economic realities. . . .
We’ve also seen a jump in the number of people working from home, which also makes sense given the tighter labor markets and growing resistance to hiring. Another option besides working at home is one that Europeans know very well: going back to school. This trend has taken hold in the United States in the last two years. . . .
The tendency to plunge back into school is also dictated by economic realities. We are now in the third straight year of college graduating classes whose earnings potential is far less than they had expected during their years in school. During these years, students accumulated six-figure debts that they figured they could pay off in a reasonable time with their high incomes. Those incomes have not appeared. So rather than accepting pay at the prevailing rate, they have reenrolled in school to defer having to service the loan.
We might as well bring up the striking trend of young people moving back in with their parents after a period of living by themselves. This phenomenon has given rise to the phrase Boomerang Generation. In 2000, some 17 percent of Americans age 20 to 29 lived at home. Today, some estimates put that figure at 34 percent. And this compares to 1960, when only 9 percent of people in this age group lived with their parents. . . .
Tragically, labor-force participation among American youth age 16 to 24 continues to fall. Most recently, it fell to 60.5 percent in July 2010, which is the lowest July ever recorded. Before 20 years ago, the typical labor force participation rate ranged between 81 and 86 percent. In other words, four out of five kids in this age group gained hugely valuable experience for a lifetime of work. Now only three out of five kids do. The most dramatic drops we’ve seen in these figures have been in the past three years. . . .
This is a striking fact of our times, one made even more devastating as we look at the economic fundamentals such as the unpayable public debt and the out-of-control spending in Washington and the states that continues to consume vast amounts of private capital.
However, if we take a longer-term look, we can see that these trends date back decades, with the turning point being the severing of the dollar’s last link to gold in 1971. This is the event that set up the explosion of government growth, of credit addiction across the population, of massive malinvestment in housing and many other sectors, of the gutting of American savings, and, most seriously, of the loss of freedom to the national-security state. . . .
Having established the trend lines, let us now speak of cause and effect. In every case, we can easily trace these trends to economic realities, which in turn are profoundly affected by government policy trends and monetary policy in particular. Monetary policy is truly the hidden hand behind the strangulation of the American dream. It is the secret force at work that erodes our living standards, funds the growth of the leviathan state, and makes every sector of economic life dependent on rising debt.
But there are other factors at work here, too. Antitrust law hobbles business as never before. Taxes drain productivity from corporations, small businesses, and households. Protectionism keeps the best products at the best prices out of the hands of consumers. Edicts issued by a thousand bureaucracies keep American enterprise constantly guessing about the legal climate. Patent mania has created a minefield for innovation in every sector from medicine to software. Imperial wars have drained away capital and labor resources from the private sector.
The leviathan state is the great enemy of American prosperity, the monster that devours wealth. Every bit of economic growth that we experience is due not to the presence of this leviathan, but to the ingenuity of American enterprise in getting around the barriers. . . .
you can count me among the skeptics that the Tea Party is going to achieve anything like a restoration of liberty. It isn’t clear that many of these activists really understand that ending despotism will require a gutting not only of the current crop of state managers, but the entire apparatus of state management itself. That means ending all forms of government intervention, domestic and international.
It is not enough to cut back or even end the welfare state; the imperial warfare state must also be dismantled. That means taking apart the national-security apparatus as surely as we end the economic intervention in domestic life. To oppose one while supporting the other — and this is the very essence of the Republican Pledge to America — is self-defeating if not deliberately deceitful. We know the results of this kind of intellectual incoherence because we’ve seen it so many times before.
Tea Partyers proclaim themselves to be against socialism, but reflect on the often-overlooked forms that socialism takes in our time. The first type is corporate socialism that puts large banks and corporations in the driver’s seat of public policy, leading to bailouts for the most well-heeled firms out there. In an effort to keep home values from falling and to keep American automotive companies from going belly up, the whole of the American mortgage market is socialized and American car manufacturing put on the public dole.
A second type of American socialism comes in the form of a gargantuan military-industrial complex that plows through more than a trillion taxpayer dollars each year to sustain the American empire around the world — and be enriched, of course.
Yet a third type is that which provides social security and medical benefits for older Americans, people who believe that because they have paid into these systems their entire lives, they are entitled to receive back as much as possible.
These three systems of socialism are a main cause of the American bankruptcy. They are absolutely unsustainable. A consistent application of the principle of liberty must take aim at these programs, across the board, with no exceptions. . . .
the current revolutionary atmosphere in political life will be subverted by the political machinery of Washington. The radical sentiments you heard during the primaries are already being changed to please the establishment. . . .
If this next round follows suit, the Republican elite will benefit from the energy and enthusiasm of naive activists but will trim and curb the antigovernment agenda in the interest of “responsible governing.” The most we can hope for is a wonderful gridlock.
But the next question becomes, What exactly are we waiting for, and how do we bring it about?
. . . . In this fight, I believe we are working with the most powerful tool of all, one that is stronger and more effective than all the armies, guns, and drones in the world. In the end, no government can rule without at least the passive consent of the people. This is why government works so hard at the manufacturing of ideologies to justify what it is doing to us. Our job is to counter this with education of a different sort, one that debunks the rationales behind despotism and then explains the meaning of liberty.