They Know Something's Wrong, But They Don't Know What

A change is in the wind. Some have a better sense of it than others.

Michael Kinsley

They (the Baby Boomers) made alienation fashionable and turned self-indulgence (sex, drugs, rock and roll, cappuccino makers, real estate, and so on) into a religion. Their initial suspicion of the Pentagon and two presidents, Johnson and Nixon, spread like kudzu into a general cynicism about all established institutions (Congress, churches, the media, you name it). This reflexive and crippling cynicism is now shared across the political spectrum. The Boomers ran up huge public and private debts, whose consequences are just beginning to play out. In the world that Boomers will pass along to their children, America is widely held in contempt, prosperity looks to more and more people like a mirage, and things are generally going to hell.

Michael Hirsch

Economists said they would have to come up with new theories for how markets worked (following the fall of the investment banks), in particular how the financial system functioned and interacted with the “real” economy. “Large swaths of economics are going to have to be rethought on the basis of what happened,” Larry Summers, the presidential adviser who doubles as a world-renowned economist, told me in an interview shortly after Barack Obama took office.

Two years on, that rethinking has barely begun, and only with the most painful reluctance by economists. Meanwhile, policy and political debates still driven by outdated economic theory have been racing out of control, bitterly dividing the nation.

Peggy Noonan

The second thing is the clock. Here is a great virtue of the Tea Party: They know what time it is. It's getting late. If we don't get the size and cost of government in line now, we won't be able to. We're teetering on the brink of some vast, dark new world—states and cities on the brink of bankruptcy, the federal government too. The issue isn't "big spending" anymore. It's ruinous spending that they fear will end America as we know it, as they promised it to their children.

Doctor Zero

Political control is what’s killing us. It is expressed in hundreds of ways: high tax rates with carefully tailored exceptions, massive bailouts, laws rigged to favor government-controlled industries, restrictions on resource development, and a vast poppy field of subsidies and penalties. The Democrats have added thousands of pages of fabulously expensive legislation since Obama took office. Two messages echo through those pages: Obey and be rewarded. Resist and be punished.

This is not appropriate behavior for a government that was meant to live in awe of the people’s boundless freedom, and work carefully with limited powers to accomplish its sworn duties. Even the most apolitical citizen can now see that it’s also disastrous behavior.

We discarded traditional thought on marriage, saving, investing and borrowing. We tried to replace the old structures with a new one, one based on regulations and spending. We never managed to find a replacement for self-denial and self-control.

But we will.