South Dakota Politics: Prodigal Planet

Jesus’ parable of the prodigal son always seemed to me to be a bit troubling. There's the one son who frittered away his inheritance on high priced hookers and then began to starve when the GDP went south. It's great that he could come home and feast on the fatted calf.

But doesn't the unprodigal son, the one who stuck around and kept working, have a point? Dad never hosted him a party, nor did Paul Krugman of the New York Times ever praise him in a column. However:

31 [Dad] said unto him, `Son, thou art ever with me, and all that I have is thine. 32 It was meet that we should make merry and be glad; for this thy brother was dead, and is alive again; and was lost, and is found.'"

Okay. But isn't this happy ending possible only because someone bothered to fat the damn calf?

Just right now a lot of prodigal sons are showing up on their father's doorsteps. The state of California went prodigal on a Biblical scale, and now wants the Federal Government contribute a long line of fatted calves, each of a size that would impress Paul Bunyan.

Something the same is happening in Europe, where the nation of Greece has shown up, hat in hand, hoping that the European Union will kill a few fatted calves on their behalf. The trouble is, the good son in Europe is Germany, and Germany has had enough of it. She has bankrolled the European Union for decades, but in recent years she has become a poor nation. Germany had a prodigal brother to fatten up: East Germany. There just aren't a lot of cattle left.

The larger truth is that Europe as a whole (Germany included) has been prodigally dependent on the United States for a half century. The U.S. bore most of the cost for the defense of Europe through the Cold War. Afterwards, when Europe needed troops to pacify the ruins of Yugoslavia, American soldiers went there and made merry.

But prodigal Europe has depended on America for more than that, as Jonah Goldberg tells it.

When was the last time you used a Portuguese electronic device? How often does Europe come out with a breakthrough drug? Not often, and when they do, it's usually because companies like Novartis and GlaxoSmithKline increasingly conduct their research here. Indeed, the top five U.S. hospitals conduct more clinical trials than all the hospitals in any other single country combined. We nearly monopolize the Nobel Prize in medicine, and we create stuff at a rate Europe hasn't seen since da Vinci was in his workshop.

Prodigality is relative, perhaps. The U.S. has been prodigal in so far as we have relied on the Chinese to buy up our debt, and thus wasted much of our substance with riotous living. But among developed nations, we have been the responsible son.

Under President Obama, we are going prodigal in a big way. For most of the last century, government debt was a small portion of the GDP. Now it is on track to rise to 100% of the GDP, similar to what Greece is facing. There is talk of instituting a Value Added Tax, which in Europe makes it possible for governments to siphon off much larger portions of the economy, portions that would otherwise go to investment. Since the Second World War, government outlays in the U.S. have always remained around 20% of the GDP. With a VAT, they would approach the 55% that the French Government takes out of its productive economy. The Democrats want to make America more like Europe, and they are succeeding.

The world has gone prodigal. Maybe we are in the big crisis now, or maybe the economy will recover, the milk and honey will flow again, and the crisis will be postponed. Either way, one wonders what we will do when the famine comes and there isn't any generous father or responsible brother to bail us out.