Nick Gillespie’s journée de folie

A stopped clock is right twice a day. Nick Gillespie, Editor in Chief, Reason.com and Reason TV, is wrong once a year. This year, Nick’s journée de folie fell on May 23, when he came up with less than scintillating thumb-sucker, “This Used To Be a Helluva High-Trust Country, But Our Leaders Are Destroying That”.

Nick takes his lead from a famous line from Easy Rider (1970)¹, delivered by a young Jack Nicolson, playing “George Hanson”, a small-town southern lawyer, who says “You know, this used to be a helluva good country. I can’t understand what’s gone wrong with it,” but takes his substance (unfortunately) from a laughingly stupid recent column, “When leaders cheat, followers … follow” by “Instapundit” Glenn Reynolds, bashing the CIA, the IRS, and (you guessed it) Hillary Clinton for destroying “trust” in America, leading to Nick’s wrap-up, “Yeah, this used to be a helluva good country. Until we allowed our leaders to get away with bullshitting us to our faces. And given that the general 2016 election has yet to begin, things can only go downhill from here.”²

Well, excuse me, Nick, but let me cast a cold eye on both your and George Hanson’s thesis. When, exactly, was this a “helluva good country”? In 1850, when you could buy and sell human beings, when shooting Indians was a sport, and when women were scarcely more than chattel? Were those the good old days? In 1870, when blacks were maybe 25% “free,” when Indian shooting was still a sport, and when the average life expectancy from birth for white males was 40? Or in 1900, when doctors were called “saw-bones” because that was what they did, and when 1 out of 100 child births was fatal to the mother, a figure that didn’t decline significantly until the 1930s? Were those the good old days?
How about “modern times”, like the 1950s, when the black high school graduation rate in states like Mississippi and Alabama approached 0%? Or the 1970s, when a nurse could be fired because she refused to “moon” her employer?³ And when was this a “helluva country” for gays and transexuals?

You get the picture. Life is a lot better now than it used to be. What’s bad about today? Two things, the failure of global capitalism to avoid a near-disastrous collapse of confidence circa 2008⁴ and the continuing failure of governments, the U.S. in particular, to effectively address international Islamic terrorism. It is this that has given wings to the tear it all down candidacies of Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders.

Afterwords
The Lords of Finance have never been willing to admit, even to themselves, how they got it wrong. Alan Greenspan, who had extraordinary influence over the entire brief heyday of “innocent” global capitalism, which ran roughly from late Ronald Reagan to late George Bush II, had at least the grace to admit that his faith in self-policing markets had been proved disastrously wrong, but few others have been so forthcoming. For example, Richard Fuld, who ran Lehman Brothers into the ground, claimed that it was unscrupulous “short sellers” who destroyed his company. When a market ignoramus (like a congressman) proposes a ban on short selling, well, that’s taken as the first mark of market ignoramus. It was, in fact, the short sellers who saw Lehman as the house of cards—and house of lies—that under Fuld’s rule it had become.

The record of the American military-foreign policy elite is even worse. The average American has a totally distorted picture of the dismal record of American interventions, dating back to the First Gulf War, which have consistently left matters worse than before, resulting in increased instability and increased hostility to the U.S.