American Dreams, Populist Screams

Is the American Dream dead? How are most Americans actually doing? Will the coronavirus kill ...

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Is the American Dream dead? How are most Americans actually doing? Will the coronavirus kill us all? And most importantly, is Star Trek: Picard actually good? Repeat guest Michael Strain, author of The American Dream Is Not Dead, has all of these answers and more.


Show Notes:

–Michael’s book, The American Dream Is Not Dead

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  1. Brett

    Jonah you gotta watch Picard. Season 2 is like an extended Holodeck episode but Season 3 is awesome so far.

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    Chris Babcock

    So I really like the criticism of libertarianism you mentioned (that it fails foreign affairs and children). I think the solution to that problem then is found in Dostoevsky, and in particular in the famous Grand Inquisitor chapter of Brothers Karamazov. The human condition is not to desire freedom.

    The human condition is not to desire freedom, and definitions of libertarianism that insist that people long to be free will fail. Nonetheless, we should posit that freedom is a good essential to human flourishing, even if the people would constantly seek to avoid it. This requires us to accept that libertarianism is at its heart a contradiction, and that the goals of libertarian politics should not necessarily be to expand freedom, but to create the necessary (and to some extent, artificial) conditions that are most likely to allow liberty to flourish. There's a risk of streitbare democracie down this path, but that must be managed through prudence rather than doctrine.

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  3. Richard Fulmer

    Cass Sunstein is concerned that middle-class Americans are less able to afford housing, college educations, and medical insurance than in the past. Presumably, he wants the federal government to remedy this. Yet, these are precisely the areas of our economy in which the federal government has had its biggest regulatory impact. Government market regulations tend to drive up demand while reducing supply. Perhaps the solution is to get government out of the economy.

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    1. Richard Fulmer

      Correction: Oren Cass, not Cass Sunstein (or Mama Cass)

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  4. Richard Fulmer

    World War II didn't end the Great Depression. Instead, it made Americans materially worse off. Some 16 million American men and women – over 10 percent of the population – served in the armed forces at some time during the war. Living, and sometimes dying, in a foxhole was not an improvement over stateside life – even life during the worst of the Depression. Back in the States, living standards also fell as consumer goods, including food and gasoline, were rationed.

    What the war did end was the New Deal, and it was the end of the New Deal that ended the Depression. First, President Roosevelt stopped his incessant verbal and legal attacks on business because he needed big business to produce the tanks, planes, and ships required to defeat Hitler and his allies.

    Second, he ended his erratic, trial-and-error experimentation. Before the war, the stated strategy of FDR and his “Brain Trust” was to try one program after another until they found something that worked. This resulted in perpetual market churn that made long-term planning and investment risky if not impossible.

    The end of the war brought huge cuts in federal spending and taxes, an end to wage and price controls, and the repeal of the Smoot-Hawley Tariffs that had led to an international trade war during the decade of the 1930’s. All these changes combined to pull the nation’s economy out of its long and painful slide, but all could have been made without a war.

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    Dave IL

    I can't believe I wasted $1500 on you morons just so I could listen to you generalize about Boomers for the rest of my life.

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    1. Richard Fulmer

      I agree. Bill Clinton was the first Boomer President. Social Security and Medicare - the two federal programs that account for most of the federal government's unfunded mandate - were in place decades before his election. Ditto Nixon's War on Drugs, LBJ's War on Poverty, and Jimmy Carter's Community Reinvestment Act.

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    Jason

    I just want to voice my support for the Title here.

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  7. John Tibma

    Steve Miller is not The Jerk, that would be Steve Martin

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    Stephanie

    I'm no bleeding hear liberal, but there is serious denial of reality going on here. There IS a problem with so many billionaires, if you take a look at the changes in income inequality. Here's a quote from Deloitte (certainly not a populist source) from an article which shows in graphs, what the trend is:

    "Now, nobody should expect income to be distributed equally, and that has never been the case in any event. Some people earn more because they’ve invested in their careers, some because they take advantage of unforeseen market forces, and some because they are lucky, or even just born lucky. And some people earn less because they have less experience, have not invested in their careers, suffer from changes in market forces, are simply unlucky, or face hurdles such as racial discrimination. The real question is whether the trend is toward equality or inequality.

    Figure 2 shows that the trend is indeed toward greater income inequality. The share of total income earned by the top 10 percent has risen from around 31 percent in the 1970s to about 50 percent today. Some of the loss was borne by the middle 40 percent, but much of this increase among the top 10 percent has come at the expense of workers in the lower half of the distribution. Their share of total income fell from 20 percent in the 1970s to just over 10 percent today."

    https://www2.deloitte.com/us/en/insights/economy/issues-by-the-numbers/july-2017/rising-income-inequality-gap-united-states.html

    I really enjoy Jonah's podcasts but not being a movement conservative, I do understand that this is a dying breed and they are trying to bolster their movement as much as they can. But Michael Strain comes off as terribly out of touch. This is why so many people in the heartland turned to Trump.

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    1. Richard Fulmer

      You provide evidence that income inequality is increasing, but you don't explain why that's a problem. If Jeff Bezos grows far richer than me by making my life better, why should I complain?

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        Stephanie

        I think you could google your question and get a more complete answer, but consider the consequences of the inability of people in the lower income strata (and reaching into the middle class) being unable to amass savings, having to incur risky levels of debt in order to address basic needs such as housing and transportation; not funding their own retirements, and being unable to weather periods of unemployment or illness which interferes with employment. All while Republican politicians (possibly cheered on by Mr. Strain, who may be independently wealthy) work to destroy the safety nets that now exist for people facing the effects of poverty. How is it good for anyone when the number of people in poverty increases? This is why low income people voted for Trump (although Trump has since reneged on his promises to help them and not attack entitlements).

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        1. Richard Fulmer

          That's not a wealth inequality problem, that's a wealth problem. The government could reduce inequality by confiscating every last penny from every last billionaire without fixing any of the issues you cite.

          Before creating new government programs, let’s try eliminating government programs that create and sustain poverty. For example, let’s stop:
          • Penalizing companies for hiring low-skilled workers. Minimum wage laws make it more expensive to hire such workers and make it that much harder for the least employable (i.e., the least educated, the least experienced, and the most discriminated against) to get and retain jobs.
          • Proliferating job licensing. Why, for example, does Louisiana require 500 hours of expensive training before someone can go into business braiding hair?
          • Creating new regulatory hoops for would-be business owners to jump through. In a 2014 editorial, for example, The Economist magazine reported that “opening a restaurant can take more than two years in California.”
          • Restricting school choice. Parents should be able to get their children out of failing schools and into schools in which they can actually learn to read and write.
          • Imposing rent controls, which create shortages of low-cost housing.
          • Imposing zoning restrictions, which create shortages of low-cost housing.

          And, by the way, let's stop granting special privileges to companies, groups, and individuals.

          And, while we're at it, we might also stop telling people that the system is “rigged” against them and that any effort they make to improve their lives and those of their families is doomed to fail.

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            Stephanie

            Nobody's talking about new government programs. Reforming the tax system, eliminating the off shore tax shelters where people are hiding money, keeping the federal estate tax, so that unearned wealth is not passed from generation to generation, and addressing some of the conditions that perpetuate poverty would be a good start.

            Some of what you mention makes sense, however: licensing for trained occupation is important Those folks do a lot more than braiding hair. They work with toxic/caustic chemicals; and if you were a customer, you'd care a great deal that they were properly trained. Especially if you ever got a fungal infection in your scalp after a haircut with clippers that were not properly disinfected.

            School choice is fine, but parents should pay for private or charter schools. Pulling federal funds from public schools leaves students who remain in them in an even worse situation. Private schools are not required to comply with PL 94-142, nor are they staffed to do so, as public schools are, which shifts the burden and expense of special ed to public schools while voucher programs drain their funding.

            Some of these things are not quite so black and white.

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      Kevin Durant?

      My house near Seattle is worth double because of Jeff Bezos, so I disagree that he is crushing my dreams

      (to be fair, a decent percentage of that value is from Bill Gates)

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      1. Ann G

        Are you going to sell your house and use that money?

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          Kevin Durant?

          Yes, it is part of my retirement plan so that I can take care of myself instead of relying on payments from taxpayers.

          I am not going to be one of those people collecting Social Security in a $1.6 million house I bought for $50k when I could just sell the house and have more than enough money.

          A non-zero share of the cost of housing in major cities is because Social Security is providing a ‘safety net’ that saves people from the horror of having to downsize. That’s not what that plan is supposed to do. As I believe you indicated earlier, it is supposed to be for people who NEED the money.

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        Stephanie

        Very happy for you. But I don't think you can generalize from it to the average low income American.

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          Kevin Durant?

          It’s not all gravy. My property taxes also doubled which further harms society.

          Agreed you can’t generalize. If you are low income in Seattle then you are stuck with 5,000 additional employment opportunities and a dramatically expanded safety net from increased tax revenues.

          (okay ‘dramatically expanded’ is overstating it since the government is inefficient)

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            Stephanie

            Glad about Seattle. But what about rural Kentucky?

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  9. James R

    Just ordered the book on Amazon...The Remnant moves books.

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  10. Ann G

    Clotheslines? Seriously? Europeans use dryers less than Americans, and energy conscious Americans also line-dry their laundry. It has nothing to do with being able to afford a dryer. Guys, it's 2020, not 1920, okay? Even poor people have friends whose washers and dryers they can use if they want to.

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      Jonah Goldberg vertical-nib Author

      Stephanie, I know that. I'm sorry if I made it sound like I didn't. But my point stands. The cost of living in Europe is often very high. Energy costs are a big part of it.

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        Kevin Durant?

        Wait I thought you guys were just making fun of Europe for being sneaky-poor?
        😂😂

        Regardless I greatly enjoyed your rendition of “arondissement”
        💃🏻💃🏻

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      2. Ann G

        It did sound like that, and after the dishwasher detergent being a repressive attack on women argument I read here at The Dispatch, I was wondering if it would be safer to leave domestic chores out as examples.

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