Will: Novel posits scary view of current course – The Columbian

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George F. Will

Although Americas political system seems unable to stimulate robust, sustained economic growth, it at least is stimulating consumption of a small but important segment of literature. Dystopian novels are selling briskly Aldous Huxleys Brave New World (1932), Sinclair Lewis It Cant Happen Here (1935), George Orwells Animal Farm (1945) and 1984 (1949), Ray Bradburys Fahrenheit 451 (1953), and Margaret Atwoods The Handmaids Tale (1985), all warning about nasty regimes displacing democracy.

There is, however, a more recent and pertinent presentation of a grim future. Last year, in her 13th novel, The Mandibles: A Family, 2029-2047, Lionel Shriver imagined America slouching into dystopia merely by continuing current practices.

Shriver, who is fascinated by the susceptibility of complex systems to catastrophic collapses, begins her story after the 2029 economic crash and the Great Renunciation, whereby the nation, like a dissolute Atlas, shrugged off its national debt, saying to creditors: Its nothing personal. The world is not amused, and Americans subsequent downward social mobility is not pretty.

Florence Darkly, a millennial, is a single mother but such mothers now outnumber married ones. Newspapers have almost disappeared, so print journalism had given way to a rabble of amateurs hawking unverified stories and always to an ideological purpose. Mexico has paid for an electronic border fence to keep out American refugees. Her Americans are living, on average, to 92, the economy is powered by the whims of the retired, and, desperate to qualify for entitlements, these days everyone couldnt wait to be old. People who have never been told no are apoplectic if they cant retire at 52. Antibiotic-resistant bacteria are ubiquitous, so shaking hands is imprudent.

Soldiers in combat fatigues, wielding metal detectors, search houses for gold illegally still in private hands. The government monitors every movement and the IRS, renamed the Bureau for Social Contribution Assistance, siphons up everything, on the you-didnt-build-that principle: Morally, your money does belong to everybody. The creation of capital requires the whole apparatus of the state to protect property rights, including intellectual property.

Social order collapses when hyperinflation follows the promiscuous printing of money after the Renunciation. This punishes those who had a conscientious, caretaking relationship to the future. Government salaries and Medicare reimbursements are linked to an inflation algorithm that didnt require further action from Congress. Even if a Snickers bar eventually cost $5 billion, they were safe.

In a Reason magazine interview, Shriver says, I think it is in the nature of government to infinitely expand until it eats its young. In her novel, she writes:

The state starts moving money around. A little fairness here, little more fairness there. Eventually social democracies all arrive at the same tipping point: where half the country depends on the other half. Government becomes a pricey, clumsy, inefficient mechanism for transferring wealth from people who do something to people who dont, and from the young to the old which is the wrong direction. All that effort, and youve only managed a new unfairness.

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Will: Novel posits scary view of current course - The Columbian