I wish I had the time to write an article which lived up to the promise of that title. But all I have is a moment and a few ideas.

If there is one thing you can say about normal people—perhaps because it’s the one thing that most defines normality—it’s that they seem to intuitively understand the value of civil interaction. Normal people are polite. Normal people refrain from offending others unnecessarily. Normal people speak in moderate tones using ordinary language. Normal people try to be friendly. Normal people are a dying breed.

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Essential reading by Francis Fukuyama in NewsWeekThe End of America Inc.

Excerpt:

Like all transformative movements, the Reagan revolution lost its way because for many followers it became an unimpeachable ideology, not a pragmatic response to the excesses of the welfare state. Two concepts were sacrosanct: first, that tax cuts would be self-financing, and second, that financial markets could be self-regulating.

Prior to the 1980s, conservatives were fiscally conservative— that is, they were unwilling to spend more than they took in in taxes. But Reaganomics introduced the idea that virtually any tax cut would so stimulate growth that the government would end up taking in more revenue in the end (the so-called Laffer curve). In fact, the traditional view was correct: if you cut taxes without cutting spending, you end up with a damaging deficit. Thus the Reagan tax cuts of the 1980s produced a big deficit; the Clinton tax increases of the 1990s produced a surplus; and the Bush tax cuts of the early 21st century produced an even larger deficit. The fact that the American economy grew just as fast in the Clinton years as in the Reagan ones somehow didn’t shake the conservative faith in tax cuts as the surefire key to growth.

Unfortunately, Fukuyama seems to have a gaping blind spot in his analysis. It’s the same blindness shared by most policy makers and policy-obsessed analysts. Growth is not fueled by policy. It is fueled by energy. And what deficits indicate is that the growth in America during most of the last twenty years was imaginary, because it was fueled by short-term energy (fossil fuels), instead of long-term energy (human effort and other renewable sources). The current financial crisis is the spectacle of Americans waking up and realizing that they aren’t wealthy and haven’t been doing meaningful (wealth-generating work), but merely pretending to. They’ve been playing games and calling it work, and building sand castles and calling them bastions of economic prosperity.