US Public Debt Crisis: Meet English Football Socialism

So much going on in the world. Most of it unambiguously bad.

Tension in Kosovo. Tension in the Turkish army. Libya duly quagmired. Famine in Africa. Something or other going in and around North Korea. And so on.

Yet bigger even than those problems, each of which is capable of creating a new expensive and intractable crisis, is the West’s budget drama. That is not only bad – it’s far worse than you think:

Even in the late 1990s, when official Washington was jubilant because the national debt briefly shrank, fiscal-gap calculations showed that the government was quietly getting into deeper trouble. It was paying out generous benefits to the elderly while incurring big obligations to boomers, whose leading edge was then 15 years from retirement. Now the gray deluge is upon us. As Holtz-Eakin, now president of the American Action Forum, a self-described center-right policy institute, says: “We’re just in a world of hurt.”

The U.S. is in danger of reaching a generational tipping point at which older Americans have the clout to vote themselves benefits that sap the strength of the younger generation—benefits that can never be repeated. Kotlikoff argues that we may have reached that point already. He worries that the U.S. could become Argentina, which went from one of the world’s richest to lower-middle income in a century of chronic mismanagement.

Or as Mark Steyn puts it:

Since Obama took office, it’s been fashionable to quote Mrs. Thatcher’s great line: “The problem with socialism is that eventually you run out of other people’s money.” But we’re way beyond that.

That’s a droll quip when you’re on mid-20th-century European fertility rates, but we’ve advanced to the next stage: We’ve run out of other people, period.

Hyper-rationalist technocrats introduced at remarkable speed a range of transformative innovations — welfare, feminism, mass college education, abortion — whose cumulative effect a few decades on is that the developed world has developed to breaking point: Not enough people do not enough work for not enough of their lives.

In the course of so doing, they have fewer children later. And the few they do have leave childhood ever later — Obamacare’s much heralded “right” for a 26-year old to remain on his parents’ health insurance being merely a belated attempt to catch up with the Europeans, and one sure to be bid up further.

A society of 25-year-old “children” whiling away the years till early middle age in desultory pseudo-education has no desire to fund its prolonged adolescence by any kind of physical labor, so huge numbers of unskilled Third World immigrants from the swollen favelas of Latin America or (in Europe) the shanty megalopolises of the Muslim world are imported to cook, clean, wash, build, do …

The evolving justification for post-war immigration policy — from manufacturing to welfare to moral narcissism — is itself a perfect shorthand for Western decay.

Most of the above doesn’t sound terribly “fiscal,” because it’s not. The ruinous debt is a symptom of our decline, not the cause.

In a nutshell, modern democratic governments have lost touch with reality and are borrowing money which can not be paid back. So they resort to improvised Ponzi-scheme tricks to get by. Even the much attacked Republican principles passed last night by the US House of Representatives do not mean any serious expenditure cuts, merely a slowing in the degree of unsustainability! Sooner or later a huge crash must come.

How to explain this startling civilisational dysfunctionality? Isn’t the point of democracy (as opposed to dictatorship) that information circulates freely, and so stupidity is curbed?

Look no further than here: the Report on Football Governance by the British House of Commons Culture Media and Sport Committee (sic).

I previously have raved away on the evils of Football Socialism. Here the subject sinks to new depths.

The Report begins with a bold collectivist falsehood, setting the scene for the fearsome meddling which follows: Football is our national game.

No, it isn’t. It has no special status. Millions of people – perhaps a majority – could not care less about it and have never attended a match. It is an exclusively private activity, one of many sports and of course much the most popular.

Supporters and commentators have expressed concern that there are insufficient checks and balances on financial mismanagement in football and that a failure of governance is jeopardising the sustainability of the game, both at the micro-level of individual clubs and at the macro-level of the pyramid league structure and the national game more generally.

So what? That’s football’s private business, not anything to do with Parliament.

We have also been aware of the coalition Government’s commitment to encourage the reform of football governance rules to support the co-operative ownership of football clubs by supporters. Indeed, the Government indicated to us that it would welcome a select committee inquiry to help frame its thinking as to how it should take this undertaking forward.

The correct answer is for Parliament to tell the government not to make stupid collectivist promises meddling in one private business.

Anyway, fortified by a jolly trip to Germany at public expense the MPs on this Committee have produced a long and detailed report. Glance through it. It is impressive in that it does not really identify why any of football’s problems are so crucial that the state needs to concern itself with this private activity.

Yes, a lot of clubs have big debts or are badly run. Some of them go bust or slump down the divisions as they are compelled to retrench to survive. Listen, MPs: that’s the system working, not failing!

Yes, some supporters want more say in the running of the game. So what? Their best way to influence a club is to stop going to its matches. Or they can buy their way into part of the club’s ownership. Wait – the problem here is that the state’s own rules via the FSA make this difficult.

Yes, more of the wealth generated at the top of the game could make its way to the bottom. But again, that’s none of the state’s business.

The report oozes cloth-cap nostalgia for the ‘community’ aspects of football. But when almost every team which counts is trying to bring in clever players from anywhere on the planet, that argument looks pretty thin:

A number of supporters organisations argued that the current business-orientated model risked alienating them. Bristol City Supporters Trust wrote that "like fans up and down the country, we feel ill at ease. We still feel like outsiders looking in on our club".

It’s not ‘your’ club! It belongs to the owners. If they ‘alienate you’, too bad. Serves you right for being so gullible. Deal with it. Set up another club. Or watch rugby, or read a good book instead.

The Committee pores over the role of the Football Association and comes up with an impertinently precise suggestion:

Our recommendations would result in a Board of ten, consisting of the Chairman, General Secretary, two further executives, two non-executives, two professional game representatives and two national game representatives.

Let’s get this straight.

Part of the problem with football governance is that the people running football are said to be out of touch. Yet here is a group of MPs with no obvious qualification to opine on the subject making highly specific recommendations about how the game should be run? Get lost!

The MPs discovered something called the Football Creditors Rule:

… to return to league competitions the new owners of insolvent clubs must re-pay all money owed to key "football creditors" … the key football creditors all get paid 100%, which means that the tax authorities get proportionately less and all the small creditors, such as St John Ambulance, do not get paid.

This obscure internal football club arrangement apparently has positive and negative effects. It is being challenged in the courts by the UK tax authorities. The Report:

The Football Creditors Rule should be abolished. It represents a "post facto" preferential treatment of creditors that would be illegal in the run-up to the insolvency of any business. If the football authorities do not take the initiative themselves, and Her Majesty’s Revenue and Customs loses its legal challenge to the Football Creditors Rule, we recommend that the Government consider introducing legislation to abolish it.

Here again, it looks as if the problem has been caused by the state not making sure that the football business runs to the same reasonable rules as every other business.

And so on and so on.

The point?

That we are seeing a systemic failure of governance, not within football but at the national level.

The state is failing to do its job in the most central parts of its work. The Times today (paywall) describes how the British police are not investigating crimes. The nation’s tax authority HMRC is in massive disarray, in part because (as I happen to know) the unions have rebuffed successive attempts to computerise the tax system.

In this confusion things decay.

Instead of focusing on doing a small number of key jobs fairly well, the state balloons into trying to solve each and every problem, to the point of inventing problems to ‘solve’ when they do not exist. When something goes wrong, that is presented as a signal for more state intervention (such as all those hundreds of new crimes created by New Labour), when the existing rules and laws can do a good enough job and simply need enforcing.

Ditto media telephone hacking: the current laws are more than good enough – enforce them, including against corrupt police officers (or is that all of them?)

The cumulative effect of all this stupidity and waste compounding up is the growing debt crisis which is slowly but surely dragging down Western competitiveness and rubbing out basic Western values.

The last words from Mark Steyn on an unexpected US soccer note:

I had a faintly surreal conversation with two Hollywood liberal pals not so long ago:

One moment they were bemoaning all those right-wing racists like Pat Buchanan who’d made such a big deal about the crowd cheering for the Mexican team and booing the Americans at a U.S.–Mexico soccer match in Pasadena, and deploring the way the U.S. goalie had complained that the post-match ceremony was conducted entirely in Spanish. Ten minutes later they were sighing that nothing in Los Angeles seemed to work quite as well as it did when they first came out west over 40 years ago.

And it never occurred to them that these two conversational topics might somehow be connected.

Meanwhile, at Redwood Heights Elementary in Oakland, Californian kindergartners are put through “Gender Spectrum Diversity Training” in order to teach them that there are “more than two genders.”

The social capital of a nation is built up over centuries but squandered in a generation or two. With blithe self-confidence, the post-war West changed too much too fast.

We changed everything, and yet we’ll still wonder why everything’s changed.