Here's a question. Life expectancy in the US is 78 years. What's life expectancy in Spain? Remember, Spain, just forty years ago, was a dictatorship, wracked by civil war, the poor and sick man of Europe. Go ahead, guess.
It's 85 years. Now,
life expectancy is currently falling in the US, and rising in Spain.
Soon the gap will be a decade. What would you give for a decade more life? For yourself, your kids, your loves ones? What will you desperately cry to give, not just now, but on your deathbed? It's another way to ask: how are societies managed well? I'll give you the secret in a minute, by way of an example.
Today, in the USA, Congress is about to pass a "tax bill". Its jam-packed with strange things like "self-financing tax cuts" and "auto triggers". Strange because the rest of the world, which, like Spain, has surpassed the US, doesn't use them, need them, or even think about them: they aren't things at all. It's a tiny example of
America having gone Soviet,
trapped in a tightly closed, self-referential ideological bubble of failure, that's floating away into space. What are all these strange notions? The US has built a sprawling Rube Goldberg machine, sprocket carefully balanced against gear, mostly so that human possibility in exactly the wrong direction, backwards, not expanding, but receding.
