Hard America, Soft America

I really don’t read books quite this fast, although “Hard America, Soft America” by Michael Barone is a short and easy read. I tend to have more than one book going at a time, and when I hit some vacation a number of them tend to go to completion. I managed to head to the family homestead in NW Wisconsin and eat too much Cheese and Raisin Ravioli at the incomparable Bona Casa just South of Cumberland WI, and follow that up with way too much good turkey, stuffing, wild rice, yams, lefse, pumpkin pie, etc on Thanksgiving itself.

Barone is a bonafide genius, and the book shows it in it’s scope and it’s brevity. It mixes some ficitional novel quotes with a whole lot of statistics and insights to point out what is to many Americans “obvious”. Without “hard” standards like specific deadlines, profit targets, grade requirements for entrance, consequences like lower standards of living for those that don’t attain certain levels of education, etc, humans tend to “get lazy”. Most of us realize that intrinsically as we jump back on the exercise equipment after T-Day and have granola rather than Perkins 2-egg omelets to attempt to maintain some level of truce with the waistline after a holiday of indulgence.

We would all love “softness that works”, but unfortunately it doesn’t. That doesn’t mean that there doesn’t need to be a balance, and Barone argues that at the turn of the 19th to the 20th century it was “too hard”. The New Deal started us on a path toward too soft … WWII pulled us back to hard for a bit, then Sputnick did a get for a very brief time. Like any observer with eyes, he points out the horror of the 60’s for shabby thinking that the laws of economics could be repealed … along with moral propriety, common sense, and a lot of other things. The disaster of the ‘70s, followed by the Reagan Restoration … of hope, competitiveness with the world, military strength, and “ basic decency” … in NYC and a lot of other places.

One little example quote; “ Elite opinion in the years around 1980 was that the US was in economic decline and that the decline could not be reversed. People just had to get used to living in an era of limits. This turned out to be a good prediction – for some countries in western Europe.” He then goes on to show how relatively slight hardening of the private sector economy in the US has allowed us to enjoy economic growth far in advance or Western Europe for 25 years.

He does it all with wit, a lot of statistics, and recognition of what the side of “softness” thinks and why they think that way, and a level of genuine respect for difference of opinion. Barone is WAY easier to read then Buckley, but one gets that same sense of “it is easier to be a nice guy if you are a genius” kind of feeling that can almost give those of us lesser humans a twang of jealousy. I highly recommend the book, concise, excellent, and a joy to read.