America Has Been Warned

Anthony Daniels aka Theodore Dalrymple, his usual nom de plume when essaying for us fellow commoners, is a retired British prison physician and psychiatrist who makes a lot of sense. He must have a number of secretaries to whom he dictates judging by his output in recent years.

Daniels wrote a short essay a few days ago on Pajamas Media, entitled Sophisticated Incompetence Is Britain's New National Characteristic. Here is a short excerpt in response to some dumb academics:

"It is remarkable that economic historians, of all people, should view the matter so statically, as if the present moment were eternal, not taking into account the speed of the increase in the debt, the ageing of the population, the different place the country now occupies in the world, the uses to which all the borrowing was put, or indeed the crushing and impoverishing size of the debt after the Second World War. Never, it seems, have so many professors learnt so little from so much; sophisticated incompetence is now our national characteristic."—My emphasis on the last sentence. Note the Churchillian cadence in the last sentence.

 I know this is somewhat geeky but it is addressed to geeks of the academic persuasion primarily and and only secondarily to us commoners. Remember when President Eisenhower [president from '53 to '61 for you youngsters] warned us about the military-industrial complex near the end of his term? I guess we did keep our eye on them but missed the ascendancy of the academic-government-media complex.

There are a surprising number of observers all over the world who are trying to warn us Americans. Is it too late?