The Age of Entitlement is over

An unexpected line running through Christopher Caldwell’s book The Age of Entitlement is how post-1960s America, high on the supply of a newly minted civil rights regime overseen by the federal bureaucracy, became a landscape ripe for unbridled government spending, easy credit, and extraordinary leniency on personal and corporate debt..

... the Reagan Administration doubled down. The massive increase in the power of the administrative state to enforce newly-created civil rights over the course of the 20th century had economic consequences. Namely, the flood gates of easy money, unending government expansion, workless jobs, and inflated assets across public and private spheres. The federal government, along with an ever-expanding circle of industrial subsidies, corporate behemoths, and nongovernment organizations, was unwisely relied upon to be the backstop...

Caldwell’s central observation is that what began as an expanded civic concept of rights soon morphed into a broader sense of societal entitlement...

Just as the Age of Entitlement saw the erosion of the constitutional order, making the central government the policemen of American social life, it promulgated the New Deal monetary regime as the life source of the economy...

The Era of Efficiency is here.

The promise of efficiency is not simply about saving money, but about restoring the federal government to its proper place in our economy—one aligned with the Constitution, not with the stock market or home prices, and not as the government as job creator or income provider...