7/9/2015 - Victor Davis Hanson Townhall.com
Barbarians at the gate usually don't
bring down once-successful civilizations. Nor does climate change. Even mass
epidemics like the plague that decimated sixth-century Byzantium do not
necessarily destroy a culture.
Far more dangerous are
institutionalized corruption, a lack of transparency and creeping neglect of
existing laws. All the German euros in the world will not save Greece if Greeks
continue to dodge taxes, featherbed government and see corruption as a business
model.
Even obeying so-called minor laws
counts. It is no coincidence that a country where drivers routinely flout
traffic laws and throw trash out the window is also a country that cooks its
books and lies to its creditors. Everything from littering to speeding seems
negotiable in Athens in a way not true of Munich, Zurich or London.
Mexico is a much naturally richer
country than Greece. It is blessed with oil, precious minerals, fertile soils,
long coastlines and warm weather. Hundreds of thousands of Mexican citizens
should not be voting with their feet to reject their homeland for the U.S.
But Mexico also continues to be a
mess because police expect bribes, property rights are iffy, and government
works only for those who pay kickbacks. The result is that only north, not
south, of the U.S.-Mexico border can people expect upward mobility, clean
water, adequate public safety and reliable power.
In much of the Middle East and
Africa, tribalism and bribery, not meritocracy, determine who gets hired and
fired, wins or loses a contract, or receives or goes without public services.
Americans, too, should worry about
these age-old symptoms of internal decay.
The frightening thing about
disgraced IRS bureaucrat Lois Lerner's knowledge of selective audits of groups
on the basis of their politics is not just that she seemed to ignore it, but
that she seemingly assumed no one would find out, or perhaps even mind. And she
may well have been right. So far, no one at the IRS has shown much remorse for
corrupting an honor-based system of tax compliance.
Illegal immigration has been a
prominent subject in the news lately, between Donald Trump's politically
incorrect, imprecise and crass stereotyping of illegal immigrants and the
shocking murder of a young San Francisco woman gratuitously gunned down in
public by a Mexican citizen who had been convicted of seven felonies in the
United States and had been deported five times. But the subject of illegal
immigration is, above all, a matter of law enforcement.
Ultimately, no nation can continue
to thrive if its government refuses to enforce its own laws. Liberal
"sanctuary cities" such as San Francisco choose to ignore immigration
laws. Imagine the outcry if a town in Utah or Montana arbitrarily declared that
federal affirmative action or gay marriage laws were null and void within its
municipal borders.
Once an immigrant has successfully
broken the law by entering and residing in the U.S. illegally, there is little
incentive for him to obey other laws. Increasing percentages of unnaturalized
immigrants are not showing up for their immigration hearings -- and those
percentages are higher still for foreign nationals who have been charged with
crimes.
The general public wonders why some
are selectively exempt from following the law, but others are not. If federal
immigration law does not apply to foreign nationals, why should building codes,
zoning laws or traffic statutes apply to U.S. citizens?
Consider the immigration activists'
argument that immigration authorities should focus only on known felons and not
those who only broke immigration law. This is akin to arguing that the IRS
shouldn't worry about whether everyday Americans pay their income taxes and
should enforce the tax laws only against those with past instances of tax
avoidance.
But why single out the poor and
foreign-born? Presidential hopeful Hillary Clinton once pocketed a $100,000
cattle-futures profit from a $1,000 investment, with help from an insider
crony. A group of economists calculated the odds of such an unlikely return at
one in 31 trillion. Clinton then trumped that windfall by failing to fully pay
taxes on her commodities profits, only addressing that oversight years later.
Why did Clinton, during her tenure
as secretary of state, snub government protocols by using a private email
account and a private server, and then permanently deleting any emails she felt
were not government-related? Clinton long ago concluded that laws in her case
were to be negotiated, not obeyed.
President Obama called for higher
taxes on the wealthy. But before doing so, could he at least have asked his
frequent advisor on racial matters, Al Sharpton, to pay millions in back taxes
and penalties?
Might the government ask that its
own employees pay the more than $3 billion in collective federal back taxes
that they owe, since they expect other taxpayers to keep paying their salaries?
Civilizations unwind insidiously not with a loud, explosive
bang, but with a lawless whimper.
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