Make New York Post a Preferred Source The American-led global order has incubated more prosperity in the last 80 years than most of the previous 25 centuries combined. Getty Images I keep hearing that America is polarized. Republicans vs. Democrats. MAGA vs. DSA. Wokesters vs. anti-wokesters. It’s true, up to a point. But I believe there is a more consequential divide, one growing wider and more perilous every day.
I am talking about the division between the empiricists and the parasites.
The empiricists are most of you reading these words. Entrepreneurs. Blue-collar workers. Engineers. Scientists. Business people.
An engineer has to be in touch with empirical reality because if their assumptions about gravity are inaccurate, their bridges will fall down. An entrepreneur has to be in touch with reality because if he can’t persuade customers to buy his products, the businesses will go belly up.
America is the undisputed world leader in empiricism: more Nobel prizes than any other nation, dominance in the frontier technologies, an army of highly impressive (and hugely industrious) blue-collar workers, a spirit of enterprise that remains the envy of the world.
When you live here, you probably don’t notice what outsiders sense the moment they land. The buzz. The sense of possibility. The American dream is perhaps not what it once was, but it’s still alive. Almost two centuries ago, de Tocqueville wrote “No sooner do you set foot upon the American soil than you are stunned by a kind of tumult . . . Everything is in motion around you.” The words ring as true today as in the 1830s.
This is a nation that once pushed at geographical boundaries but is now pushing at what the philosopher Sir Karl Popper called “the frontiers of knowledge”: quantum, robotics, AI, medicine and the vast array of entertainment products that course through the limbic system of the Republic, even if in the case of social media not always for the better.
Ancient Rome pales by comparison. As do the Abbasids, Persians, Greeks, Phoenicians, Carthaginians and Babylonians.
The American-led global order has incubated more prosperity in the last 80 years than most of the previous 25 centuries combined. America still delivers a quarter of the world’s output with only 4% of the population.
But I’m sorry to say that America also plays host to a growing army of parasites: smaller in number, but ever more draining in effect. They exist in one place above all others: Washington. Some are called Republican and others Democrat, but they are vampiric in virtually the same way and for the same reasons.
An empiricist understands that you cannot borrow the moolah indefinitely without paying a huge price. Parasites of both parties borrow and borrow. And borrow some more. Debt has risen to more than 100% of GDP, a scandal overseen by presidents of all colors, stealing from the future to pay for the present in the way that a realist would never countenance.
Only the dynamism of the private sector is keeping this Ponzi scheme afloat, driving growth just about capable of servicing the ever growing interest burden (now measured at almost $1 trillion).
But for how long? Bond yields are rising, placing an even larger weight on the throats of those paying the bill (not least future generations who didn’t even vote for this profligacy) while Washington gets fatter.
That’s one thing to understand about an ever expanding state: there are more side alleys in the sprawling labyrinth to be gamed by insiders for their own profit. The Pentagon hasn’t passed an audit since they started conducting them in 2018. They can’t even account for the cash or where it’s going.
Yet the real scandal extends way beyond the debt and waste. Senators get ever richer from “public service” but few ask why. Congressional staffers become lobbyists for industries whose laws they helped to write — a game played by Democrats and Republicans alike.
Aging corporations protect themselves from competition not through innovation but by erecting barriers to entry with the complicity of the political class.
That is how corruption today drains an economy: not with one spectacular theft, but by the steady diversion of talent and capital away from productive activity and towards political connection. The scale of this extraction is difficult to overstate.
They arrive as a thousand small impediments to enterprise: a permit delayed, a tax loophole preserved, a regulation written by insiders, a subsidy paid to yesterday’s technology. American capitalism is now rigged in favor of incumbents: politicians and regulators coining it while competition is throttled. I find it darkly comical to observe MAGA supporters condemning the “corrupt” Democrats — Crooked Joe, Dodgy Hillary — while the Dems hammer Trump for the same reason: memecoins, allegations of front running and more.
It’s all a game, folks. A distraction. The partisan hysteria whipped up by each high-profile scandal obscures the deeper truth neither side wants you to grasp.
Both sides are looting the coffers in plain sight in ways that are normalized and often legalized.
In his 18th century work on the fall of Rome, the British historian Edward Gibbon talked of “a slow poison introduced into the vitals of the empire.” When I look at Washington today, I see an eerily parallel story unfolding.
Ponder this paradox. In the 20th century, despite two global conflagrations and the Great Depression, economic growth in America averaged almost 3.5%. In this century, despite the internet, Moore’s Law and relative peace, it has slumped to 2%.
Some might say we’ve been here before. Historians talk of the Whiskey Ring, the Keating Five and the 19th century “state of courts and parties.” But none of this touches the scale of corruption today. America continues to produce the world’s finest entrepreneurs, scientists and blue collar workers but they are like a magnificent thoroughbred sweating under the crippling weight of a burden few even mention.
Yet let me finish with this thought: the answer is not to succumb to the fashionable nihilism of tearing everything down.
The grievance-fueled revolution promised by the Marxist left and extremist right would be no remedy.
The DSA sees corruption and concludes that the system itself is the crime: capitalism, the Constitution, the whole inheritance. They have it precisely backwards. What I’ve described is not the American system working as designed. It is a betrayal of that design.
No, what this country needs is not a revolt against its founding principles but their restoration: truly competitive capitalism, government constrained by the Constitution, public servants who serve the public rather than themselves.
