It is a question that has sparked much debate, at least in certain rare quadrants where the unvarnished reality of the American imperium is recognized. But surely now the debate is over. Question it no more; the supposition, the fear, the heartbreaking intimation is a fact. It is real. It is here.

Fascism has come to America.

And no, it didn't come in jackboots. It didn't come in massed, marching ranks. It didn't come in greasy-haired frothers ranting on a stage.

It came with cool. It came with savvy. It came wearing the mask of past evils redeemed by the image of a persecuted minority elevated to power. It came spouting scripture, hugging bright children, quoting pop music, sporting pricey leisure threads.

It came on Facebook, it came with 269 cable channels blazing, with I-Pad apps offering Catholic confession and YouTube porn. It came with the Super Bowl, with de la Renta gowns on the Oscar carpet, with 36 brands of dips and chips on the bulging shelves of your local Wal-Mart.

It came right in the midst of your ordinary life, as you went to work -- or looked for work -- as you partied, as you courted, as you watched TV, as you worshipped, as you studied, as you played, as you went about the business of being human.

As you went about the business of being human, this inhuman thing has come. It has come in your name, wrapped in your flag, claiming your security as its raison d'etre.

And in the guise of a young, hip, educated progressive, it has just now declared that anyone who reveals any hidden evil committed by the fascist state is subject to prosecution for a capital crime. That's right. It has revealed that you -- you American citizen, you patriot, you believer in goodness and justice and genuine democracy -- you can be killed by the government if you tell the truth.

This is what the administration of President Barack Obama has demonstrated -- indeed, has proudly proclaimed -- in its treatment of the young man it is avowedly, openly torturing for telling the truth about American war crimes, Bradley Manning. There can be no mistaking the meaning, implications and import of Barack Obama's actions.

Corporal Bradley Manning has been charged with leaking "classified material," including a video posted on WikiLeaks that showed American forces gleefully shooting up Iraqi civilians with helicopter gunships. Manning is also alleged to have obtained thousands of other files detailing crimes, corruption, cover-ups, lies and deceit by American forces and American diplomats around the world.

Although American officials have repeatedly said that none of leaks attributed to Manning and to WikiLeaks have caused any bodily harm to any agent of American imperial power around the world, Manning is being accused of "threatening national security" and "aiding the enemy."

And who, pray tell, is the "enemy" being aided by the expression of truth? On Thursday, the Pentagon very helpfully spelled it out to the New York Times:

The charge sheet did not explain who “the enemy” was, leading some to speculate that it was a reference to WikiLeaks. On Thursday, however, the military said that it instead referred to any hostile forces that could benefit from learning about classified military tactics and procedures.

It could not be clearer. The release of any information that the American government declares might be of any use whatsoever to any possible "hostile" force -- real, imagined, or possibly run by American provocateurs -- somewhere in the world at some point in time is a crime that can be punishable by death. Thus any person or any entity that reveals embarrassing or criminal facts that the government wishes to keep hidden now stands in the shadow of death.

If that is not fascism, there has never been such a thing on the face of the earth.

To be sure, American officials say that they will seek only life imprisonment for Manning -- who they are now subjecting to hours of forced nakedness in front of video cameras. But the military judge who will oversee Manning's court martial is entirely free to disregard the prosecutor's stated intention and impose the full penalty for aiding the "enemy."

But again, who is the "enemy"? You are the enemy -- if you speak a truth that the government does not want you to reveal. (Of course, if you are an approved and coddled courtier, an eager, scurrying scribe like Bob Woodward, for example, you can reveal all the most secret "classified material" that you like, as long as it comes from savvy insiders "authorized" to praise their bosses and make their rivals look bad.) If you speak this unwanted truth, the government, the president -- the cool, savvy, modern, hip, educated progressive president -- can throw you in jail, subject you to torture, deprive you of sleep, and finally strip you naked in front of cameras to break you down and humiliate you in their efforts to dehumanize you, to grind you down into a piece of meat.

2.

Here is the New York Times report on Manning's treatment -- a small, brief story which did not make the front page of the print edition and within a few hours disappeared from the dozens of stories on the front page of the on-line edition:

A lawyer for Pfc. Bradley Manning, [David E. Coombs], the Army intelligence analyst accused of leaking secret government files to WikiLeaks, has complained that his client was stripped and left naked in his cell for seven hours on Wednesday. ... The soldier’s clothing was returned to him Thursday morning, after he was required to stand naked outside his cell during an inspection, Mr. Coombs said in a posting on his Web site.

“This type of degrading treatment is inexcusable and without justification,” Mr. Coombs wrote. “It is an embarrassment to our military justice system and should not be tolerated. Pfc. Manning has been told that the same thing will happen to him again tonight. No other detainee at the brig is forced to endure this type of isolation and humiliation.”

First Lt. Brian Villiard, a Marine spokesman, said a brig duty supervisor had ordered Private Manning’s clothing taken from him. He said that the step was “not punitive” and that it was in accordance with brig rules, but he said that he was not allowed to say more. “It would be inappropriate for me to explain it,” Lieutenant Villiard said. “I can confirm that it did happen, but I can’t explain it to you without violating the detainee’s privacy.”

A little after 3:00 Friday afternoon, in front of a crowd of 850 people that had gathered at short notice, Madison Mayor Dave Cieslewics came outside of the city-county building with the Reverend Jesse Jackson.

“It’s nice to see so many people here,” the mayor said.

“And it’s nice to see the palm trees,” the mayor joked, alluding to Fox News’s insertion of some California ruckus footage that it had pawned off as being from Madison.

“This struggle is not just about union rights,” the mayor said. “It’s also about human rights. And it’s not just about civil rights but it’s also about peaceful protest. We have showed the world that Madison can protest peacefully.”

One person held a sign that said, “Firefighters for Workers’ Rights.”

And many people held pink signs that read, “Walker, Your Pink Slip Is Coming,” in response to the governor’s threat to hand out layoff notices.

Then the mayor introduced Jackson to tumultuous applause.

“Collective bargaining is what democracy looks like,” Jackson said. “The right to be at the table is what democracy looks like.”

Jackson revved up the Madison crowd, which was in a fighting spirit already.

“I congratulate you for your staying power,” he said, “for your commitment to hold on and hold out, and for your focus to stay nonviolent.”

Jackson then made a comparison between the civil rights movement and the current labor struggle in Wisconsin.

“This is the week we went across the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma for the right to vote,” he said. “We have gone from Wallace trying to deny us the right to vote to Walker trying to deny workers the right to bargain. We have gone from Wallace to Walker.”

And he pointed out that “Dr. King’s last act on Earth was marching for workers’ rights.”

He added: “When we march, we honor Dr. King. When we march multiculturally and multiracially, we honor Dr. King. When we march nonviolently, we honor Dr. King.”

Jackson criticized Walker and other Republican governors for using teachers and workers as “scapegoats.”

And he asked repeatedly, “Where is the money?”

He pointed out that there were trillions of dollars for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and for bailing out the banks. He said there were billions of dollars for tax breaks for the five biggest oil companies, even though they have made $1 trillion since 9/ll.

But somehow there is no money, Jackson said, for teachers or for universal health care or for forgiving student loans or for HeadStart or for Pell grants.

Jackson took pains to warn the crowd not to lose faith in the days ahead, even if Walker succeeds in passing his bill.

“Don’t let them break your spirits,” he said, as he concluded. “Stand tall. The journey gets hard some time. Hold on. Hold out. Victory is assured. Joy cometh in the morning.”

It is a truth universally acknowledged that education is the key to economic success. Everyone knows that the jobs of the future will require ever higher levels of skill. That’s why, in an appearance Friday with former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush, President Obama declared that “If we want more good news on the jobs front then we’ve got to make more investments in education.”

But what everyone knows is wrong.

The day after the Obama-Bush event, The Times published an article about the growing use of software to perform legal research. Computers, it turns out, can quickly analyze millions of documents, cheaply performing a task that used to require armies of lawyers and paralegals. In this case, then, technological progress is actually reducing the demand for highly educated workers.

And legal research isn’t an isolated example. As the article points out, software has also been replacing engineers in such tasks as chip design. More broadly, the idea that modern technology eliminates only menial jobs, that well-educated workers are clear winners, may dominate popular discussion, but it’s actually decades out of date.

The fact is that since 1990 or so the U.S. job market has been characterized not by a general rise in the demand for skill, but by “hollowing out”: both high-wage and low-wage employment have grown rapidly, but medium-wage jobs — the kinds of jobs we count on to support a strong middle class — have lagged behind. And the hole in the middle has been getting wider: many of the high-wage occupations that grew rapidly in the 1990s have seen much slower growth recently, even as growth in low-wage employment has accelerated.

Why is this happening? The belief that education is becoming ever more important rests on the plausible-sounding notion that advances in technology increase job opportunities for those who work with information — loosely speaking, that computers help those who work with their minds, while hurting those who work with their hands.<> Some years ago, however, the economists David Autor, Frank Levy and Richard Murnane argued that this was the wrong way to think about it. Computers, they pointed out, excel at routine tasks, “cognitive and manual tasks that can be accomplished by following explicit rules.” Therefore, any routine task — a category that includes many white-collar, nonmanual jobs — is in the firing line. Conversely, jobs that can’t be carried out by following explicit rules — a category that includes many kinds of manual labor, from truck drivers to janitors — will tend to grow even in the face of technological progress.

And here’s the thing: Most of the manual labor still being done in our economy seems to be of the kind that’s hard to automate. Notably, with production workers in manufacturing down to about 6 percent of U.S. employment, there aren’t many assembly-line jobs left to lose. Meanwhile, quite a lot of white-collar work currently carried out by well-educated, relatively well-paid workers may soon be computerized. Roombas are cute, but robot janitors are a long way off; computerized legal research and computer-aided medical diagnosis are already here.

And then there’s globalization. Once, only manufacturing workers needed to worry about competition from overseas, but the combination of computers and telecommunications has made it possible to provide many services at long range. And research by my Princeton colleagues Alan Blinder and Alan Krueger suggests that high-wage jobs performed by highly educated workers are, if anything, more “offshorable” than jobs done by low-paid, less-educated workers. If they’re right, growing international trade in services will further hollow out the U.S. job market.

So what does all this say about policy?

Yes, we need to fix American education. In particular, the inequalities Americans face at the starting line — bright children from poor families are less likely to finish college than much less able children of the affluent — aren’t just an outrage; they represent a huge waste of the nation’s human potential.

But there are things education can’t do. In particular, the notion that putting more kids through college can restore the middle-class society we used to have is wishful thinking. It’s no longer true that having a college degree guarantees that you’ll get a good job, and it’s becoming less true with each passing decade.

So if we want a society of broadly shared prosperity, education isn’t the answer — we’ll have to go about building that society directly. We need to restore the bargaining power that labor has lost over the last 30 years, so that ordinary workers as well as superstars have the power to bargain for good wages. We need to guarantee the essentials, above all health care, to every citizen.

I have walked through the barren remains of Babylon in Iraq and the ancient Roman city of Antioch, the capital of Roman Syria, which now lies buried in silt deposits. I have visited the marble ruins of Leptis Magna, once one of the most important agricultural centers in the Roman Empire, now isolated in the desolate drifts of sand southeast of Tripoli. I have climbed at dawn up the ancient temples in Tikal, while flocks of brightly colored toucans leapt through the jungle foliage below. I have stood amid the remains of the ancient Egyptian city of Luxor along the Nile, looking at the statue of the great Egyptian pharaoh Ramesses II lying broken on the ground, with Percy Shelley’s poem “Ozymandias” running through my head:

“My name is Ozymandias, king of kings:
Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!”
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away.

As food and water shortages expand across the globe, as mounting poverty and misery trigger street protests in the Middle East, Africa and Europe, the elites do what all elites do. They launch more wars, build grander monuments to themselves, plunge their nations deeper into debt, and as it all unravels they take it out on the backs of workers and the poor. The collapse of the global economy, which wiped out a staggering $40 trillion in wealth, was caused when our elites, after destroying our manufacturing base, sold massive quantities of fraudulent mortgage-backed securities to pension funds, small investors, banks, universities, state and foreign governments and shareholders. The elites, to cover the losses, then looted the public treasury to begin the speculation over again. They also, in the name of austerity, began dismantling basic social services, set out to break the last vestiges of unions, slashed jobs, froze wages, threw millions of people out of their homes, and stood by idly as we created a permanent underclass of unemployed and underemployed.

The Mayan elite became, at the end, as the anthropologist Ronald Wright notes in “A Short History of Progress,” “… extremists, or ultra-conservatives, squeezing the last drops of profit from nature and humanity.” This is how all civilizations, including our own, ossify and die. The signs of imminent death may be undeniable. Common sense may cry out for a radical new response. But the race toward self-immolation only accelerates because of intellectual and moral paralysis. As Sigmund Freud grasped in “Beyond the Pleasure Principle” and “Civilization and Its Discontents,” human societies are as intoxicated and blinded by their own headlong rush toward death and destruction as they are by the search for erotic fulfillment.

The unrest in the Middle East, the implosion of national economies such as those of Ireland and Greece, the increasing anger of a beleaguered working class at home and abroad, the growing desperate human migrations and the refusal to halt our relentless destruction of the ecosystem on which life depends are the harbingers of our own collapse and the consequences of the idiocy of our elite and the folly of globalization. Protests that are not built around a complete reconfiguration of American society, including a rapid dismantling of empire and the corporate state, can only forestall the inevitable. We will be saved only with the birth of a new and militant radicalism which seeks to dethrone our corrupt elite from power, not negotiate for better terms.

The global economy is built on the erroneous belief that the marketplace—read human greed—should dictate human behavior and that economies can expand eternally. Globalism works under the assumption that the ecosystem can continue to be battered by massive carbon emissions without major consequences. And the engine of global economic expansion is based on the assurance that there will always be plentiful and cheap oil. The inability to confront simple truths about human nature and the natural world leaves the elites unable to articulate new social, economic and political paradigms. They look only for ways to perpetuate a dying system. Thomas Friedman and the array of other propagandists for globalization make as much sense as Charlie Sheen.

Globalization is the modern articulation of the ancient ideology used by past elites to turn citizens into serfs and the natural world into a wasteland for profit. Nothing to these elites is sacred. Human beings and the natural world are exploited until exhaustion or collapse. The elites make no pretense of defending the common good. It is, in short, the defeat of rational thought and the death of humanism. The march toward self-annihilation has already obliterated 90 percent of the large fish in the oceans and wiped out half of the mature tropical forests, the lungs of the planet. At this rate by 2030 only 10 percent of the Earth’s tropical forests will remain. Contaminated water kills 25,000 people every day around the globe, and each year some 20 million children are impaired by malnourishment. Greenhouse gases in the atmosphere now are at 329 parts per million and climbing, with most climate scientists warning that the level must remain below 350 ppm to sustain life as we know it. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change estimates that the measurement could reach 541 to 970 ppm by 2100. At that point huge parts of the planet, beset with overpopulation, droughts, soil erosion, freak storms, massive crop failures and rising sea levels, will be unfit for human existence.

Jared Diamond in his essay “The Last Americans” notes that by the time Hernan Cortés reached the Yucatán, millions of Mayan subjects had vanished.

“Why,” Diamond writes, “did the kings and nobles not recognize and solve these problems? A major reason was that their attention was evidently focused on the short-term concerns of enriching themselves, waging wars, erecting monuments, competing with one another, and extracting enough food from the peasants to support all these activities.”

“Pumping that oil, cutting down those trees, and catching those fish may benefit the elite by bringing them money or prestige and yet be bad for society as a whole (including the children of the elite) in the long run,” Diamond went on. “Maya kings were consumed by immediate concerns for their prestige (requiring more and bigger temples) and their success in the next war (requiring more followers), rather than for the happiness of commoners or of the next generation. Those people with the greatest power to make decisions in our own society today regularly make money from activities that may be bad for society as a whole and for their own children; those decision-makers include Enron executives, many land developers, and advocates of tax cuts for the rich.”

“Forest clearance for the growing of crops would have led to population increase, but also to soil erosion and decline of soil fertility,” Paul Bahn and John Flenley write in “Easter Island, Earth Island.”

“Progressively more land would have had to be cleared. Trees and shrubs would also be cut down for canoe building, firewood, house construction, and for the timbers and ropes needed in the movement and erection of statues. Palm fruits would be eaten, thus reducing regeneration of the palm. Rats, introduced for food, could have fed on the palm fruits, multiplied rapidly and completely prevented palm regeneration. The over exploitation of prolific sea bird resources would have eliminated these for all but the offshore islets. Rats could have helped in this process by eating eggs. The abundant food provided by fishing, sea birds and rats would have encouraged rapid initial human population growth. Unrestrained human population increase would later put pressure on availability of land, leading to disputes and eventually warfare. Non-availability of timber and rope would make it pointless to carve further statues. A disillusionment with the efficacy of the statue religion in providing the wants of the people could lead to the abandonment of this cult. Inadequate canoes would restrict fishing to the inshore waters, leading to further decline in protein supplies. The result could have been general famine, warfare and the collapse of the whole economy, leading to a marked population decline.”

Clans, in the later period of the Easter Island civilization, competed to honor their ancestors by constructing larger and larger hewn stone images, which demanded the last remnants of the timber, rope and manpower on the island. By the year 1400 the woods were gone. The soil had eroded and washed into the sea. The islanders began to fight over old timbers and were reduced to eating their dogs and soon all the nesting birds.

The desperate islanders developed a belief system that posited that the erected stone gods, the moai, would come to life and save them from disaster. This last retreat into magic characterizes all societies that fall into terminal decline. It is a frantic response to loss of control as well as despair and powerlessness. This desperate retreat into magic led to the Cherokee ghost dance, the doomed Taki Onqoy revolt against the Spanish invaders in Peru, and the Aztec prophecies of the 1530s. Civilizations in the last moments embrace a total severance from reality, a reality that becomes too bleak to be absorbed.

The modern belief by evangelical Christians in the rapture, which does not exist in biblical literature, is no less fantastic, one that at once allows for the denial of global warming and of evolution and the absurd idea that the righteous will all be saved—floating naked into heaven at the end of time. The faith that science and technology, which are morally neutral and serve human ambitions, will make the world whole again is no less delusional. We offer up our magical thinking in secular as well as religious form.

We think we have somehow escaped from the foibles of the past. We are certain that we are wiser and greater than those who went before us. We trust naively in the inevitability of our own salvation. And those who cater to this false hope, especially as things deteriorate, receive our adulation and praise. We in the United States, only 5 percent of the world’s population, are outraged if anyone tries to tell us we don’t have a divine right to levels of consumption that squander 25 percent of the world’s energy. President Jimmy Carter, when he suggested that such consumption was probably not beneficial, became a figure of national ridicule. The worse it gets the more we demand illusionary Ronald Reagan happy talk. Those willing to cater to fantasy and self-delusion are, because they make us politically passive, lavishly funded and promoted by corporate and oligarchic forces. And by the very end we are joyfully led over the cliff by simpletons and lunatics, many of whom appear to be lining up for the Republican presidential nomination.

“Are the events of three hundred years ago on a small remote island of any significance to the world at large?”

Bahn and Flenley ask. “We believe they are. We consider that Easter Island was a microcosm which provides a model for the whole planet. Like the Earth, Easter Island was an isolated system. The people there believed that they were the only survivors on Earth, all other land having sunk beneath the sea. They carried out for us the experiment of permitting unrestricted population growth, profligate use of resources, destruction of the environment and boundless confidence in their religion to take care of the future. The result was an ecological disaster leading to a population crash. A crash on a similar scale (60 percent of the population) for the planet Earth would lead to the deaths of about 1.8 billion people, roughly 100 times the death toll of the Second World War. Do we have to repeat the experiment on this grand scale? Do we have to be as cynical as Henry Ford and say ‘History is bunk’? Would it not be more sensible to learn the lesson of Easter Island history, and apply it to the Earth Island on which we live?”

Regressives love markets as a tool for organizing our social sphere. Love ‘em!

That’s fine, up to a point. Marketplace of ideas? Great notion. Political choice? Could we have a lot more, please? Competition in commercial relations? I wish the folks on the right were one-tenth as serious about that as is their rhetoric.

In other respects, however, the market is not the way to go. Letting the market take care of my health security (have we already forgotten that “managed care” was originally sold to us on the basis of bringing the wonders of the business model to medicine?) hasn’t worked out so very well. And, as we’re going to realize acutely in the coming decades, turning over environmental stewardship to the magic of the marketplace has been about as brilliant an idea as would be giving nuclear warheads to angry meth-torqued teenagers or religious lunatics sporting apocalyptic visions of the paradise that will follow global annihilation.

But, I’ve got an idea. And perhaps my (mostly imaginary) friends on the right will indulge me and play along. Let’s call it the Marketplace of Countries, shall we? Let’s take two (for the sake of simplicity) countries and compare them to each other. Then we can use the magical market modality to determine our respective assessments of them. If it turns out that one country looks a lot more attractive than the other, surely we’ll want to exercise that much vaunted power of marketplace choice, and validate that one as the superior place to live, right?

Fair enough?

An additional beauty of this test is that while the right and what little that goes for a left in America today can hardly ever agree on any solutions to problems, I think we can mostly agree on what constitutes the problems, right? Not always, but mostly. For example, a richer country is better than a poorer one, isn’t it? No debate on that. A more educated society beats an ignorant one, no? And wouldn’t we all like to feel safe from crime?

Okay, then! Let’s compare Country A and Country B on a variety of measures, and see what we come up with, shall we?

How about if we start with physical security? Suppose I told you that in Country A the murder rate is 5.0 per 100,000 people. I believe you’d say “Ouch!” That’s ranks in about the top ten percent of countries internationally. Maybe, therefore, you’d like it better in Country B, where the rate is about one-sixth of that nasty figure, at .89 per hundred thousand people instead. And that’s true even though Country A has the death penalty going, while in Country B they think that the government murdering its own people is a pretty barbaric thing to do. Hmm. So much for that whole deterrent argument, eh? But I digress...

How about health? How do the two countries compare? In Country A, there are substantially fewer hospital beds per thousand people (3.3) than in Country B (3.6), and the infant mortality rate – always a key indicator of national health – is more than twice as bad, with 6.3 deaths per thousand live births in A, compared to 2.75 in B. That probably explains why the World Health Organization ranks Country A as having only the 37th best health care system on the planet (out of about 200 countries), while Country B’s is 23rd best. That may also help explain why people live a fair bit longer in Country B (80.74 years) as compared to Country A (78.14).

Surely, though, Country B is spending a helluva lot more than is A on its health care system in order to get these numbers, right? I mean anyone can improve delivery by spending more money, can’t they? Well, not exactly. In order to achieve this record of fewer hospital beds, staggeringly greater infant mortality, and killing people off at a younger age, Country A is actually spending twice as much as Country B in annual health care costs. That is, $4271 versus $2145 per person, per year. At that rate, good thing they spent more! Just think how sick people would be in Country A if they spent four times what Country B does on health care.

The two countries are pretty similar in terms of education measures. Both sport 99 percent literacy rates. People go to school a bit longer, on average, in Country A than B – 12.0 years versus 11.4. But Country B devotes a greater portion of its GDP to education, and does slightly better than Country A on measures of reading, scientific and mathematical literacy.

Country A and Country B are also pretty similar when it comes to measures of civil and political liberties. They both get rated 6 on a 7 point scale. Not bad. But that is where the similarities end. Government corruption levels in Country B are among the lowest in the world, earning a 9.2 rating on a 10-point scale, while in Country A that number is only 7.6. In Country A, voter registration rates run at about 50 percent, whereas in Country B they’re 74 percent. In A, turnout of registered voters tops out at 64 percent, while in Country B fully eight out of every ten registered voters shows up at the polling place. In Country B 43 percent of parliamentarians are women, whereas in Country A it’s only 14 percent. And the overall gender empowerment index (a composite statistic that accounts for women’s participation in government, business, academia, salary ratios, etc.) for B is .824, whereas for A it is .757. In short, both countries are relatively free democracies, but B achieves much greater participation of its people – and, importantly, all of its people – than does A.

There are certain social indicators that are quite telling as well. In Country A, they sure go to church a lot. Forty-four percent of people attend once a week or more often, while in Country B only 4 percent do. It’s not so clear that such piousness makes them better people over there in A, however. Teenage pregnancy rates are not only higher, they’re nearly ten times higher in Country A than in Country B, coming in at an annual rate of 1672 versus 178 per one million people, respectively. And a look at environmental responsibility shows similar massive discrepancies. Country A produces over three times more the annual carbon emissions – 19.48 tons per capita – than does Country B, at 5.4 tons. That’s not only, er, rude, it happens to be quite lethal as well. Given the global pollution and climate effects of such a massive carbon footprint, one might say that Country A doesn’t exactly play well with others.

But, you might argue, what everyone really cares about is getting rich. I’d say that varies a lot from culture to culture (which also means that any given society doesn’t have to be obsessed with money if it doesn’t want to be), but I’d surely agree that it’s important to compare economic performance across national boundaries. Country A had a slightly better rate of GDP growth in 2005 than did Country B, 3.2 percent over 2.7, and a slightly lower unemployment rate in 2004, 5.5 versus 6.5 percent. However, it’s also important to note that A grows in population each year at a much greater rate (.883 percent, using 2008 figures) than does B (.157 percent), which likely more than wipes out the GDP growth rate differential between the two countries. In any case, the net difference in GDP per capita between them turns out to be pretty small anyhow. In Country A people earned, on average, $44,155 in 2006, while in Country B that figure is $42,553.

So, for all their differences, it turns out that A and B are more or less equally wealthy countries, right? Well, yes and no. They do indeed both enjoy relatively equal (and quite high) standards of living. But GDP per capita is, after all, a very well-named figure. As a measurement of economic well being, it is indeed gross. Since it is an average, it tells us nothing about the distribution of wealth and income in a given country. Very different concentrations of wealth can produce identical averages. And, it turns out that they are very different in this case. In Country A the share of income received by the richest ten percent of the population is 31 percent, whereas in Country B it is 20 percent. In Country A, child poverty rates are ten times what they are in Country B. Ten times. That is, the share of children living in households with income below fifty percent of the national median is 22.4 percent in A, whereas in B it is a mere 2.6 percent. And the overall polarization of wealth, as measured by the Gini coefficient statistic, is twice as high in Country A (45) as compared to Country B (23). Country A is thus the 42nd highest country in the world in terms of economic inegalitarianism, located right between Cameroon and Uruguay. Every single country that is higher than it on that list is a third world country, as are the next 26 below it on the list, assuming one does not count Russia (#54) as a developed economy. Country B, on the other hand, is the least unequal society in the entire world.

Ah, well, you say: “Country B is some communist dictatorship, where they have no free market and they imprison the wealthy! It’s North Korea, right?! Evil egalitarianism brought to us courtesy the business end of gun barrel!” Alas, ‘fraid not. Indeed, here we can consult our good friends at the ultra-conservative Heritage Foundation, which ranks countries according to their level of economic freedom, per an index that the right-wing think tank has cooked up. Turns out that in extraordinarily unequal Country A, that figure is 3.2, while in extraordinarily equal country B it’s – wait for it, now – all the way down to 3.1. It would seem that both places are – in the current parlance of our friendly downsizing, union-busting, middle class-crushing political class – quite “open for business”, thank you very much.

And, interestingly, notwithstanding its welcoming attitude to business big and small, it turns out that working conditions are also much better in Country B than in Country A. People in B work 1564 hours per year, whereas in A it is 1792. Based on a forty hour work week, that means that the 228 extra hours being worked by the folks in Country A translate into nearly six additional work weeks per year, even though, as we’ve seen, GDP per capita is pretty similar. (Hmm. Doesn’t that therefore also mean that they work for a lot less over there in Country A?) And, indeed, when it comes to vacation and holidays, the legally required minimum that workers must receive in Country B ranges from 25 to 32 days, depending on one’s age. In Country A that number is zero. Although most workers actually get 7 to 21 days off work each year, many do not, and none are legally required to. Moreover, when people lose their jobs, they do much better in Country B than in Country A. In addition to not losing health and pension coverage, the unemployment benefit replacement rate (a composite statistic) is 29 in Country B, and more than double that (14) in Country A.

In Country B, people receive substantial support through government programs throughout the duration of their lives, from cradle to grave. In Country A, there is little of that, except for seniors, who receive a modest governmental pension supplement and help with their health care expenses. Of course, such programs are expensive, and in Country B all forms of taxation combined are equal to 54 percent of GDP, while in Country A that figure is instead 30 percent. For individuals in Country B, that translates into 41 percent of family income going to taxes, while only 19 percent does so in Country A. Yet, that does not seem to bother the citizens of Country B, who indeed are quite delighted with the economic system. When asked to rate themselves on a ten-point scale with respect to their degree of financial satisfaction, the mean response there was 6.6. What was it for Country A, where people get to keep so much more of what they earn? A whopping 6.7.

We could go on and on with this. Did I mention, for instance, that 82 percent of workers in Country B are members of trade unions (the highest level in the industrialized world), but only a mere 13 percent in Country A (nearly the lowest). I’m sure that little factoid has nothing to do with the comparative economic conditions for workers in each place, eh? Anyhow, you get the picture I think. Call me crazy, but it seems like there’s a pattern emerging here.

So let’s recap, shall we? In Country B, as compared to Country A, people are way safer, they’re healthier and they live longer. They are far more equal socially, politically and economically. They’re much more engaged in their democracy, and their government is less corrupt. They are far more environmentally responsible, secularist, and they have one-tenth the teenage pregnancy rates. They spend more on education, and their public is more literate in language, math and science. They pay more in taxes, but in exchange for that, they get far more benefits and a lifetime of almost complete freedom from economic anxiety. They work far fewer hours each year, and they are just as satisfied with their financial position as the folks in Country A, despite netting far less income after taxes. They have essentially eliminated poverty within their national borders, while tens of millions of children and adults are impoverished in Country A. Oh, and I didn’t even mention how much Country A loves to fight wars, and Country B never does. So, where would you rather live? Hey you guys out there on the right, with your constant mantra about the wonders of the marketplace. I’m talkin’ to you. Which product are you gonna buy at this market? Sorry, I can’t hear you. I can no longer make out the lofty choruses of your “Ode To Market”, or the sweet strains of “Bring Back The Morning Again, Ronald”. All I hear are footsteps, and they’re getting quieter and quieter.

Here’s what Barack Obama said about Americans in his state of the union address, as reported in the official text: “As contentious and frustrating and messy as our democracy can sometimes be, I know there isn't a person here who would trade places with any other nation on Earth. (Applause.)”

(Other) regressives, meanwhile, love to rail against the perils of evil European socialism, as supposedly embodied by the pernicious Mr. Obama himself. For example, a 2009 article in Slate noted that, “The columnist Charles Krauthammer recently called the president's address to a joint session of Congress last month ‘the boldest social democratic manifesto ever issued by a U.S. president.’ Newt Gingrich claims that Obama wants to bring us ‘European socialism.’”

So, let me see here. According to both the far right and the alleged left, European socialism is a total disaster of malaise and stagnation and oppression, and America is all warm and fuzzy and “exceptional”, right?

But how is it, then, that Country B above – you know, the one that kicks ass in just about every measure – is that paragon of evil socialism, Sweden?

(Though it also could have been Norway. Or Denmark. Or Germany. Or Canada. Or just about any developed democracy in the world, including those prissy poofs in France, who actually do have the world’s best health care system. As opposed to the blowhards from a certain other country – ranked right between Slovenia and Costa Rica on the list – who merely claim to. Incessantly.)

And why is it that the dysfunctional Country A – deficient in nearly every measure, and often quite sickeningly so – is none other than America?

I wish I could have been at the state of the union speech, so that I could have jumped up in the halls of Congress and shouted to the president, “Excuse me, Barack, but, yes, there is a person here who wants to trade places!”