Towards the end of his life, I got to know the late Herb Stein, the Chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers under Presidents Nixon and Ford, and I now regret never having asked him for the definitive version of what has come to be known as Herb Stein’s Law. Google tells me that the law is: “If something can’t go on forever, it will stop,” but I like to think that Herb would have preferred what seems to me the more rhetorically satisfying version, whose provenance I cannot now recall: “If something can’t go on forever, it won’t.” Either way, what amounts to a simple tautology has shown again and again its power to strike through the vaporous fogs of public debate to astound us with the force of revelation—although, as I write, it appears not yet to have done so, except in a few odd corners out of the way of the dominant media, in the case of that now legendary precipice, the “fiscal cliff.”

Indeed, the very idea of what the metaphor suggests, an eminently avoidable geographical hazard—one which will either have been avoided or not avoided by the time you read this—as an inflection point in our national fortunes, will tell the tale. The image of the cliff helped to reinforce the media’s representation of the debate surrounding it as a moment of decision between traditional American small(er) government, as championed by the Republicans, and its more recent, social democratic rival, allegedly imported from