Posted on 12/14/2002 7:13:19 AM PST by yankeedame
How to Ruin American Enterprise Benjamin J. Stein, 12.23.02
We're well on our way to squelching what gives this country an edge. What would it take to kill innovation altogether? --Ben Stein
As a casual observer of what makes this country work and what stops it cold, I hereby offer a few suggestions on how we can ruin American competitiveness and innovation in the course of this century. I think the reader will agree with me that we are already far down the road on many of them:
1) Allow schools to fall into useless decay. Do not teach civics or history except to describe America as a hopelessly fascistic, reactionary pit....
2) Encourage the making of laws and rules by trial lawyers and sympathetic judges, especially through class actions. Bypass the legislative mechanisms that involve elected representatives and a president. This will stop--or at least greatly slow down--innovation, as corporations and individuals hesitate to explore new ideas for fear of getting punished...
3) Create a culture that blames the other guy for everything and discourages any form of individual self-restraint or self-control...Make it a general rule that anyone with more money than a plaintiff is responsible for anything harmful that a plaintiff does. Promulgate the pitiful joke that Americans are hereby exempt from any responsibility for their own actions--so long as there are deep pockets around to be rifled.
4) Sneer at hard work and thrift. Encourage the belief that all true wealth comes from skillful manipulation and cunning, or from sudden, brilliant and lucky strokes that leave the plodding, ordinary worker and saver in the dust. Make sure that society's idols are men and women who got rich from being sexy in public or through gambling or playing tricks, not from hard work or patience....
5) Hold the managers of corporations to extremely lax standards of conduct and allow them to get off with a slap on the wrist when they betray the trust of shareholders. This will discourage thrift and investment ....while simultaneously developing that contempt for law and social standards that is the hallmark of failing nations. Hold the management of labor unions to no ethical standards.
6) While you're at it, discourage respect for law in every possible way....
7) Encourage a mass culture that spits on intelligence and study and instead elevates drug use, coolness through sex and violence, and contempt for school...
8) Mock and belittle the family...
9) Develop a suicidal immigration polcy that keeps out educated, hard working men and women from friendly nations and, instead, takes in vast numbers of angry, uneducated immigrants from nations that hate us...
10) Enact a tax system that encourages class antigonism and punishes savings...
11) Have a socialized medical system...that discourages drug companies from developing new drugs by not paying them enough to cover their costs...
12) Elevate mysticism, tribalism, shamanism and fundamentalism-- and be sure to exlude educated, hard working men and women-- to an equal status with technology in the public mind...act as if science were on an equal footing voodoo and history with ethnic fable.
My list need not end here. But I stopped at a dozen because I realized that this is already, in large measure, the program of so many of our elected represenatives. The debauchery of our tort system is already in place, and the rest of the agenda is under way.
(Excerpt) Read more at forbes.com ...
She can show me. ;-)
...and here I stop wasting my time.
This is why I'll never be a Ben Stein fan. If it doesn't grasp his attentions seriously, why should it mine?
Dan
That is an interesting point, and one I believe is not examined sufficiently because a lot of people presume instinctively (as I first did) that what you are implying is some sort of advocacy for patriarchy and chauvinism rather than simply an honest look at correlated factors. Rather like what happens whenever one tries to discuss race and crime.
In my opinion (and I don't know if this is an obvious point), it would have less to do with something inherent about female character, but rather the way being raised to be either caregivers (in the traditional mold) or socialists (in the modern feminist mode). I can tell that it is not an innate characteristic because I know a number of women (of highly diverse backgrounds, personalities, intelligence) who were raised without a heavily constrained definition of their gender role (not liberal bs "friend" parenting, but just a well-regulated form of laissez-faire, so to speak), and they are all staunch libertarians/conservatives.
Perhaps it is not something that is most effectively examined at the macrosocial level (ie matriarchal culture) since such a definition creates an arbitrary view of something that is a collective, societal phenomenon rather than one created by individual women.
Either way, prepare to draw fire for even opening the discussion...
Guttural: Of or relating to the throat. Having a harsh grating quality, as certain sounds produced in the back of the mouth.
------word-nerd-alert---------
I assume you mean gutter humor...I couldn't resist...
I understand what you are saying, and I do think the show lost a lot with the transition from Kimmel to bimbo because Kimmel was funny, in his own slovenly way. He provided a good foil to Ben's "straight guy".
I think it is far from the highest form of entertainment, but it does remarkably well at amusing its target audience (teenagers, college age folks, morons, etc), and at least provides a few nuggets of trivia along the way. I don't come away from 95% of tv programming (including the news) being able to say that I learned at least one new thing; at least Stein's show tops that admittedly low bar...
My biggest family problems come from a daughter-in-law that wants to treat adults like "Friends" and shows no respect at all to anyone.
If she is a daughter-in-law, I would hope she herself is an adult as well, no? So I would guess you are referring to the proper respect due a parent-in-law who wishes to remain in a heirarchical role, rather than being all buddy-buddy with the daughter-in-law (perfectly understandable, of course).
Obviously, your family relations are none of my affair, and I do not intend, given my youth and lack of first-hand knowledge, to insult you by giving advice. But in a general sense, I think a lot of the times older folks I know tend to blame television and other such factors for an absence of courtesy, which I think misses the core of the problem: an absence of character and manners which has not been corrected at any point in their lives. Lots of people bitch and moan about how teenagers have no respect, but few actually *do* anything about it (like my grandma who would settle any misconceptions about expected courtesy RIGHT smartly the moment the issue arose).
Television offers more a reflection of a cultural state, especially creatively barren sitcoms like Friends, rather than the other way around. It is a problem, I believe, that needs to be dealt with in the proverbial trenches of the interpersonal relationships themselves, through honest and polite, but unwavering, confrontation.
Just my 2 cents...
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