I find that local radio gives me a good view of the state of American consciousness, or unconsciousness.
Just today I learned that the government is studying how to help “ailing mortgages.” Defaulters, it seems, have been struck by an unfortunate epidemic. Anyone can get sick, and sick people have to be helped. I also learned today that one of our celebrated university athletes will miss the next game because he is having “academic issues.”
This began some years ago when it became customary to use language suggesting that criminals and AIDS carriers were victims of random misfortunes that we were somehow vaguely responsible for and were obligated to fix.
We may be in a recession, but don’t worry. Your politicians and federal bureaucrats won’t have to be distracted from their tireless public service by financial insecurity.
At the last commencement I attended at my university, there were 40 doctorates awarded in the sciences. Thirty-nine Asians and one white lady.
The faculties of my backward Southern state’s two medical schools are now substantially dominated by Asians. And they are among the highest paid of all State employees, in some cases receiving more than heads of statewide departments.
What Adam Smith and his successors meant as they advocated the virtues of “free trade”: Removing government restrictions and employing comparative advantage in the exchange of goods could enhance the prosperity of a given community of people (and indeed have benefits for all peoples). In its new American form “free trade” means the international slave trade—exchanging the people of a given country for cheaper people from another country. The people subject to this form of “free trade” do not prosper—they disappear. The wealth of the country is not enhanced, but the slave traders and owners prosper.
President Obama is doomed. George W. Bush has promised him full co-operation.
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