Wednesday, March 19, 2014
Two good reads: Diagnosis and prescription
A couple of truly excellent columns appear online this morning. One is a concise diagnosis of our current cultural insanity in the West, the other is an even more concise prescription for fixing our economic insanity. Not quite a match, but cleaning up the economic mess will tend to open the gates for normal culture to flow back in.
The diagnosis is a rather long book review by R.R. Reno, editor of 'First Things'.
Sample paragraph:
Marsden ends The Twilight of the American Enlightenment with reflections on the dead-end to which we have come. Consensus liberalism suffers from a fatal dishonesty. Because it claims to serve the common good and at the same time sustain authenticity with what it regards as exemplary non-judgmentalism, liberalism cannot recognize itself as merely one view among others. It must see itself as transcending the worldviews competing for control over American society (and, increasingly, over world culture). It is this conceit that supports the tyrannies of liberalism, which range from full blown political correctness and the politics of denunciation (accusations of homophobia, bigotry, and sexism) to various forms of social exclusion of the kind so blatantly expressed by Richard Rorty ("that's not the way we talk about things").The prescription is a perfectly short and perfectly comprehensive column by David Stockman. Do everything Stockman recommends, and we'll be on the way to overall recovery. Key paragraph:
The 2008 bailouts were based on a grotesque urban legend that we were faced with Great Depression 2.0. None of that was true. The resulting spree of massive lunatic money printing since then, in my view, is a monetary time bomb that will trigger the third thundering collapse of the 21st century. The meltdown going around was almost entirely in the canyons of Wall Street. The gamblers running the last remaining casinos, otherwise known as investment banks, had hit the wall because they were funding massive multitrillion-dollar balance sheets loaded with toxic securities. It would have finished and burned out in the canyons of Wall Street.Stockman's cure is the same thing Polistra has been prescribing here for the last 8 years. Won't happen, of course. We can't learn. We're EXCEPTIONAL. But we've been warned. We have no excuse. ¶ 3:00 AM
