The stock market opened ‘down' but it’s rising like a bullet (for, again, no apparent reason.) I think they need to cut down on the level of ‘Happy Pills’ in the NYC water supply!
The national ‘paper of record’ has once again wandered off the reservation with stories about communities attempting to ‘re-purpose’ abandoned shopping malls (rather than pointing to what this widespread phenomenon means to the ‘consumer economy’ that has too few customers!)
In the meantime Mr. Krugman continues his crusade against austerity, rightly accusing conservatives of starving those who are already on a forced starvation diet!
He (again rightly) fears that the miniscule (and largely mathematical) ‘improvement’ in unemployment will shift the focus away from job creation.
Ah! But today’s offering is not from the national headlines, the business section or the editorials; Today’s piece comes to us from the Arts section (books to be specific):
Like it or not, the showcased author has held a mirror up to society and here’s what he sees:
Looking at America Mr. Murray sees a country increasingly polarized into two culturally and geographically isolated demographics. In Belmont, the fictional name Mr. Murray gives to the part of America where the top 20 percent live, divorce is low, the work ethic is strong, religious observance is high, and out-of-wedlock births are all but unheard of. Meanwhile in Fishtown, where the bottom 30 percent live, what Mr. Murray calls America’s four “founding virtues” — marriage, industriousness, community and faith — have all but collapsed.
The book says little about the roots of Fishtown’s problems, but in conversation Mr. Murray doesn’t hesitate to name the villain. “The ’60s were a disaster in terms of social policy,” he said. “The elites put in place a whole set of reforms which I think fundamentally changed the signals and the incentives facing low-income people and encouraged a variety of trends that soon became self-reinforcing.”
It’s an argument familiar from Mr. Murray’s 1984 book, “Losing Ground,” which established him overnight as a major policy intellectual and helped lay the groundwork for the 1996 law overhauling welfare. But in “Coming Apart” Mr. Murray’s recommendations are both more vague and far more ambitious. The first step, he writes, is for the people of Belmont to drop their “nonjudgmentalism” and lecture Fishtown on the importance of marriage and nondependence: to “preach what they practice,” as Mr. Murray puts it.
Ironically, at the end of this piece, Mr. Murray recants this statement by admitting he prefers NOT telling people what to do…but what are you gonna do?
Libertarianism is full of such ‘double-standards’, ‘non-coercion’ coupled with rigid interpretation and enforcement of ‘the law’ (That YOU pay for out of YOUR pocket!)
And if you ‘can’t afford’ law enforcement (or the other guy can hire more heavily armed thugs than you can)…you lose (and, mind you, none of this has ANYTHING to do with Justice!)
Is Mr. Murray a Libertarian?
That is for you to decide, although I’ll share my own impression which is ‘guilty as charged!’
But I digress, it is the admission at the end of the snippet that one of his prior works lead to the effective dismantling of welfare (and our currently overcrowded prisons, how‘s that for ‘one plus one‘ the media totally missed?) that, er, ‘prejudice’ me against his, er, ‘philosophy’.
Is his ‘premise’ (as it is put forth in his book) ‘sound’?
Absolutely!
God fearing rich folk have all hunkered down inside their insulated bubbles, blithely pretending the, er, ‘less-fortunate’ brought their misfortune upon themselves!
But that hasn’t changed for millennia…(in his defense, Mr. Murray doesn’t claim his observations are ‘new’…) which begs the question ‘why the book?’
And the answer is as simple as to keep these long out-dated ideas current in the public eye.
What does it say about a society when it produces economists who are clueless about the basic tenants of commerce and sociologists that are completely ignorant of the three pillars of civilization?
And, in case you were wondering, it all flows from Equality, it is kept in balance with Justice and only thrives under Peace (which is heavily dependent on equality and justice...just saying...nothing 'new' here.)
Sociologists like Mr. Murray would be the first to protest the ‘equality’ was ‘impossible’ (totally missing the point…it’s EQUAL TREATMENT we’re after, not an even dispersion of talent and luck! As the fucktards are quick to point out!)
Why DO we have economists that ignore the existence of the economic desert and sociologists that don’t understand what ‘equality’ means?
If we had the answer to that one we wouldn’t be in the pickle we’re currently in…
And the answer is ‘politics’ good citizen! We have allowed the most basic tenant of society, ‘the common good’ to be ‘politicized’!
This is how we got saddled with an ‘unresponsive’ government because our elected representatives supposedly can’t agree on what ’the common good’ is.
Here’s a suggestion, lets dump the lot and put it up for a vote!
I’ll bet the majority of us can put things back on track in no time at all!
Thanks for letting me inside your head,
Gegner
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