Crunchy Cons And Other Cud Chewers

Capitalism, Democrats, Economy, English, Free Markets, Government, Neoconservatism, Political Economy, Private Property

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Jeff Tucker of the Mises Institute provides a powerful and pertinent review of Crunchy Cons, by Rob Dreher, a book I’m as likely to read as I am to see Al Gore’s Global Gibberish. Jeff writes:

“What’s really strange about this book is that it … is mostly a guide to how above-it-all the author and his family are, how they got to be so fabulous, and how they and their friends are to be congratulated and admired for having escaped the trappings of the materialism of our age. No Wonder Bread and Cheez Whiz circuses for them! They live a fully ‘sacramental’ life, from their choice of crusty multigrains to their love of fancy French cheeses.”

“It never occurs to the author that his crunchy way of living is a consumable good—nay, a luxury good—made possible by the enormous prosperity that permit [sic] intellectuals like him to purport to live a high-minded and old-fashioned lifestyle without the problems that once came with pre-capitalist living….”

And:

“The author doesn’t speak of demographics at all: the population of England soared from 8.5 million in 1770 to 16 million by 1831. This is the result of a vast increase in living standards. The result of the Industrial Revolution was not “a loss of the human in everyday life” but exactly the opposite: the vast increase in the number of humans who could participate in everyday life.”

“The world today has 6.5 billion people, and many of them are growing richer all the time thanks to the advance of capitalism. How does Dreher propose to feed and clothe and care for all these people? If they were all required to live a ‘crunchy con’ lifestyle they would die, first by the thousands, then by the millions, then by the billions. The world today absolutely requires a vast productive machinery called the market. I’m sorry that he doesn’t like it but this is reality. To be truly pro-life means to embrace free markets.”

Let us not forget “the evil of large retail shops driving smaller ones out of business.” Crunchy creeps are not original in this particular fixation. In a book review of Naomi Klein’s “deeply silly” No Logo for the Financial Post, I wrote that “in her discrete demarcation between big and small, local and transnational business, Ms. Klein ignores the fact that consumer patronage grows a small business into a large one. To her, consumers are dim. They buy products they neither need nor want, and even when their purchases are unsatisfactory, they keep at it. If they are so incompetent, why allow them to vote?”

Joining Klein and her crunchy-conservative cohort is another cud chewer: Charles Fishman, author of The Wal-Mart Effect. His think-piece was reviewed in The American Conservative by Marian Kester Coombs (the magazine has a preference for the double-barreled pretension). Now, even if a reviewer thinks a book is Bible from Sinai (not a metaphor TAC would tolerate, mind you), he ought to use some critical faculties to examine its flaws. That’s presuming such faculties exit.

Coombs is also a crappy writer: Wal-Mart, we are informed, is a “close-mouthed entity”; or “Wal-Mart knows the price of everything and the value of nothing.” I suspect both are mixed metaphors, and that Oscar Wilde is writhing in his grave.

She does nothing to articulate the mysterious mechanism that explains how exactly Wal-Mart impoverishes. By offering “the lowest possible prices all the time, not just during sales”? What exactly is the economic process that accounts for Wal-Mart’s ability to “expel jobs and technology from our own country”? Competition? Offering a product people choose to buy?

“Protecting the home market,” which is what this woman advocates, is to the detriment of consumers. It forces them to subsidize less efficient local industries, making them the poorer for it. To keep inefficient industries in the lap of luxury, hundreds of others are doomed to shrink or go under.

Our reviewer also froths at the mouth over “the teenage girl in Bangladesh … forced to sew pocket flaps onto 120 pairs of pants per hour for 13 cents per hour.” Look lady, Wal-Mart is either offering higher, the same, or lower wages than the wages workers were earning before its arrival in Bangladesh. The company would find it hard to attract workers if it was paying less, or the same as other companies. Ergo, Wal-Mart is a benefactor that pays the kind of wage unavailable prior to its arrival. More material, if the entrepreneur were forced to pay Third-World workers in excess of their productivity, he would eventually have to disinvest. What will the Bangladeshi teenage girl do when that happens?

Default Diplomacy

America, Iran, Iraq, Islam, WMD

Diplomacy, not bribery à la Bush, is a good thing, for sure, all the more so if it averts violent confrontation. The goal with Iran ought to be to get IAEA inspectors in there, and have them criss-cross the place—and keep doing so—as they did Iraq before Bush banished them (to wage war, in violation of international and every other law, including natural). Treat Iran’s nuclear facilities like CSI would a crime scene.

But let’s be perfectly clear on who is offering whom a way out. The package of incentives (and disincentives) made to Iran, a pivotal member of Bush’s “axis of evil,” contradicts the Bush Doctrine in every possible way, not least in ignoring the poisonous drip-drip of dissident groups urging action (and that’s a good thing: think Mr. liar-liar-pants-on-fire Chalabi).

By allowing them to front the Iran “deal,” the Europeans have lifted Bush and Rice from the blood-soaked Iraqi soil, dusted them off, and let them save what they lost in “Mess-opotamia”: face.

A way out for Iran? More like a way back in for America.

Brokeback Boredom

Film, Hollywood, Homosexuality

The film “Brokeback Mountain” was available for viewing on my BA flight back from the Britain, last month. As a captive audience, I twitched through half an hour of the thing.

I have very little patience for Hollywood fare. I used to love the cinema. But that was before the motion picture industry forsook good scripts and well-developed characters for storylines fit for a stun-gunned audience, with the attention span of a nit, and an ability to focus only on fast-moving or imploding animated objects and characters as flat as pancakes.

Movies with a message are especially irksome, although film has almost always come with a moral. “Midnight Expresses” or “Deliverance” had messages, but they were incidental to the story. Because the people involved in movie making are much less talented nowadays (not an implausible thesis, and perfectly compatible with Charles Murray’s in his monumental, “Human Accomplishment: The Pursuit of Excellence in the Arts and Sciences, 800 B.C. to 1950“), and because they think in clichés, the overall effect on the viewer is that of a giant wagging, prodding finger. They really get in your face and stay there—for two hours, plus.

Peggy Noonan once said succinctly that “George Clooney is a fellow who read an article and now wants to tell us the truth, if we can handle it.” George Clooney or Ang Lee (Brokeback’s director); it’s all the same to me. To pay for a two-hour-long sermon in the guise entertainment is not my cup of tea.

About the gay thing I’m agnostic. If, however, in Ayn Rand’s magnificent words, “civilization is the progress toward a society of privacy,” then sexual exhibitionism—homo or hetero—is anathema. All in all, it’s most regrettable that the proverbial closet has come to signify oppression, rather than discretion.

Like Hollywood, gays too have become colossal bores. Once interesting and iconoclastic, they now want nothing more than the State’s pension and its stamp of approval. They ought to go back to the days of the Stonewall Riots, when the police’s violations of privacy—and private property—were the object of gay wrath.

After sampling bits of Brokeback—it was horrible—I quickly went back to my book. Heath Ledger as Ennis (an unfortunate name) Del Mar tried to emulate Marlon Brando’s potato-in-the-cheek mumbling in The Godfather. A bad idea today as it was then. The “love scene” between the two men was, as my daughter suggested, like a bear fight. And as sexy. The only sympathetic, ever-so-sad character was the betrayed wife and her neglected babies.

Brokeback’s bathetic tagline was “Love Is A Force Of Nature.” I didn’t get that feeling at all from this flick. I got it in spades from, say, “The Crying Game,” a truly unorthodox love story. Directed by an Irishman, and starring Stephen Rea, the superlative Jaye Davidson, Forest Whitaker, Miranda Richardson (Queenie of “Black Adder“), and Adrian Dunbar—the 1992 British drama/thriller was everything Brokeback wasn’t. There was no accompanying advocacy, only an achingly bare and beautiful love story with a twist (which I cracked right away), against the backdrop of terrorism and intrigue.

Men & Women Who Hothouse Hamasniks & Those Who Love Them

Israel, Israeli-Palestinian Conflict, Terrorism, The Zeitgeist

Believe it or not, there are a couple of *creeps and kooks on the Internet who find nothing creepy or kooky about how Palestinians cultivate kids into killers.

By the looks of it (take a look), this “educational” effort is a real communal affair, involving immediate and extended family, grandmothers too. Nothing cute about them or their offspring. Yet some find them sympathetic, certainly tragic, even endearing. Fail to finesse this ugly and evil specter and Friends of the Palestinian Authority and Enemies of Everything Israel accuse you of bias.

You must understand, after all, that the tinfoil faithful usually read from a script every bit as binding as the Quran. They parrot their lines like any good madrasa student regurgitates The Hadith and Sunnah. And in particular, our automatons shun the concepts of free will or personal responsibility when it comes to the Palestinians, and blame Israel for causing Palestinians to raise children to die as “martyrs.”

What do you know? A Jewish mother prays for a lawyer or a doctor; her Palestinian neighbor prefers a cold-blooded killer. All out of necessity, you see. For, as her defenders preach, under the skin, all mothers are equal in their love for their offspring. Including those who partake in “sex-selective infanticide in several of the world’s cultures.” Ultimately, behind every fine female who kills her kid or raises him to kill lurks a man, often an Israeli.

Yes, it’s Israel’s doing.

If not for the Israelis, a veritable economic oasis and a culture of life would flourish where a black hole now threatens to collapse on itself. And the evidence for this putative Palestinian revival, whence does it come? Why, from the Islamic world, at large. Oh, you mean to say the Ummah is not exactly in the grips of a Renaissance? Well, then, let me tell you about those crusaders.

And so the blame game goes.

* The link to the suicide slideshow promo originated at the little green footballs, was picked up by Michelle Malkin, and was lovingly redeemed and reinterpreted (minus soft focus, though) by libertarian exculpators of evil, where yours truly found it. (What’s up with the popular affectation of giving credit to the finder of a link, by the way? It’s not as if he or she is a real secondary source.)
†Recommended reading: “Coddling Killers: The Liberal Root-Causes Racket”, The American Spectator.