Saturday, January 2, 2010

Jonah Goldberg on the "Sins" of Capitalism

From National Review Online:

"On the last day of 2009, that awful year, I was listening to a report on National Public Radio (yes, I’m a listener). Reporter Tamara Keith presented a by-now-familiar recap of the worst financial and corporate scandals of the decade, from Enron and Martha Stewart to Tyco and Bernie Madoff. It was a depressing slog of greed, venality, and theft. When the report was over, Morning Edition host Steve Inskeep summarized the report with a tart: “The decade in capitalism.”

I don’t want to single out Inskeep, since he was doing what pretty much the entire media establishment has done, particularly of late: reducing “capitalism” to its alleged sins.

And that’s the point. There are few areas of life where a thing responsible for so much good gets so little credit for it.

Imagine if I were to collect the most infamous deeds of African Americans over the last decade — say, Michael Vick’s dog-fighting scandal and O. J. Simpson’s most recent criminal exploit — and then put a bow on it with the phrase “the decade in black America.” What if I did the same thing with Jews? Bernie Madoff, the face of Jewish America! Do the scandals of Rod Blagojevich, Charlie Rangel, and John Edwards define the Democratic party from 2000 to 2010? Do Abu Ghraib and the balloon boy sum up America? [Continued]

2 comments:

Reaganx said...

Enron and Madoff have nothing to do with non-existent sins of capitalism. If anything, they have to do with sins of financial socialism.

Anonymous said...

tune in, turn on, and drop out and listen to Валерий и Вадим Мищуки. Ночной дождь (Капли)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bLFcKz3pDJE