subject: 2nd part : Thomas Sowell: 'Barbarians Inside the Gates' [a collection of brilliant essays [print this page] 2nd part : Thomas Sowell: 'Barbarians Inside the Gates' [a collection of brilliant essays
One can remain hopeful but increasingly skeptical about the ability of our modern world to fend off the cultural Barbarians which are indeed inside the gates. Cultural Marxism and the Multi-cult fetish have the ability to castrate our civilization through self-loathing; lies; historical revisionism; and ignorance, in which the world of the 5 senses and common intelligence is replaced by meaningless theories, phase dialecticisms, and mindless rhetoric about equality, sameness, cultural relativity, and one-world.
"...the philosophy of the 'multi-culturalism' cult, where things are not better or worse, but just different. Yet people around the world do no simply 'celebrate diversity', they pick and choose which of their own cultural features they want to keep....When Europeans first discovered paper and printing from China, they did not, 'celebrate diversity', they.....started letting the printing presses do the work.....Multiculturalism is one of those affectations that people can indulge in when they are enjoying all the fruits of modern technology and can grandly disdain the processes that produced them."
Cultures are never relative. Neither are people. Throughout history some cultures have shown themselves to be superior. Western culture created the modern world. It came out of medieval Christian Europe, itself a complex of legacies ranging from Rome, to Athens, to Jerusalem. To disavow this fact is sheer stupidity and mindlessness. But these are the attributes of multiculturalism aren't they?
Similar attitudes now pervade the nexus of the state and economy. In Europe it is taken for granted that the state is benevolent, just, kind, compassionate and fair. Europeans are not even taught that the greatest crimes in modern history were perpetrated by Marxist statist constructs such as Fascism [an entirely 'left wing concept'] and Communism. State controlled Marxism in any variety demolishes freedom, the economy and all interactions of supply and demand:
"The very notion of making things affordable misses the key point of a market economy. An economy exists to make trade-offs, and a market economy makes the terms of those trade-offs plain with price tags representing the relative costs of producing different things. To have politicians arbitrarily change the price tags, so that prices no longer represent the real costs, is to defeat the whole purpose."
Health care is an example of Sowell's law of price. When a bureaucrat 'caps a price', or sets a policy 'premium', he is in effect disavowing the interaction of supply and demand. Two things will happen when this occurs. First, there will be a distortion in both the supply of the good or service, and the demand for the same. Supply of product will fall, or be rationed. Demand might well escalate if this product or service is deemed 'free'. This will lead to all sorts of problems, which will end up costing the consumer more money in the form of taxes, higher user prices, or deficient supply, or as well, in lower quality of supply and available resources. Second, the political preferences in setting prices or regulating supply always leads to corruption in which business and government work together. This corruption can take many forms such as 'price cartels' in agriculture and car insurance; protected oligopolies in telecoms, banking and transport; or in outright criminality in which the 'regulated' fund the political campaigns of friendly 'regulators'.
These essays noted above are important. They lance the beguiling mediocrity and mendacity of Marxism, multi-culturalism, totalitarian management, and degenerate culture. I truly believe that culture is king. When you replace a culture which did enshrine individualism, the Book of Matthew, innovation, true hope, and a solid sense of optimism, with welfare, dependency, narcissism, negativity, relativity, and statism, you have a colossal disaster. Do we have the strength, the will and the intelligence to fix what is wrong? Or will we simply drift along supine and gaping until we plummet over the edge?
