This four page opinion piece that leads in Sunday’s Washington Post dichotomizes free-enterprise and "european-style statism" as mutually exclusive. It’s not hard to figure out which one the author is leaning towards in the very first paragraph:
America’s new culture war:
Free enterprise vs. government control
Washington Post
By Arthur C. Brooks
May 23, 2010This is not the culture war of the 1990s. It is not a fight over guns, gays or abortion. Those old battles have been eclipsed by a new struggle between two competing visions of the country’s future. In one, America will continue to be an exceptional nation organized around the principles of free enterprise — limited government, a reliance on entrepreneurship and rewards determined by market forces. In the other, America will move toward European-style statism grounded in expanding bureaucracies, a managed economy and large-scale income redistribution. These visions are not reconcilable. We must choose…
Who is Arthur C. Brooks? He’s a French Horn player who returned to college and got a Ph.D. in public policy. His work has been on charitable giving and happiness [which he relates to religiosity]. Pertinent to his authorship of this article, he became the new President of the American Enterprise Institute two years ago.We all know the American Enterprise Institute as the home of the Neoconservatives and the source of many of George W. Bush’s appointees. What we don’t know is that it was founded in 1938 by a group of New York businessmen led by Lewis H. Brown. Brown was the CEO of the Johns-Manville Corporation – the asbestos company that kept the carcinogenesis of asbestos secret for forty years. It is and was a conservative think-tank devoted to American business interests and the epicenter for the very culture war Brooks is trying to create. It’s the home of Newt Gingrich [see my last post].
Now read the rest of Dr. Brooks polemic. It’s the current Talking Point of Fox News, Rush Limbaugh, the Republican Party, Rand Paul, the Tea Party, etc. It’s Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged thinly disguised. It’s the anti-FDR rhetoric of the 1940’s, the John Birch Society line from the 1950s and 1960s. It’s Reagan and the Bushes. It’s the false dichotomy that gave us the recent Great Recession and filled the Gulf of Mexico with crude oil. There’s no culture war like he describes. It’s only greed…
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