Home Forums Hunting & Shooting Hunter's Campfire Why are our major cities War-Zones?

Time to post this one again.
An excellent read.

CULTURAL POLLUTION
A Matter of Principle
by Robert James Bidinotto

The welfare state's destructive impacts on our economic well-being have been well chronicled by free market economists. But the inverted incentives of socialism also play havoc with the moral character of a society. All of the virtues associated with living a productive life are punished; all the vices associated with an irresponsible existence, rewarded.

The result is cultural pollution.

Market economists have long argued that environmental pollution is caused not by capitalism, but by the absence of property rights and market mechanisms. Similarly, cultural pollution is not caused by capitalism; to a large extent, it is caused by the breakdown of capitalism amid the absence of markets. The discipline that comes from market relationships preserves such precious cultural resources as personal character, benevolence, and basic civility. But the welfare state has destroyed that discipline.

Those under age 30 probably can't remember a time when radio and TV stations refused to air gutter-minded "shock jocks" -- or sewer-mouthed cartoon characters - or nihilistic music videos -- or freak shows masquerading as "talk programs," where guests compete in revolting displays of decadence and self-abasement.

There actually was a time in this nation's not-so-distant past when most kids wouldn't use foul language around the opposite sex (not to mention at adults), and when those few who did would get their faces slapped. A time when no one would have dared ask the President of the United States what kind of underwear he wore... and when no President would have dignified such a question with an answer.

It was a time when students referred to teachers by their surnames, teachers refused to pass kids who hadn't met minimum standards of achievement, high school graduates could read job applications, and schools issued students more books than condoms. A time when unmarried girls actually felt ashamed to get pregnant -- even once -- and when unemployed young men actually felt ashamed to apply for welfare. When derelicts didn't use the sidewalks, nor celebrities the airwaves, as public latrines.

During the past four decades, standards of personal taste, language, behavior, dress, and manners have plunged to loathsome levels. Today, we are awash in a cultural tsunami of vulgarity and incivility. From the street corner to the school classroom, from the movies to MTV, belligerent faces stare back at us in defiant challenge to all that is decent and good, virtuous and valuable -- even simply coherent and intelligible.

What is most odious is the fact that the expressions of decadence are so incongruously militant. We behold, daily and in countless forms, bizarre spectacles of self-righteous relativism and crusading nihilism. We are simultaneously revolted and incredulous and bewildered, wondering from what buried cesspool of our national life such pollution has oozed forth.

It would be simplistic to lay blame for this cultural collapse solely at the feet of politics or economics. Ideas rule the world, for better or worse; the militancy of today's nihilists is largely the product of many decades of intellectual corruption. The concerted, ceaseless assault by generations of academics upon the standards, heroes, values, and philosophical premises of Western civilization have undermined our culture's foundations and battered its institutions. The barbarians we see around us have been unleashed and empowered by modern intellectuals who -- like carriers of some deadly spiritual virus -- have sapped our society of its once-vital defenses and immunities.

But to have a broad social impact, ideas good or bad must be transported from the ivory tower into every corner of society. They must be embodied in cultural institutions and transmitted by political programs. So while intellectuals may have opened the faucets, the main pipeline for carrying cultural pollution throughout society has been the welfare state.

The corrupting influences of the welfare state go far beyond the obvious. It isn't just that the National Endowment for the Arts occasionally subsidizes obscenity, or that billions of dollars in food stamps and Supplemental Security Income (SSI) checks are being cashed in and traded on the streets for drugs and alcohol. It isn't just that AFDC encourages unwed young women to have children, then remain unwed. It isn't just that unearned benefits encourage some people to remain shiftless and lazy.

More broadly, the welfare state also buffers people from any need to behave like civilized human beings.

One of the seldom-recognized benefits of the market system is its great civilizing influence. Socialists often denounce capitalism for promoting "competition, not cooperation." But in fact, the competitive demands of the marketplace reward cooperation and punish anti-social conduct.

To survive and thrive under laissez-faire capitalism, the individual must learn to produce goods and services valuable to his fellow man. Failing to do so dooms him to a miserable and marginal existence.

But becoming productive entails much more than simply learning a skill or creating a product. Whether employee, employer, or self-employed, each individual in a free market must also learn to market himself, his service, or his product. This, in turn, compels him to present himself and his wares in the best light possible, attracting rather than repelling others. Those who learn to cooperate with others will be rewarded by their fellows and flourish; those who don't will remain unmarketable and go wanting.

The welfare state short-circuits this learning and maturation process by buffering people from any need to behave themselves. In the marketplace a foul-mouthed boor will be fired from his job. In the welfare state, nothing he says to anyone will stop his government checks from coming. In the marketplace, an ignorant, illiterate, incoherent young woman has few prospects of getting a job. In the welfare state, she can remain just as she is -- and the checks will keep on coming. In the marketplace, hanging out as a streetcomer tough all day is a short route to homelessness and starvation. In the welfare state, though, such a lout can go home to a public housing project, his rent and food paid for by the same pedestrians he has spent the day menacing and insulting -- and then, perhaps, spend his wee hours in a federally-funded midnight basketball league.

By buffering such offensive behavior from the normal punishments that the marketplace would surely administer, the welfare state has allowed and encouraged the proliferation of a nihilistic subculture. This subculture, in turn, has become its own growing market, with an insatiable demand for the lurid and depraved, fed by unscrupulous panderers in the media, entertainment, and corporate America.

A first step in restoring the quality of our social environment, then, would be to plug the poisonous pipeline of the welfare state.

Mr. Bidinotto, a Staff Writer for Reader's Digest, is a long-time contributor to The Freeman and lecturer at FEE seminars.

Our local newspapers "on the record" section [arrests] is mostly Hispanic names.

I really admire and respect your Dad and Mom. Looks like their kids turned out pretty good too.

I fully realize, understand, and have seen it true that folks can rise above their raising. However, there seems to be a recurring theme of troubling issues in predominatly black areas and countries. I hope it does not remain so for much longer. Hundreds, if not thousands, of years should be long enough.

I've worked in those exact same places and lived close to there. Grandma and Grandpa lived in east Dallas and Grandpa worked right down by where Kennedy was shot. Back in the 60's it was so bad down town that Grandma said the negros would shove old white women out into oncoming traffic if they were in the way. During my short time working there, I was almost shot, had the window broken out of my car in an attempt to steal the stereo and was in a near-riot. All of South Dallas is dammed dangerous due to it being nearly entirely black-unless somehow things have changed for the better in the last twenty-or-so years.

AB2506,

Excellent post & personal story.

The reason that the ones who cause most of the problems in this country don't do what your family has done is that all the entitlements make it (falsely) too easy not to do that.

They are entitled to a good life, to prosperity, to a new car, to have 8 kids by 8 different men, to a house they can't pay for, & the list goes on.............all on the public's money.

It's become the standard for a way of life for most blacks & latino's in inner cities, not all, just most.

MM
MM

Three books that are REQUIRED reading:

1. The Sovereign Individual
2. Atlas Shrugged
3. The War After Armageddon

It's all there and yes, my friend, the food wars will come as every city only has 2-3 days food in it and when it's gone the mobs will come looking for yours.

You may want to read about what was happening in Weimar Germany before Hitler took over.......

Think of Haiti w/o the USA being here. Or the 100s year war.
Nobody is taught history anymore because if they actually studied it, it would scare the crap out of them.

Bet all the folks in Rome in 475 AD were thinking "it can't happen here" too..... LAFFIN

Talking in circles? How so? By pointing out I grew up with pretty much the same thing in lilly White circles?? And where did I disagree?

We post what we know, I grew up where I did, and have been living and working here for the past two decades in a lower income, higher crime area of this big city.

For the most part guys over this side of the Atlantic don't got a friggin' clue; my chances where I live of being subject to unprovoked felony assault or felony aggravated assault are but a fraction of what they could be over there.

Furthermore, I had made my living these past few years pushing the best and brightest. We had our post-Katrina crime wave like most ever'body else when some of 'em were settled here. Had a girl come to see me today with her full ride to Baylor U., one of them kids who is just a joy to be around. Suprised the Hell outta me a couple of years back to find out she was a Katrina refugee.

Guys start talking about the big cities etc etc etc.... I immediately start recalling names and faces.

Birdwatcher

You nailed our core problem, the break down of the family unit. Until the late 50's or early 60's it was unusual to have a single parent family. In the inner cities it has become the norm to have men running around with various women & fathering children. The mothers found out through our failed welfare system that the more fatherless children,the more they received to buy drugs & alcohol. Some of the fatherless children had learning disabilities & didn't want to attend school & convinced the others it was cool to skip & be arrogant. Our society attempted to solve this problem by spending more & more money to graduate mostly literate students to say nothing of the close to 50% that quit & began to live off street crimes. One only has to look at D.C. next to where I live. Either the worst or among the worst school systems in our nation with the highest per student expenditure. Many teachers can hardly wright & they stay in the system. On the day each month welfare checks are received the liquor stores are packed & drug pushers are lined up on every street. For many years I worked in down town D.C. & it was like visiting a freak show on the drive in & out. As was stated by other posters the system perpetuates its self. I see no solution any where in the future. No politicians are ready to make the difficult decisions to start correcting the problem. Our once proud nation is decaying from within.

I guess I missed the series of white race riots across this country in the 60's and 70's.......

Again I'll ask. What majority white area is a warzone as mentioned in the OP?

I spent a nice vacation in Scotland last year. FYI according to the UN (whatever that is worth) Scotland is the most dangerous FIRST WORLD nation today. Of course, since most UN members are just out of the trees, "dangerous" may equate to having running water.

A war zone?

What, you think nobody lives their whole life and grows old in the ghetto? The fact is, most people do. Do you think that everybody wakes up there expecting to die that day?

OK, I know this thread has been beat to death but this Old Country across the pond stuff is fascinating to me.

Prob'ly unimaginable to some that White folks can act this way....

Dublin, 2006
http://www.indymedia.ie/article/74528

The people who took part in the rioting were largely drawn from the urban poor, mostly disenfranchised young men from impoverished estates around Dublin, people who normally have no political voice whatsoever, people who rarely vote, who are disorganised, who live in communities that have been ravaged by poverty and drug and alcohol abuse, people who many of those who live lives of privilege and relative comfort write off as 'scumbags'...

O'Connell street was a building site and bricks, paving stones, barricades and oil cans were neatly arranged all along it, almost like an ammunition dump for rioters. Combine that with the proximity of many of the poorest residential areas in the city where the Gardai (Police) are feared and hated and the reasonable number of destitute drug users who you will find around O'Connell street on an average Saturday and you had a ready supply of people and ammunition for a proper riot and that was what we saw. There were probably no more than 200 people who were involved in the initial onslaught, but hundreds more joined in as the fighting made its way down O'Connell Street. Local youths could be seen coming out of side streets phoning their mates and as the fighting progressed more and more people joined in. I'd estimate that over a thousand people took part in the events in one way or another. Every time that the riot squad managed to advance a few metres, they would have to leave a line of police to guard any of the side streets that they had passed as more and more locals came out to see what was happening. There were crowds massed all along the side streets and most of their sympathies appeared to lie with the rioters...

Behind the lines of the rioters, looting broke out. Although I didn't observe it, witnesses report that several women from the inner city were seen filling bags full of shoes from the shops and engaging in a bit of 'discount shopping'. The police were not even nearly in a position to do anything about it. They had lost control of the city and were mostly just trying to protect themselves as the riot was now almost entirely an anti-police and anti-state affair....

The riots were an expression of the anger of the most marginalised sector of Dublin's urban poor, they had no real political point other than an expression of that rage.


Living on welfare? Violence? Drugs? Booze? I think prob'ly the Irish have a genetic predisposition for this sort of thing, leastways that was the common belief in England fer years...


Birdwatcher

Why?
IMHO
Open borders/drugs, and
Punishment that isn't punishment enough.

Jail/prison should be hell on earth to spend time in, and the death penalty should be liberally enforced.

Since some would obfuscate an easy question, the obvious answer in the USA is none exists.

Nice to talk about theory and history. I'm sure all the Jews martching into the ovens knew a lot more about history and theory than did the Nazi Thugs killing them. Diito those killed by Stalin, Mao and other assorted thugs.
I prefer to focus on what is and what will be in the near future.

While some of you are concerned about cities, it might be more constructive to think about what will happen WHEN (not if, when)
Israel takes out Iran and $6.00 a gallon gas will be cheap.

How will "wing nuts" handle that and what will you do when the unfed mobs invade your neighborhood ? You thought Katrina was fun? Think of Haiti with no US intervention.... that's what's coming.

AB2506,

Excellen post. Spot on with the other comments about the loss of Christian values, be they marriage, moral responsibility, whatever and you then have the precipitous decline that we see today.

Yep, that's where Italian sausage comes from.

In addition, dangerous cities ain't hardly new to this age. In ancient Rome, B.C & A.D, in many parts of the city, especially at night, the streets were so dangerous that no one went out after dusk if he could help it. Only the rich Romans went out and they hired large groups of Roman soldiers as bodyguards. And those dudes took no prisoners!

(Kinda like the mega-rich today who have their own heavily armed, very expensive bodyguards. Not much has changed, has it?)

L.W.

imho, we need an advance in technology, and a big one, quite quickly.

a new form of energy, maybe approaching Free Energy? the oil paradigm has about run it's course, but not quite yet.

two-stranded DNA might not be enought?? is there a form of "civility" that is inclusive in the two-stranded DNA structure??

where is the Grandson of Einstein when we need him??

You are never going to see free energy government has made energy the new tax. They own it contol it or tax every bit of it or are working on it even at the city level.

Gov't is our friend. Please don't shoot.

the overpopulation of the Earth continues, and is supported by various religious and non-religious folks.

two-stranded DNA is insufficent. ask the Barak, if'n ya don't beleive me.

cheap oil empowers cheap 300hp SUV's. and why not?

under current conditions, we can breed, multiply and advance technology to the best of our ability.

technology is in the ditch, and maybe we should work to dig it out on Sunday??