Win Ben Stein's Country

Ben Stein recently wrote an incredibly sharp column describing "How to Ruin American Enterprise." The key points were:

1. Allow schools to fall into useless decay


2. Encourage the making of laws and rules by trial lawyers and sympathetic judges, especially through class actions.


3. Create a culture that blames the other guy for everything and discourages any form of individual self-restraint or self-control.


4. Sneer at hard work and thrift.


5. Hold the managers of corporations to extremely lax standards of conduct and allow them to get off with a slap on the wrist when they betray the trust of shareholders.


6. While you're at it, discourage respect for law in every possible way. This will dissolve the glue that holds the nation together, and dissuade any long-term thinking.


7. Encourage a mass culture that spits on intelligence and study and instead elevates drug use, coolness through sex and violence, and contempt for school.


8. Mock and belittle the family.


9. Develop a suicidal immigration policy that keeps out educated, hardworking men and women from friendly nations and, instead, takes in vast numbers of angry, uneducated immigrants from nations that hate us.


10. Enact a tax system that encourages class antagonism and punishes saving, while rewarding indebtedness, frivolity and consumption.


11. Have a socialized medical system that scrimps on badly needed drugs and procedures, resorts to only the cheapest practices and discourages drug companies from developing new drugs by not paying them enough to cover their costs of experimentation, trial and error.


12. Elevate mysticism, tribalism, shamanism and fundamentalism--and be sure to exclude educated, hardworking men and women--to an equal status with technology in the public mind.

While I don't agree with every point he makes, many of the arguments are quite timley. The complaint about litigiousness is particularly noteworthy given the recent lawsuit against McDonald's and the New York Times Magazine article about the unequitable litigiousness-inspired Victim Compensation Fund.

A lot of the arguments also sound like the complaints my parents have about America. Based on my reading of Portnoy's Complaint and White Teeth this summer, such immigrant experiences are not unusual. And while their ethic is certainly not always right and their characterizations not always accurate, there are many social ills unique to America or the West that undermine the successes of our way of life. I'm not particularly conservative, but it is sad to witness how divorce runs rampant, how credit card debt piles up, and how high schoolers keep dropping out.