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| Home Front: Culture Wars |
| I Guess We Forgot the Laws of the Past |
| 2007-08-23 |
| by Victor Davis Hanson There used to be certain laws about mortgages, wisdom slowly acquired through past boom and bust cycles of American history. You got a fixed, usually 30-year mortgage. You paid 20% down. And you bought a house whose debt payments did not eat up more than 30-40% of your monthly income. Tales of wild real estate riches and speculative profits, even if true, meant little, since a home was more than just an investment. Somehow all that was forgotten with no or little down payment loans, adjustable-rate or interest only schedules, and excess purchased square footage. Apparently the idea was either to appreciate yourself into 2nd and 3rd mortgage equity, or to expect interest rates magically to go down and thus lower payments, or to buy and sell/buy and sell yourself into a mansion. So the house of straw is now tragically collapsing, and the old wisdom of the past being relearned. Ditto the Chinese serial fiascos. In the 19th century, the muckrakers, crusaders, and populists all lectured us that most industrialists were good, but a small minority that wasn’t could do great damage through the mass sale of toxic products. Thus arose the alphabet soup of regulatory agencies and the consumer movement. But then the new wisdom ignored that and we were told that out-sourcing was a win/win situation, as cheap goods flooded into the US, keeping inflation low, expanding our purchasing power, freeing us up from the drudgery of rote labor, while moderating the Chinese. Few asked whether there were comparable regulatory institutions in China. And there weren’t. And now we have everything from toxic pet food to tainted toys—exactly in the manner of our own spoiled canned meat and drug-laced soft-drinks of generations past. Again we forget our ancestors’ past wisdom about human nature. Ditto again open borders. Our illiberal ancestors worried about letting in too many groups in too quickly a time under less than legal auspices, lest the heralded melting pot stagnate and solidify. We in our infinite wisdom laughed at all that as protectionist, illiberal, nativist, even racist. And so like the laxity of the Chinese manufacturing sector, for 30 years the U.S. functioned without the rule of law. Now the result is that Los Angeles is the second largest city of Mexican nationals in the world, the legal system has become a mockery, and the bankrupt idea of a salad bowl of unmixed and competing tribes has replaced the melting pot. Apartheid communities in the United States—try visiting Parlier or Orange Cove, California— are somehow models of diversity, not to be lamented for their poverty, racial and linguistic uniformity, and entitlement-dependent and often exploited illegal aliens. How odd that liberalism is giving us a model right out of the Old Confederacy or South Africa, a nation in the American Southwest of two different societies. The old truism holds true: each time a Mexican national enters the US legally, knows English, and has graduated from high school, an employer loses a potential bargain hire and the Chicano Studies industry an exploited victim in need of its crusading zeal. So once more we are turning back to the mundane: nations must have borders; a citizenry should have a single uniform official language; assimilation and integration must be encouraged, and separatism and tribalism shunned. The one common thread is again short-term bounty and convenience at the expense of long-term disaster. An odd thought: I wish I could say that had we more farmers in this society, who are born, live, and die in the same place, and depend on what works over decades rather than what seems to work over a few years, we wouldn’t be in such dilemmas. I say I wish because agriculture for years depended on illegal immigration, failing to realize that scarce labor would make prices rise and mechanization quicken—and that the doom of farmers was always overproduction and surfeit never shortages of product. |
| Posted by:Steve White |
| #5 Summary: Borders. Language. Culture. (Sounds familiar;) |
| Posted by: Captain Lewis 2007-08-23 09:17 |
| #4 He forgot to add the abandonment of classical education and substitution of indoctrination in our public school systems as well. |
| Posted by: Procopius2k 2007-08-23 08:51 |
| #3 Word. Looks to me that it all boils down to the fact that the Love of Money is the root of all kinds of evil, and apparently the root of the evils recounted here. |
| Posted by: Ptah 2007-08-23 08:50 |
| #2 Nations must have borders; a citizenry should have a single uniform official language; assimilation and integration must be encouraged, and separatism and tribalism shunned. Thats all I want. But none of the current candidates is standing strong for that, except possibly a couple of the Republicans (but about half the Repubs in Congress aren't strong on the above either). |
| Posted by: OldSpook 2007-08-23 08:39 |
| #1 A triple whammy from VDH. |
| Posted by: Zenster 2007-08-23 00:51 |