Unlike many of my comrades in the punditry game, I don’t do a lot of TV. But I’m currently promoting my latest doom-mongering bestseller, so I’m spending more time than usual on the telly circuit. This week I was on the BBC’s current-affairs flagship Newsnight. My moment in the spotlight followed a report on the recent riots in English cities, in the course of which an undercover reporter interviewed various rioters from Manchester who’d had a grand old time setting their city ablaze and then expressed no remorse over it. There then followed a studio discussion, along the usual lines. The host introduced a security guard who’d fought for Queen and country in Afghanistan and Bosnia and asked whether he sympathized with his neighbors. He did. When you live in an “impoverished society,” he said, “people do what they have to do to survive.”
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When we right-wing madmen make our twice-a-decade appearance on mainstream TV, we’re invariably struck by how narrow are the bounds of acceptable discourse in polite society. But in this instance I was even more impressed by how liberal pieties triumph even over the supposed advantages of the medium. Television, we’re told, favors strong images — Nixon sweaty and unshaven, Kennedy groomed and glamorous, etc. But, in this instance, the security guard’s analysis, shared by three-quarters of the panel, was entirely at odds with the visual evidence: There was no “impoverished society.” The preceding film had shown a neat subdivision of pleasant red-brick maisonettes set in relatively landscaped grounds. There was grass, and it looked maintained. Granted, it was not as bucolic as my beloved New Hampshire, but, compared to the brutalized concrete bunkers in which the French and the Swedes entomb their seething Muslim populations, it was nothing to riot over. Nonetheless, someone explained that these riotous Mancunian youth were growing up in “deprivation,” and the rioters themselves seemed disposed to agree. Like they say in West Side Story, “I’m depraved on account of I’m deprived.” We’ve so accepted the correlation that we don’t even notice that they’re no longer deprived, but they are significantly more depraved.
In fact, these feral youth live better than 90 percent of the population of the planet. They certainly live better than their fellow youths halfway around the world who go to work each day in factories across China and India to make the cool electronic toys young Westerners expect to enjoy as their birthright. In Britain, as in America and Europe, the young take it for granted that this agreeable division of responsibilities is as permanent a feature of life as the earth and sky: Rajiv and Suresh in Bangalore make the state-of-the-art gizmo, Kevin and Ron in Birmingham get to play with it. That’s just the way it is. And, because that’s the way it is, Kevin and Ron and the welfare state that attends their every need assume ’twill always be so.
To justify their looting, the looters appealed to the conventional desperation-of-deprivation narrative: They’d “do anything to get more money.” Anything, that is, except get up in the morning, put on a clean shirt, and go off to do a day’s work. That concept is all but unknown to the homes in which these guys were raised. Indeed, Newsnight immediately followed the riot discussion with a report on immigration to Britain from Eastern Europe. Any tourist in London quickly accepts that, unless he hails a cab or gets mugged, he will never be served by a native Londoner: Polish baristas, Balkan waitresses, but, until the mob shows up to torch his hotel, not a lot of Cockneys. A genial Member of Parliament argued that the real issue underlying the riots is “education and jobs,” but large numbers of employers seem to have concluded that, if you’ve got a job to offer, the best person to give it to is someone with the least exposure to a British education.
Well written Mr. Steyn! My Father grew up in a fairly prosperous farm family, in the happy days after WWII my father told me you could spit on the ground and make money, they were not rich but they ended up pretty well off and my father and his three brothers all went into small business for themselves after leaving the farm.
In my life I have worked with a lot of poor youths through the church youth groups, outreach and charitable efforts. I have seen families on food stamps have more money, items and tech just laying around their house than my Father saw for the first 25 years of his life combined.
I have moved over seas and chopped and carried firewood to widows that were literally freezing and could have died if they were not helped. People have no perspective. The British rioters claims of being deprived should provoke outrage in England not understanding. Depraved yes deprived absolutely not!
Note yes I am talking in general I have met truly, poor and deprived people in America and helped more than few but in every case I was exposed to that kind of poverty only developed in homes where all the adults were addicted to drugs. They could have gotten enough help to not be so poor but could not or would not get the help because of the drug addiction.
When you had the opportunity to tell the liberals at BBC's Newsnight the truth did you have the courage? If you saved it for NRO you're just preaching to the choir.
Goldiliocks, think about it. Mark Steyn was on the show plugging his EXCELLENT doomsday book. Even if he sat there mute, and I'm sure he didn't, he was nonetheless a billboard for the conservative opposition. We conservatives are such oddities in places like Britain that our mere presence is worth a lengthy liberal speech.
I made a good middle class living telling for-profits what they were doing wrong. The big boss got paid in the millions before going statist. Meanwile, the non-profit grows to the size of the largest for-profit and larger than the government agency under and for which it labors.
It seems that not just a large minority, but a majority of the population eventually becomes state supported - through displacement or age. And the growth of state ensures the growth of displacement.
It also seems just a matter of time until this human capital problem prods the statist center of society into building factories for the depraved to go stand in to receive their welfare Soviet style. Wait, what about expanding GM and building a bunch of plug-in armored personnel carriers to police the human capital?
In the statist non-profit model, your human capital is a version of Soylent Green with all of the attendant sustainability problems more sharply focused over time.
When speaking of the non-productive, always include the tens of thousands of tax lawyers and accountants making lucrative sums only because they know how to navigate and exploit the absurd tax system designed by imbecile pols. Their salaries are generated by the unnecessarily higher prices we pay for every good and service.
Why pick on the lawyers and accountants. They are doing productive work. They do not create the convoluted and counterproductive laws and should not be maligned for making a living navigating others through that system. Fix the laws. Don't blame the messengers. And in terms of the article itself, those lawyers and accountants are being productive members of society, working hard, earning a living and paying taxes. To equate them with leaches on society is just plain wrong.
I blame them to the extent that they have trade groups and other types of groups that pay to lobby legislators to make decisions in favor of them. The same way that while I don't bear any particular malice toward teachers and other public workers, they do still support their unions, who funnel a ton of money to the Dems who in turn see to it that their interests are protected at the expense of the rest of the taxpayers.
Why pick on the lawyers and accountants? Because they are rent-seekers, constantly lobbying for the "convoluted and counterproductive laws" you mentioned. Heck, the lawyers (who make up a significant portion of elected officials) are the ones writing the laws.
Any attempt to reform those laws would be met with their resistance.
A few years ago a university researcher (U of Texas?) concluded that the U.S. economony would be better off if we paid all lawyers $1 million to agree to never again practice law. Lawyers on average are wealth destroyers. One manifestation is that literally every publicly-traded technology company (with inherent stock price volatility)is subject to a flood of nuisance lawsuits from shareholders who bought at peaks.
To be fair, Russia really should not be included on that list as their revolt was caused by the Ottoman Turks and the Germans shutting off their ports and thus their food sources. Likewise, Germanys revolt was caused by Britain demanding that Germans pay for the slaughter of their own children.
Add a few though:
Ottoman Turkey 1600's - loses Morroco to Spain and all of Africa west of Libya. European expansion stops for good with all Austrian and Hungary territories returning to their original owners.
Ottoman Turkey 1800's - loses Egypt and Sudan. Starts having significant troubles with Arabs.
Ottoman Turkey 1908 & 1918 - Loses first Libya (1908, to Italy) and then entire empire.
Lesson: It doesn't necessarily end until you make it.
Not too long ago many people may have dreamed of being able to start their own business, work hard, and do well for themselves. I believe they once called this the "American Dream".
Now, more often than not, I hear friends and coworkers dream of winning the lottery. I think this is the NEW American dream. That if I plunk down 1 dollar my return on "investment" could be, for example, 50 million.
Then one could exempt oneself from being productive at all and merely consume--and lavishly--for the rest of one's life. This "lottery mentality" is a symptom of the now all-too-common fantasy that somehow life can be lived with only benefits and no costs.
Ah yes, someone has to pay for insurance. In "rough" neighborhoods in America, high crime equals expensive insurance equals high business costs equals high prices equals high business failure rate equals paucity of retail outlets in said neighborhoods.
The next problem is that the same people who caused the high prices, will then turn around and accuse the merchant of being a racist, because his prices are higher than the prices that can be found in neighborhoods that aren't crime ridden.
Jack Layton truly is the poster boy for the welfare state. The man's entire career was spent feeding at the taxpayer trough and even in death he continues to feed off hardworking, tax paying Canadians. We get to pay for his over hyped, vainglorious and oh so politicized funeral. The scary part is, there are many here in Canada who consider themselves conservatives that think Jack somehow earned this farcical send-off.
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