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Nov. 20, 2009
Rabbi David Aaron: How to make every second of your life come first
Caroline B. Glick: Whither American Jewry
Nov. 19, 2009
Binyamin L. Jolkovsky: Please Listen to this Godcast (5 minutes)
Jonathan Tobin: ADL Crosses the Line with Report Bashing Obama Critics
Nov. 18, 2009
Rabbi Yonason Goldson: What Judaism has to say about the secret of the Mona Lisa's smile
JWisdom.com: The (Jewish) Dating Game with Rabbi Lawrence Hajioff (8 minutes)
Nov. 17, 2009
Steven Emerson: How Does the 4th Amendment Impact Terror Finance Investigations?
JWisdom.com: If Frank Sinatra married Edith Piaf with Rabbi Y.Y. Rubinstein (2 minutes) Life lessons from what would be regarded as the most inappropriate lyrics ever sung
Nov. 16, 2009
The Jewish Ethicist by Rabbi Dr. Asher Meir : When borrowing is stealing
JWisdom.com: Deconstructing faith with Rabbi Warren Goldstein (9 minutes)
Nov. 13, 2009
JWisdom.com Sarah's subjective reality with Rabbi Sroy Levitansky ( 6 minutes)
Caroline B. Glick: Obama's failure, Netanyahu's opportunity
Nov. 12, 2009
The Kosher Gourmet By Marialisa Calta : A sweet sweet potato treat
JWisdom.com Does God get tired? with Rabbi Harvey Belovski ( 5 minutes)
Nov. 11, 2009
Rabbi Avi Shafran: Jews and money: When anti-Semitism isn't
JWisdom.com Marriages are not made in Heaven with Rabbi Lawrence Hajioff (VERY fast 15 minutes)
Nov. 10, 2009
Michael Doyle: Author of book exposing CAIR ordered to remove supporting documents from Web
JWisdom.com If the creation so loudly shouts the existence of the Creator, why aren't more people believers? with Rabbi Naftali Brawer (9 minutes)
Nov. 9, 2009
Mark Steyn: Shooter exposes hole in U.S. terror strategy
JWisdom.com It's never too late to have a happy childhood with Sarah Chana Radcliffe (5 minutes)
Nov. 6, 2009
Rabbi Berel Wein: Choosing to hear
JWisdom.com Zero to 1/60th: How to Empower An Hour with Gavriel Aryeh Sande (7 minutes)
Caroline B. Glick The mullahs' big week
Suzanne Fields A Fallen Wall for Fallen Man
Nov. 5, 2009
The Kosher Gourmet: Three scrumptious -- but simple -- butternut squash dishes
JWisdom.com Hidden Hints: Unlocking Faith & Prayer with Rabbi Jay Yaacov Schwartz (10 minutes)
Nov. 4, 2009
Tom Hamburger and Kim Geiger: Should prayers be covered?
JWisdom.com When God played peacemaker With Rabbi Sroy Levitansky (5 minutes)
Nov. 3, 2009
Martin Peretz: Beware, Barack. Beware, Rahm. Beware, Axelrod
JWisdom.com Are you are closet idolater? With Sara Yoheved Rigler (10 minutes)
Nov. 2, 2009
Paul Greenberg: The Holocaust is now on Facebook
JWisdom.com Abraham's Strange Change With Rabbi Yitzchok Fingerer (5 minutes)
Oct. 29, 2003
Mortimer B. Zuckerman: Graffiti On History's Walls (MUST-READ!)

Jewish World Review January 14, 2008 / 7 Shevat 5768

Capitalism is the real ‘agent of change’

By Mark Steyn


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http://www.JewishWorldReview.com | This past week's issue of the Economist has a heart-rending vignette from one of the most ruthlessly capitalist industries on the planet:


"In 2006 EMI, the world's fourth-biggest recorded-music company, invited some teenagers into its headquarters in London to talk to its top managers about their listening habits. At the end of the session the EMI bosses thanked them for their comments and told them to help themselves to a big pile of CDs sitting on a table. But none of the teens took any of the CDs, even though they were free."


"That was the moment we realized the game was completely up," an EMI exec told the magazine. In the United States, album sales in 2007 were down 19 percent from 2006. Don't blame me. I still buy plenty of CDs. But that's because I like Doris Day, and every time I try to insert one of these newfangled MP3s into my fax machine it doesn't seem to play. But if you're not Mister Squaresville, and you dig whatever caterwauling beat combo those London hep cats are digging on their iPods, chances are you find the local record store about as groovy as the Elks Lodge.


Now there are generally two reactions to the above story. If you're like me, you're reminded yet again why you love capitalism. It's dynamic. And the more capitalist your economy, the more dynamic it is. Every great success story is vulnerable to the next great success story — which is why teenagers aren't picking their CDs from the Sears-Roebuck catalog. There's a word for this. Now let me see. What was it again?


Oh, yeah: "change." Innovation drives change, the market drives change. Government "change" just drives things away: You could ask many of the New Hampshire primary voters who formerly resided in Massachusetts.


Nevertheless, between Iowa and New Hampshire, almost every presidential contender found himself lapsing into boilerplate assertions that he was the "candidate of change" — or even, as both McCain and Hillary put it, an "agent of change," which sounds far more exotic, as if they're James Bond and Pussy Galore covertly driving the Aston Martin across some international frontier, pressing the ejector button and dropping a ton of government regulation on some hapless foreigners.


But it's capitalism that's the real "agent of change." Politicians, on the whole, prefer stasis, at least on everything for which they already have responsibility. That's the lesson King Canute was trying to teach his courtiers when he took them down to the beach and let the tide roll in: Government has its limits. In most of the Western world, the tide is rolling in on demographically and economically unsustainable entitlements, but that doesn't stop politicians getting out their beach chairs and promising to create even more. That's government "change".


What's the second reaction to that EMI story? Perhaps even now John Edwards is rallying the crowd at the last CD mill in America's declining rap belt, comforting the 9-year-old coatless daughter of a laid-off mill worker who started there in 1904 making wax cylinders of the Columbia Male Quartet singing "Sweet Adeline," and later pressed million of 78's of Ukulele Ike singing "Who Takes Care of the Caretaker's Daughter While the Caretaker's Busy Taking Care?," and millions of 45's of the Swinging Blue Jeans singing "The Hippy Hippy Shake," and millions of CDs of Three 6 Mafia ]singing "Hit A Motherf——-," only to be cut down in his prime and thrown on the scrapheap because Americans have outsourced their record collection to the computer.


"I will never stop fighting for you," Edwards will be telling them. "No matter how they try to stop me. I feel the spirit of Al Jolson speaking through me. He's saying, climb upon my knee, Sonny Boy, though you're 53, Sonny Boy, I'll never stop condescending to you."


Heigh-ho. "They" can try to stop Edwards, and if by "they" you mean primary voters in New Hampshire, they're doing a pretty good job of it. But what's going on over on the Republican side? John McCain demonizes Big Pharma — i.e., the private pharmaceutical companies that create, develop and manufacture the drugs that all these socialized health care systems in every corner of the planet are utterly dependent on. He voted for Sarbanes-Oxley, a quintessential congressional overreaction (to Enron) that buries American companies in wasteful paperwork and hands huge advantages to stock exchanges in London, Hong Kong and elsewhere.


But why stop there? McCain is also gung ho for all the most economically disruptive Big Government solutions to "climate change." Apparently, that's the only change these candidates aren't in favor of. When it comes to the climate, McCain and Hillary are agents of nonchange. McCain has an almost Edwardian contempt for capitalism, for the people whose wit and innovation generate the revenue that pay for your average small-state senator's retinue of staffers worthy of a Persian Gulf emir.


As for Mike Huckabee, last seen comparing his success in Iowa to the miracle of the loaves and fishes (New Hampshire, alas, was loaves-and-fishes in reverse: he took his Iowa catch and turned it into one rotting fish head in Lake Winnipesaukee), in Thursday night's debate he was attacked for raising taxes in Arkansas. "What I raised," riposted the Huckster, "was hope."


Terrific. In a Huckabee administration, nothing is certain but hope and taxes. Did he poll-test the line? Was it originally "What I didn't raise was tobacco"? Or did he misread the line? Did he mean to say "hogs"? Is there any correlation between taxes and hope? If you cut taxes by 20 percent, does hope nosedive off the cliff? Not for those of us who were hoping for a tax cut. And is there any evidence that he "raised hope"? Hope of what? Huck's line is a degradation of FDR: We have nothing to hope for but hope itself.


Barack Obama, of course, called it "the audacity of hope." I'll say. Those London music-biz execs must look at our primary election season and marvel. In what other industry can you clean up with such insipid bromides?


"So what you selling today?"


"Well, we got two products. Over here, on this bare shelf, we've got 'Hope.' And over here, in this entirely empty display cabinet, we've got 'Change.' Or you could go for one of our two-for-one packages, 'The Hope of Change' or 'A Change of Hope.'"


In the midst of the world's lousiest Presidents Day sale, let us give thanks to the Democratic voters of New Hampshire, who took a cooler look at Barack Obama and decided that the audacity of hope was perhaps less audacious than shameless. Sen. Obama seems a perfectly pleasant fellow, if somewhat cravenly in thrall to every cobwebbed Democratic piety. However, his platform is platitude piled upon platitude.


As Barack floats off to the gaseous uplands of soft-focus abstract buzzwords, it would be nice if Republicans could have their feet planted on something firmer than Huckabee's big-government mush. Like those teenagers surveying the table of EMI CDs, grown-up voters should look at the display of anachronistic freebies peddled by politicians singing the same old songs, and coolly walk on by.


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