[wordup] How to Ruin American Enterprise

[Adam Shand]

From: 
http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story2&cid=64&e=3&u=/fo/20021213/bs_fo/2002_12_how_to_ruin_american_enterprise

How to Ruin American Enterprise
Fri Dec 13,12:02 PM ET

By Benjamin J. Stein

We're well on our way to squelching what gives this country an edge. 
What would it take to kill innovation altogether?

  As a casual observer of what makes this country work and what stops it 
cold, I hereby offer a few suggestions on how we can ruin American 
competitiveness and innovation in the course of this century. I think 
the reader will agree with me that we are already far down the road on 
many of them:

1) Allow schools to fall into useless decay. Do not teach civics or 
history except to describe America as a hopelessly fascistic, 
reactionary pit. Do not expect students to know the basics of 
mathematics, chemistry and physics. Working closely with the teachers' 
unions, make sure that you dumb down standards so that children who make 
the most minimal effort still get by with flying colors. Destroy the 
knowledge base on which all of mankind's scientific progress has been 
built by guaranteeing that such learning is confined to only a few, and 
spread ignorance and complacency among the many. Watch America lose its 
scientific and competitive edge to other nations that make a 
comprehensive knowledge base a rule of the society.

2) Encourage the making of laws and rules by trial lawyers and 
sympathetic judges, especially through class actions. Bypass the 
legislative mechanisms that involve elected representatives and a 
president. This will stop--or at least greatly slow down--innovation, as 
corporations and individuals hesitate to explore new ideas for fear of 
getting punished (or regulated to death) by litigation for any misstep, 
no matter how slight, in the creation of new products and services. Make 
sure that lawsuits against drugmakers are especially encouraged so that 
the companies are afraid to develop new lifesaving drugs, lest they be 
sued for sums that will bankrupt them. Make trial lawyers and judges, 
not scientists, responsible for the flow of new products and services.

3) Create a culture that blames the other guy for everything and 
discourages any form of individual self-restraint or self-control. 
Promote litigation to punish tobacco companies on the theory that they 
compel innocent people to smoke. Make it second nature for someone who 
is overweight to blame the restaurant that served him fries. Encourage a 
legal process that can kill a drug company for any mistakes in 
self-medication. Make it a general rule that anyone with more money than 
a plaintiff is responsible for anything harmful that a plaintiff does. 
Promulgate the pitiful joke that Americans are hereby exempt from any 
responsibility for their own actions--so long as there are deep pockets 
around to be rifled.

4) Sneer at hard work and thrift. Encourage the belief that all true 
wealth comes from skillful manipulation and cunning, or from sudden, 
brilliant and lucky strokes that leave the plodding, ordinary worker and 
saver in the dust. Make sure that society's idols are men and women who 
got rich from being sexy in public or through gambling or playing 
tricks, not from hard work or patience. Make the citizenry permanently 
envious and bewildered about where real success comes from.

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. This will discourage thrift and 
investment and ensure that Americans will have far less capital to work 
with than other societies, while simultaneously developing that contempt 
for law and social standards that is the hallmark of failing nations. 
Hold the management of labor unions to no ethical standards.

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. Societies in which the law can be clearly seen 
to apply to some and not to others are doomed to decay, in terms of 
innovation and everything else.

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. As children learn to be stupid instead of smart, 
the national intelligence base needed for innovation will simply vanish 
into MTV-land.

8) Mock and belittle the family. Provide financial incentives to people 
willing to live an isolated existence, vulnerable and frightened. This 
guarantees that men and women of sufficient character to bring about 
innovation will be psychologically stifled from an early age.

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. 
This, too, leads to the shrinking of our knowledge base and the eventual 
disappearance of social cohesion.

10) Enact a tax system that encourages class antagonism and punishes 
saving, while rewarding indebtedness, frivolity and consumption. Tax the 
fruits of labor many times:

First tax it as income. Then tax it as real or personal property. Then 
tax it as capital gains. Then tax it again, at a staggeringly high 
level, at death. This way, Americans are taught that only fools save, 
and that it is entirely proper for us to have the lowest savings rate in 
the developed world. This will deprive us of much-needed capital for new 
investment, for innovation and our own personal aspirations. It will 
compel us to ask foreigners for ever more capital and allow them to own 
more of America. It will also promote an attitude of carelessness about 
the future and, once again, encourage disrespect for law.

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. Make sure that, in order to pay 
proper (and politically correct) respect to all different ethnic groups 
in America, you act as if science were on an equal footing with voodoo 
and history with ethnic fable.

My list need not end here. But I stopped at a dozen because I realized 
that this is already, in large measure, the program of so many of our 
elected representatives. The debauchery of our tort system is already in 
place, and the rest of the agenda is under way.

Benjamin J. Stein is a lawyer, economist, writer and actor, and host of 
the game show Win Ben Stein's Money.