Cultural Pollution; R. Bidinotto

But the inverted incentives of socialism also play havoc with the moral character of a society. All of the virtues associated with living a productive life are punished; all the vices associated with an irresponsible exis tence, rewarded. The result is cultural pollution. Market economists have long argued that environmental pollution is caused not by capitalism, but by the absence of property rights and market mechanisms. Similarly, cultural pollution is not caused by capital ism; to a large extent, it is caused by the breakdown of capitalism and the absence of markets. The discipline that comes from market relationships preserves such pre cious cultural resources as personal charac ter, benevolence, and basic civility. But the welfare state has destroyed that discipline. Those under age 30 probably can't re member a time when radio and TV stations refused to air gutter-minded "shock jocks ' '-or sewer-mouthed cartoon charac ters-or nihilistic music videos-or freak shows masquerading as "talk programs,"

where guests compete in revolting displays of decadence and self-abasement. There actually was a time in this nation's not-so-distant past when most kids wouldn't use foul language around the opposite sex Mr. Bidinotto, a StajfWriter for Reader's Digest, is a longtime contributor to The Freeman and lecturer at FEE seminars. Criminal Justice? The Legal System Versus Individual Responsibility, edited by Mr. Bidi notto and published by FEE, is available at $29.95 in cloth and $19.95 in paperback. by Robert James Bidinotto (not to mention at adults), and when those few who did would get their faces slapped. A time when no one would have dared ask the President of the United States what kind of underwear he wore . . . and when no President would have dignified such a ques tion with an answer. It was a time when students referred to teachers by their surnames, teachers re fused to pass kids who hadn't met minimum standards of achievement, high school grad uates could read job applications, and schools issued students more books than condoms. A time when unmarried girls ac tually felt ashamed to get pregnant-even once-and when unemployed young men actually felt ashamed to apply for welfare.

When derelicts didn't use the sidewalks, nor celebrities the airwaves, as public latrines. During the past four decades, standards of personal taste, language, behavior, dress, and manners have plunged to loathsome levels. Today, we are awash in a cultural tsunami of vulgarity and incivility. From the street corner to the school classroom, from the movies to MTV, belligerent faces stare back at us in defiant challenge to all that is decent and good, virtuous and valuable even simply coherent and intelligible. What is most odious is the fact that the expressions of decadence are so incongru ously militant. We behold, daily and in countless forms, bizarre spectacles of self righteous relativism and crusading nihilism. We are simultaneously revolted and incred ulous and bewildered, wondering from what 165 166 THE FREEMAN • MARCH 1995 buried cesspool of our national life such pollution has oozed forth.

It would be simplistic to lay blame for this cultural collapse solely at the feet of politics or economics. Ideas rule the world, for better or worse; the militancy of today's nihilists is largely the product of many decades of intellectual corruption. The con certed, ceaseless assault by generations of academics upon the standards, heroes, val ues, and philosophical premises of Western civilization have undermined our culture's foundations and battered its institutions. The barbarians we see around us have been unleashed and empowered by modern intel lectuals who-like carriers of some deadly spiritual virus-have sapped our society of its once-vital defenses and immunities. But to have a broad social impact, ideas good or bad must be transported from the ivory tower into every corner of society. They must be embodied in cultural institu tions and transmitted by political programs. So while intellectuals may have opened the faucets, the main pipeline for carrying cul tural pollution throughout society has been the welfare state.

The corrupting influences of the welfare state go far beyond the obvious. It isn't just that the National Endowment for the Arts occasionally subsidizes obscenity, or that billions of dollars in food stamps and Sup plemental Security Income (SSI) checks are being cashed in and traded on the streets for drugs and alcohol. It isn't just that AFDC encourages unwed young women to have children, then remain unwed. It isn't just that unearned benefits encourage some peo ple to remain shiftless and lazy. More broadly, the welfare state also buff ers people from any need to behave like civilized human beings. One of the seldom-recognized benefits of the market system is its great civilizing influence. Socialists often denounce capital ism for promoting "competition, not co operation." But in fact, the competitive demands of the marketplace reward coop eration and punish antisocial conduct.

To survive and thrive under laissez-faire capitalism, the individual must learn to produce goods and services valuable to his fellow man. Failing to do so dooms him to a miserable and marginal existence. But becoming productive entails much more than simply learning a skill or creating a product. Whether employee, employer, or self-employed, each individual in a free market must also learn. to market himself, his service, or his product. This, in turn, compels him to present himself and his wares in the best light possible, attracting rather than repelling others. Those who learn to cooperate with others will be re warded by their fellows and flourish; those who don't will remain unmarketable and go wanting. The welfare state short-circuits this learn ing and maturation process by buffering people from any need to behave themselves. In the marketplace a foul-mouthed boor will be fired from his job. In the welfare state, nothing he says to anyone will stop his government checks from coming. In the marketplace, an ignorant, illiterate, in coherent young woman has few prospects of getting a job. In the welfare state, she can remain just as she is-and the checks will keep on coming. In the marketplace, hanging out as a street-corner tough all day is a short route to homelessness and star vation. In the welfare state, though, such a lout can go home to a public housing project, his rent and food paid for by the same pedestrians he has spent the day menacing and insulting-and then, perhaps, spend his wee hours in a federally-funded midnight basketball league.

By buffering such offensive behavior from the normal punishments that the market place would surely administer, the welfare state has allowed and encouraged the pro liferation of a nihilistic subculture. This subculture, in turn, has become its own growing market, with an insatiable demand for the lurid and depraved, fed by unscru pulous panderers in the media, entertain ment, and corporate America. A first step in restoring the quality of our social environment, then, would be to plug the poisonous pipeline of the welfare state. D THEFREEMAN IDEASON LIBERTY Making the Polluter Pay by Jonathan H. Adler T he experience of the past few decades indicates that "pollution control" is often a pretext by .which the federal gov ernment regulates the minutiae of each and every industrial process and economic transaction. Much of this so-called pollution control is done in the name of the "polluter pays" principle. This principle, which is intuitively sensible, was trumpeted by early environmentalists as a means to discourage environmental harms. 1 The' 'polluter pays" rhetoric is still often used, and most Americans probably think that current environmental policies make polluters pay. In truth, however, this ap proach is seldom embodied in American environmental laws.