A couple of years ago my family spent some time during the Christmas season with my sisters, one of whom actually owns a Festivus pole. For those of you who don’t know, Festivus is a made-up holiday which was introduced to “the rest of us” on the television show Seinfeld. In addition to easily explainable events being labeled as "Festivus miracles,” traditions include the “Airing of Grievances,” during which participants hold an unadorned aluminum Festivus pole and gripe about everything from obnoxious drivers and inconsiderate shoppers to slimy politicians.
Having participated in such a gripe session I can assure you it is hysterically funny as well as extremely therapeutic. This year I have a few suppressed diatribes just waiting to be released so I thought I would grab the Festivus pole right now. Here goes:
My first grievance is with the political correctness surrounding Christmas. If anyone had peeked in my kitchen window the weekend after Thanksgiving they would have been privy to a private performance of Handel’s Messiah, with several encores of the Hallelujah Chorus (I sing all four parts, too.) Christmas always makes me nostalgic for this magnificent musical work, which I performed along with the other member of my public high school chorus three out of the four years we attended. Yes, that was a public high school, back before diversity and sensitivity relegated all things western and religious verboten. What a great loss this has been to our American culture, which, as much as we hate to admit, derived primarily from religious and western influences. What a personal loss it would have been to me had I not been introduced to the works of Handel and instead been allowed only the paltry, secularized musical diet of Frosty the Snowman and Winter Wonderland today’s public school choirs are confined to. True inclusion and tolerance would include all members of a society, even the majority.
Along those lines I give you my second gripe – the labelling of crimes as “hate crimes.” A few weeks ago a red-haired student at my local middle school was kicked by some of her classmates because it was “Kick a Ginger Day.” As a “ginger” myself, and the mother and sister of several others, I recognized this instantly for what it - a crime based on a physical characteristic, or a “hate crime.”
Though around the same time letters were pouring into the newspaper regarding allegations of racial taunts on the Career Development Center bus, no one spoke up on behalf of this girl, who had actually been physically assaulted. Not much happened to the kickers but few seemed to notice. Unfortunately for this student, she was not a member of a protected minority. If she had been, this assault would have carried stiffer penalties.
As we read in George Orwell’s Animal Farm, some animals are more equal than others and “hate crime” legislation is a perfect example of this.It elevates one group over another based on physical or cultural characteristics and fosters inequality. In this nation we are supposed to be equal under the law. As Martin Luther King said, “Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere.” Hate crime legislation is not only unjust; it is insulting to the favored and unfavored alike.
My final gripe - and it’s a big one – is with British economist John Maynard Keynes, the man who, in my opinion, is most responsible for the current fiscal disaster that is our economy. Keynesian economic theory is obviously too complicated to cover in an newspaper column but, in short, Keynes advocated the use of governmental fiscal and monetary measures to mitigate the adverse effects of the economic recessions and depressions that naturally occur in free markets (therefore rendering them unfree.) We see Keynes’ handiwork in the destructive TARP and stimulus plans being foisted upon us today as well as “Quantitative Easing” and war as the new norm. Many Keynesians view military spending as stimulative and therefore desirable. In a nutshell, Keynes believed governments should spend money they do not have and most have been more than happy to test his theory out. Unfortunately, this philosophy has permeated all of society to the point where we are dependent on credit and consumption rather than savings and production. On both a national and personal level this has produced devastating results.
The only bright spot in all this is the re-emergence of the Austrian school of economic thought. Friedrich Von Hayek, the Austrian school’s foremost representative, was Keynes contemporary and intellectual rival in the depression-dominated 1930s. Hayek was a prolific writer and producer of economic theory so it is impossible to sum up his theory in a single sentence, but he believed savings and investment rather than credit led to a more stable business cycle. He also said order in the free market is the product "of human action but not human design" and governments could not possibly predict the independent actions of millions of individuals. Therefore, they could not control the overall consequences of those actions.
This seems reasonable to most laypeople, which may be why Hayek is getting a new hearing. Sound monetary principles bringing about a sound economy - why, it’s a Festivus miracle!
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