Ethics can be Bought and Sold

Here's an thought provoking video of Ayaan Hirsi Ali. I enjoyed reading her books Infidel, a very interesting autobiography.



This video is purportedly a thought piece about how the free market supports ethics. At 4:15 into the video she makes the claim that the radical fundamentalist Muslim who killed Theo van Gogh wouldn't have done the crime if he was in the US because he would have been "too busy feeding his family" and not living off the Dutch welfare system. That is simply absurd. There are lots of examples of social groups in the US who have learned to manipulate the slimmed down US welfare system (remember Ronald Reagan moaning about "welfare queens"). In short, criminals will be criminals under any system.

I dislike Hirsi Ali's move to the right. She is wrong-headed about many things:

• She was enormously benefited by social democracy and now she bites the hand that fed her (read her autobiography). She reminds me of Clarence Thomas, the Supreme Court justice who used affirmative action to get a first class education and has now kicked down the ladder he used to get up by making anti affirmative action rulings. At least she is honest to say that Holland gave her a hand up and she wouldn't have gotten it from the US.


• At 4:50 she says she wants to replace government with philantropy. This is nuts. The rich are more likely to give "philanthropy" to operas and art galleries than to education and homes for battered women. She talks about "efficiency" but doing the wrong thing quicker or with less money doesn't make it better. The classic American "philanthropist" is Andrew Carnegie. He paid for libraries all around the US. But how did he get the money? He ran US Steel and kept the workers poor so that he could pile up his hundreds of millions (in today's terms tens of billions) in wealth. At least he didn't leave it to his dog like the "great" billionaire philanthropist Leona Helmsley.


• What she says about Wall Street "learning lessons" and that in a democratic socialist society like Holland the lessons won't be learned because "it is easily taken care of by the government" is nonsense. Wall Street is a serial bubble creator. What lessons have they learned from Michael Milken and the junk bond scandal? The S&L crisis? The Long Term Capital Management crisis? The DotCom bubble? The Enron scandal? The WorldCom, Global Crossing, Adelphia, etc. scandals? She thinks lessons were learned from the housing bubble that will last for decades. That is nuts. Anybody who reads Charles Kindleberger's Manias, Panics, and Crashes: A History of Financial Crises would know that these "lessons" are never learned.


• Her claim that welfare states will run up against a brick wall is simply an ideological claim. Each society will adjust to its own situation. She has no basis for her claim other than a prejudice that the Dutch as "paying too much" to help the needy. Funny, she didn't refuse to take this help when she was climbing up the social heap, but now that she is on top, has a well-paying job suddenly she wants to keep her money and make sure that government doesn't help anybody else. This is the classic hypocrisy of social climbers.

She now gets paid by a right wing think tank, American Enterprise Institute, so she dances to the tune they play. My respect for her has fallen. She is nothing more than a puppet who will dance to however pulls the strings. As you notice, the above video is from a the John Templeton foundation, the "charity" of a multi-billionaire stock investor who died and has endowed this foundation to fund scientsts to "prove" religion and to put out propaganda for the free market. Sadly, I believe she just might start touting the "spiritual values" of Al Qaeda if Osama Bin Laden could put her on the payroll. (She was a fundamentalist Muslim at one time, but anybody who can hop from one ideology to another so freely, can surely make the grand circuit and end up back where she started, right?)

In short, I personallly admire her for pulling herself up. He life story is amazing. I find her to be a very smart woman. But I find her politically appalling since she is so malleable and inconsistent in her beliefs.