Book Recommendation. Crisis of Responsibility: Our Cultural Addiction to Blame and How You Can Cure It by David L. Bahnsen

Book Recommendation. Crisis of Responsibility: Our Cultural Addiction to Blame and How You Can Cure It by David L. Bahnsen

https://www.amazon.com/Crisis-Responsibility-Cultural-Addiction-Blame/dp/1682616258/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1531695256&sr=1-1&keywords=The+Crisis+of+Responsibility&dpID=51HyhSpdS7L&preST=_SY291_BO1,204,203,200_QL40_&dpSrc=srch

This book is well worth reading. He hits on all the internal problems that are destroying our republic and doesn’t spare either the left or the right. These include; 1. Blaming a “bogeyman” for our problems. 2. The economic crisis and the role played by “predatory barrowers” the high-income lenders who could afford to pay their mortgages but chose to “strategically default” when their homes were under water. Defaults were much higher in this group than in the poor who couldn’t pay subprime loans. 3. Blaming other countries for our loss of jobs. Bahnson reports that manufacturing in the US has more than doubled in the past 35 years, while manufacturing jobs have dropped from about 19 million to 12 million. This is not because of NAFTA and would have happened anyway, due to automation. As the great economist Dr. Thomas Sowell reports, after NAFTA, jobs went up in both Mexico and the US. Economics is not a zero-sum game, regardless of what politicians try to convince you. 4. Crony capitalism and corruption at all levels of government, with government rewarding some industries with tax breaks and special favors, eliminating the so-called “level playing field.” This happens at all levels of governments. We conservatives like to point to Solyndra, but the truth is Republicans do it to, to win votes. And both parties buy votes, especially by building sports stadiums for billionaire owners to win votes. 5. The power of school choice to lift poor people out of poverty, which Bahnson calls the “Civil Rights Issue of our Times.” 6. Immigration. 7. Higher education’s degeneration from a place that taught students how to think and challenged them, to a place where they are never made to feel uncomfortable or offended by hearing views opposed to the pabulum the professors feed them in support of their agenda. 8. The people’s irresponsibility in feeding the growth of large and incompetent government by demanding it solve every problem or give them more. He also offers several ways that we can fight this. Unfortunately, they demand that people give up the blame game and demand things that are not in their short-term self-interest, and that politicians cease buying votes with things that are destroying the government and country. I have become cynical enough that I doubt that it can be done, just as I doubt that the solutions in Ban Sasse’s wonderful book “The Vanishing American Adult,” or the solutions that I suggest in my book, “The Coming Collapse of the American Republic” are very likely to be adopted by the majority of short-term thinkers in the voting public. But the book should still be read, and I recommend it.