The roots of their power

We all know the power of the media. They can turn a word like radioactive into a word of terror, though often it describes something innocuous or even benign; yet with the same ease, they can turn people's justified fear of AIDS into a display of ignorant bigotry. And once the media have programmed the electorate, the government, especially Congress and the courts, will obsequiously follow their lead.

Equally well known is the media's slant to the Left. Tom Wicker or Tom Brokaw do not condemn racism in Nicaragua or denial of elementary human rights in the USSR. Only countries like Chile and South Africa, and above all, America, stink in their nostrils. The same goes for the other branch of the information industry: the educational establishment.

Nor is this anything new: In the 1930s, the New York Times Moscow correspondent concealed Stalin's genocide of 8 million Ukranians by famine; the British press printed planted stories on how the Soviet government purposely created shortages so that Russian workers, in danger of overexerting themselves with zeal for communism, would get a forced rest while lining up for milk; and Western scholars came back from the USSR full of enthusiasm for the "new civilization."

The yearning for morality. It used to be quenched by religion, but as people turned away from the supernatural, they were all too often willing to fill the void with any morality, even if patently false. The Nazis had no morality: their brutal racism offended all decent men, and even the indecent outside Germany did not qualify for the German master race. But the Soviets offered Social Justice, Brotherhood of the Nations, No More Exploitation of Man by his Fellow-Man, and Peace on Earth. How could the Wickers and Brokaws resist? Even on the rare occasions when they cannot blind themselves to the deception, their servile brains attribute the fault to the imperfections of the deceiver, not to their pseudo-religion.

For like many better and smarter men, they mistakenly believe that capitalism has no morality: they regard it, at best, as a system that has provided unprecedented wealth to billions of people, but only by way of its ruthless efficiency; this, they parrot, is also responsible for all manner of horrid curses, and therefore morally deplorable. Capitalism, to them, is an evil that one must live with (after all, Tom Brokaw gets his salary by the grace of Preparation H), but nothing to be proud of.

This view is shared by many capitalists, especially those on various Committees for Corporate Responsibility, explaining apologetically how one must, after all, make a living, and how the fat checks to the Sierra Club prove that corporations make up for their monstrous wickedness.

It is a view based on abysmal ignorance. The pundits who have never read Marx or Engels (that alone should turn them off) have never even heard of Bastiat, Mises, Hayek, Rand or the other classics of capitalism. Yes, capitalism: the system that is based on voluntary exchange, not coercion; the system that channels human ambition ("greed" in Liberalese) into the avenues of maximum benefit for all; the one and only system that offers individual fulfillment without force and at nobody else's expense. Not only does capitalism have a noble morality, but it is one whose genuineness has been endlessly tested.

The power of the media is rooted in a sham-morality by default: it lives by the widespread ignorance of the alternative.

Don't expect Wicker or Brokaw to admit that they have been living a lie; but the day when Bastiat and Rand get equal access with Marx and Lenin on campus is the day when the present government by Sunday supplement will begin to crumble.