Bryce Gerard, Sam Corcos, and I went to hear a panel discussion in downtown Los Angeles, "Is Capitalism Dead?" Wednesday evening. We were guests of the America's Future Foundation (AFF), which is the group that is funding the blogging contest in which we are finalists for a $10,000 award.
It was put on in this really fancy hotel and most of the people there were well-to-do. They, according to David Kirby, executive director of AFF, owed their success to capitalism and all wanted to figure out ways to maintain capitalism. Many of them are exceptionally successful entrepreneurs who, like Hank Rearden types, don't apologize for their success.
The panelists included Andrew Breitbart of Big Hollywood, Gene Healy of the Cato Institute, writer Conor Friedersdorf, (formerly of The Atlantic) and Adam Summers of the Reason Foundation.
All of the panelists were well spoken. I particularly enjoyed Healy's argument that our obsession with executive power harms our country. Whereas Bush expanded that power into national security, that provided an opportunity for Obama to reorder the entire economy. He said that our obsession with the president and how some people want him to "rule over America" effectively makes him a "talk show host with nuclear weapons." Much of Healy's remarks come from his book, The Cult of the Presidency, which I throughly enjoyed when I read it last month.
He was right to point out that few Republicans argued against George W. Bush's spending programs, but I think he overstated the case against Rush Limbaugh, especially when he said "Dittoheads" was bad. He didn't know the history of the term. (Scroll down) [Andrew Breitbart was right to call him on it. We shouldn't be fighting over Rush. It's an effort of the Left to get us to fight one another.] Healy is wrong to suggest that there is a dichotomy between Rush Limbaugh and Pat Robertson and to say that it says anything about "where the right is intellectually."
Adam Summers and Conor Friedersdorf were also great speakers. I throughly agree with Friedersdorf that what the right needs are storytellers, people who are able to put faces to the excesses of the Left. Much of the work I've tried to do with The Claremont Conservative and now, The Claremont Independent is to that end. Friedersdorf also pointed to the Great Depression and his grandfather who refused to give up on capitalism. He asked if we would have given up on capitalism when so much seemed set up against it. Friedersdorf talked about how he discovered Ayn Rand and how much he enjoyed her work and compared it to his self-made grandfather who actually built his own home.
Adam Summers, for his part, cited Joseph Schumpeter, whose work is a big influence of mine, and who worried that democratic-capitalism would sow the seeds of its own destruction. Summers suggested that New Zealand might be the first country to escape the economic doldrums as it favors more laissez-faire economic policies. Summers was well spoken.
But the star of the show was Andrew Breitbart, who is the head of Big Hollywood, and has become the self-appointed bete noir of the Hollywood gliteratti for having the temerity to take on their sacred cows -- political correctness or moral relativism. Breitbart believes that part of the Right's big problem has been its cultural tone-deafness. The Left is chic; we're not. Breitbart is at work setting up a critical mass of conservatives in Hollywood who can defend themselves from black listing and to try and make the Right cool once more.
Breitbart, founder of Breitbart.com, the Huffington Post, and now, Big Hollywood, described his turn to the Right after being a college moron who had read all of those political correct books like Herbert Marcuse. Hollywood has gone from Gary Cooper and John Wayne to the "Cultural Revolution" of the 1960s. And contrary to popular perception, Obama is not the president. Oprah Winfrey is. She did a "make over" of Obama and introduced him to Matt Damon and George Clooney. [It definitely seems he missed the opportunity to say that Obama had taken over the "You get a car!" wrong. He nows says to the car company, "you get a billion!" I also wished he would have said something about how comics had so marginalized Sarah Palin.]
I asked Andrew Breitbart when he was going to start "Big Academia," on a lark. He told me its coming. I'm so excited. Breitbart could have left college and left the rest of us behind, but he's now working to help us keep liberty alive on America's campuses. Good for him.
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