More Blackburn...

In Monday's PBPost, "Basking in Free Market Magic":

Since we put our values on a cash basis during the 1970s, the arts have flourished. Our painters rival Rembrandt. Best-selling novelists plumb the depths and explore the heights of the human condition. The sheer range of our top actors is astonishing, but, of course, their predecessors in the profession never had such fine material to work with.

That happened because the market demands excellence and rewards it. In what looks like a happy coincidence but really is just another result of our discovery of how the world works, every year our schools confer diplomas on students fully prepared to appreciate the arts, to say nothing of the students' abilities to contribute in science, business and politics. The level of conversation in the typical college dorm is up to Plato's Symposium.

Ethical performance never has been higher in business, politics and the professions. Those who cut corners will be punished by the market. All that is as expected when we forced overbearing governments to get out of the way and let life follow the collective wisdom of markets. And the best part is that we are exporting our ideas to the rest of the world.

I josh, of course.
...

Mr. (John Ralston) Saul is one of those world citizens known to everyone but Americans. He's neither a red state nor blue and doesn't do our shout-and-scream television. He's Canadian and, in fact, married to the royal governor general. He has run an investment firm and advised a national oil company, and he has also written award-winning novels — the first one in French, one of his languages — and philosophical nonfiction. One of the latter, Voltaire's Bastards, was even noticed in the United States. It gleefully exposed the intellectual nakedness of technocrats.

His new book, the one I've been citing, is The Collapse of Globalism, published this month by Overlook Press. It shows what those naked technocrats made of the world's economy. Mr. Saul has a mean streak that keeps him entertaining, and he's better at stinging description than soothing solutions. But if you read him, you will think twice before repeating today's conventional wisdom.

Not that my e-mail shows any sign of second thoughts. So Danielle Steele is Jane Austen and Tom Cruise is John Barrymore. And I am the Sultan of Brunei.