Camille Paglia, Interviewed

I invite you to check out an interview with Camille Paglia in The Wall Street Journal. She's interesting on a number of levels, but I particularly liked these comments. Hat tip to Drudge Report for the link.

“Everything is so easy now,” Ms. Paglia continues. “The stores are so plentifully supplied. You just go in and buy fruits and vegetables from all over the world.” Undergrads, who’ve studied neither economics nor history, “have a sense that this is the way life has always been. Because they’ve never been exposed to history, they have no idea that these are recent attainments that come from a very specific economic system.”

Capitalism, she continues, has “produced this cornucopia around us. But the young seem to believe in having the government run everything, and that the private companies that are doing things for profit around them, and supplying them with goods, will somehow exist forever.”

“While I believe that boom-and-bust capitalism is inherently Darwinian and requires moderate regulation for the long-term greater good,” she says, “I insist that capitalism has produced the glorious emancipation of women.” They can now “support themselves and live on their own, and no longer must humiliatingly depend on father or husband.”

Perhaps the young's dissatisfaction with capitalism is related to the breakdown of the college-degree-leads-to-good-career transactional relationship which worked for their parents and upon which they were urged to rely. The inverse relationship between supply and demand continues to be evident.