Ben Stein wrote a piece in Forbes titled How to Ruin American Enterprise. He offers "a few suggestions on how we can ruin American competitiveness and innovation in the course of this century." I'm excerpting his dozen tips below, but urge you to read the article in its entirety.

1) Allow schools to fall into useless decay.

2) Encourage the making of laws and rules by trial lawyers and sympathetic judges, especially through class actions.

3) Create a culture that blames the other guy for everything and discourages any form of individual self-restraint or self-control.

4) Sneer at hard work and thrift.

5) Hold the managers of corporations to extremely lax standards of conduct and allow them to get off with a slap on the wrist when they betray the trust of shareholders.

6) While you're at it, discourage respect for law in every possible way.

7) Encourage a mass culture that spits on intelligence and study and instead elevates drug use, coolness through sex and violence, and contempt for school.

8) Mock and belittle the family.

9) Develop a suicidal immigration policy that keeps out educated, hardworking men and women from friendly nations and, instead, takes in vast numbers of angry, uneducated immigrants from nations that hate us.

10) Enact a tax system that encourages class antagonism and punishes saving, while rewarding indebtedness, frivolity and consumption.

11) Have a socialized medical system that scrimps on badly needed drugs and procedures, resorts to only the cheapest practices and discourages drug companies from developing new drugs by not paying them enough to cover their costs of experimentation, trial and error.

12) Elevate mysticism, tribalism, shamanism and fundamentalism... to an equal status with technology in the public mind.

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