Win Ben Stein's Intellect

Fans of television game shows out there will remember one that may still be on the air, for all I know, called Win Ben Stein's Money. The idea was that you played a timed trivia game against Ben Stein and, if you won, you got to keep part of his stipend for participating on the show.

Ben Stein is a lawyer, economist, actor and television personality who first worked as a policy analyst in the Nixon White House. You may remember him from the film Ferris Bueller's Day Off, in which he played the dry and boring history teacher, putting his class to sleep talking about the the Great Depression and Laffer Curve. He is very adept at marketing himself, but also very intelligent and thoughtful.

Stein writes a regular column for a conservative newsmagazine and this was posted on 12 March. It is worth reading in its entirety:



A few days ago, a man from a slick new magazine about business sent me an e-mail. He wanted me to do a column for him about what was "new, hot and exciting -- or terrible -- in business today." The only catch was that he did not want me to complain about the rich. This is what I sent him:

Here is what's new and hot and exciting (or terrible) in the world of money today:The average wage of the American worker adjusted for inflation is lower than it was in 1973. The only way that Americans have been able to maintain their standard of living at the middle and lower ends has been to send more family members to work and to draw down savings or go into debt or both.

The most sought after jobs in the United States now are jobs in finance in which basically almost no money is raised for new steel mills or coal mines, but immense sums are raised to buy companies, recapitalize them -- which means pay the new owners immense special dividends and other payments for going to the trouble of taking over the company. This process results in fantastically well-paid investment bankers and private equity "financial engineers" and has no measurably beneficial effect on the economy generally. It does facilitate the making of ever younger millionaires and an ever more leveraged American corporate structure.

An entire new class of financial entity has been created called "the hedge fund." It is new not in the sense that there were not always funds that hedged by selling short or buying assets uncorrelated with other assets. The new part of this phenomenon is that it is based on a demonstrably false premise: that these entities can consistently outperform wide stock indexes. They have not and cannot, and yet their managers and employees for a time are paid stupendously well.

As with the private equity function, the main effect is to siphon money from productive enterprise into financial manipulation. Or, to put it another way, to siphon money from Main Street to Greenwich or Wall Street.

Starting MBA's at hedge funds, which are basically gaming enterprises, get paid multi-six figure sums. Starting teachers in the state of Florida get paid $28,000 a year.

Here's what else is new and exciting (or terrible) in money: there is real poverty among the soldiers who fight our wars. There are fist fights to get children into $30,000 a year kindergartens and pre-schools in the right neighborhoods in Manhattan. There are 40 million Americans without health care insurance. There are almost 40 million baby boomers with no savings for retirement. There is a long waiting list for Bentleys at the dealership in Beverly Hills.

There are soldiers' wives selling blood to buy toys for their kids. There is a man selling non-functioning body armor who threw a $10 million Bat Mitzvah for his daughter.

In Brentwood, where the houses start at $3 million, the housewives complain about what a terrible country America is. In Clinton, South Carolina, where the textile mill closed fifteen years ago and there is real hardship, the young men still believe in America and their fiancees at Presbyterian College wait for them while they fight in Iraq.

This is a small part of what's new and exciting (or terrible) in America in the world of money right now.

I never heard back from the man at the slick new business magazine.


Well said, brother. Well said. It is about time that people realized that rich is not synonymous with patriotic, and that greed is not a beneficial emotion.

Is it just me, or is it getting weird around here?

Happy New Year! Yes, I know. It is 1 March. Unfortunately, this is the first post of 2007. I am a regrettable and loathsome person, just ask my family. As the cognoscenti say, "My bad" (stifle disgusted shiver).

My theme today is weirdness. I say weirdness because odd stuff is happening in the world and I am beginning to wonder if I am slowly going insane. First of all, the surge. The best way to win the War in Iraq is not to pay any attention to the military, the diplomats, America's foreign allies, or the Iraq Study Group. The best way is to send more men and gradually increase the pressure on the insurgents. Then pull out. Sort of like the British Army did mere moments after the surge was begun. Am I alone in thinking that this is a really bad idea which makes no sense at all?

The next thing that concerns me is Seymour Hersh's article in the New Yorker, called "The Redirection". This argues, from fairly well-placed (and presumably, baffled) sources, that the United States and Saudi Arabia have been quietly changing their policy in the Middle and Near East. The new policy is to support Sunni extremists against Shiite extremists. So far so good. These Sunni extremists have, apparently, enjoyed the active support of Saudi Arabia for years against Shiite Iran, Shiite Hezbollah, Shiite Syria and Shiite militants in Iraq. The object of the strategy is to destablize Iran and Hezbollah. Why? Because Iran has filled the vacuum created by the destablization of Iraq, and because Hezbollah defeated the Israeli Defence Forces in southern Lebanon last summer. Apparently, there are significant numbers of extremist Sunnis throughout the Middle and Near East who would like nothing better than to check This Shiite ascendancy. According to Hersh, the most cogent argument in favour of supporting Sunnis against Shiites is that "my enemy's enemy is my friend".

Now, I am all in favour of defeating radical, militant Islam. For that matter, I am all in favour of defeating radical, militant Christianity, too. My rationale is that radical, militant religious types are inherently dangerous, no matter what make and model they may be. However, you will recall that Osama Bin Laden (who that and where he?) is a Sunni extremist. The Taliban are Sunni extremists. The men who brought us the September 11th attacks were Sunni extremists. More American soldiers in Iraq have been killed by Sunni extremists than have been killed by Shiite extremists, apparently by an order of magnitude, according to Hersh. Have we come full circle, or am I going crazy?

Still weirder yet, the junta in the Bush Administration led by Vice-President Cheney is determined to eliminate Iran before the next presidential election. I am not quite clear why, since Saudi Arabia has been far more active in supporting terrorism than Iran ever was and Cheney probably owns a condo in Riyadh. However, it seems to be an article of faith for Cheney that Iran is run by carpet-chewing Shiite madmen who will not rest until the United States is forcibly converted to Islam or wiped from the Earth, or both if need be. As a veteran of the Cold War, I have to say that the threat of forcible conversion to Shiite Islam does not keep me awake at night quite the same way as did Soviet ballistic missiles, but I guess you take your enemies where you can find them.

Anyway, back to my point. Various sources in the American media have failed to acknowledge that the Bush administration has not shied away from using nuclear weapons in this hotly-anticipated war with Iran. That is nuclear weapons, ie. the kind we used against Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945. Come to think of it, that was the last time nuclear weapons were intentionally used on people.

Now a few years ago, India and Pakistan were competing with each other to build ballistic missiles capable of delivering nuclear warheads. This was widely considered to be a bad thing, not least because the idea of these two nations fighting each other with nuclear weapons seemed about as wise as fighting a flamethrower battle in a gunpowder factory. Still more recently, North Korea announced its intention to actively develop nuclear weapons. This was widely considered to be a bad thing, not least because North Korea has pretty much always been weird and scary. The point was, the very idea of using nuclear weapons was so horrible, we did not want countries like these even owning nuclear weapons, no less using them. So what on Earth are Bush and Cheney doing saying that they would use nuclear weapons against Iran, for Pete's sake?

Their rationale is the following syllogism: Firstly, Iran is supplying small-scale explosive devices to Shiite insurgents in Iraq to use in blowing up National Guardsmen from Ohio. Secondly, Iran is building nuclear weapons. Consequently, Iran will soon be supply nuclear weapons to Shiite insurgents in Iraq to use in blowing up National Guardsmen from Ohio.

Leaving aside when Iran will have a nuclear warhead ready (sometime between "a few years from now" and never), does anyone else see the logical fallacy here? If you were the President of Iran and you had an arsenal of nuclear warheads, would you be handing them out to anybody who dropped in, like candy on Hallowe'en? Not if you were sane.

Iran is developing nuclear weapons because its President realizes the only way to keep the United States out of Iran is to threaten massive nuclear retaliation. That is the same reason North Korea is developing nuclear weapons. It is the same reason the United States, France and Britain deployed nuclear weapons in Western Europe in the face of the Warsaw Pact. It is deterrence, and it is the result of one country fearing that another country is way too aggressive. Kind of like the United States these past six years.