“Totally amoral”: Michel Foucault

For students of the humanities today, Michel Foucault (1926-84) is a demigod. An intellectual descendant of Marx, Hegel, Nietzsche, and philosopher/Nazi lapdog Martin Heidegger, Foucault – author of a four-volume History of Sexuality, among many other works – was for some time (and perhaps still is) the most cited humanities “scholar” in the world.

We put the word “scholar” in quotation marks advisedly. Even Foucault’s teachers weren’t sure whether his scholarship was solid. Many serious philosophers today (because a philosopher is supposedly what he was) consider Foucault a lightweight who owes his fame to his lurid subject matter – and to the fact that he came along at exactly the right historical moment, when Jacques Derrida and company had made French cultural theory all the rage in the American academy.

Lurid subject matter, you ask? Well, let’s start at the beginning. At school, Foucault was viewed by his fellow pupils as “aloof, sarcastic, and cruel.” Briefly a Communist in his youth, he grew into a young man with a dark, twisted psychopathology. A fan of the Marquis de Sade, he “came to enjoy imagining ‘suicide festivals’ or ‘orgies’ in which sex and death would mingle in the ultimate anonymous encounter.” Foucault drank to excess, was a heavy user of LSD and other narcotics, and engaged in promiscuous sadomasochistic gay sex.

But these aren’t just irrelevant biographical details. All these activities helped shape his “philosophy.” That’s especially true of S&M, with its fetishization of interpersonal power relationships. As Roger Kimball has written,

Foucault’s focus was Power. He came bearing the bad news in bad prose that every institution, no matter how benign it seems, is “really” a scene of unspeakable domination and subjugation; that efforts at enlightened reform — of asylums, of prisons, of society at large — have been little more than alibis for extending state power; that human relationships are, underneath it all, deadly struggles for mastery; that truth itself is merely a coefficient of coercion; &c., &c.

The key point here is that when it came to power, Foucault was a man of two minds: even as he professed to fear and deplore the exercise of government power, Foucault got a major-league frisson out of authoritarian regimes, got off on exercises of power within personal relationships, and downright worshipped physical force and violence. To top it all off, he thought this made him a pathbreaking philosopher instead of just a run-of-the-mill weirdo or creep. For him, indeed, S&M wasn’t just a kink but a radical breakthrough in consciousness — and he truly believed that his commitment to it made him not a self-indulgent sex addict in desperate need of therapy but a world-class intellectual visionary. As one of his several adoring biographers, James Miller, has written, Foucault held out the hope that once the age of AIDS was over, men and women alike would “renew, without shame or fear, the kind of corporeal experimentation that formed an integral part of his own philosophical quest.”

For Foucault, the meaning of life was all about transgression — and not just sexual transgression, either. He also wrote about “madness,” which he saw as a matter not of mental illness but of psychic rebellion against normality. Debating Noam Chomsky on TV in the 1970s, Foucault rejected “such ideas as responsibility, sensitivity, justice, and law”; Chomsky, although himself a useful stooge of the first water, was actually the more sensible and principled of the two, pronouncing later that he’d “never met anyone who was so totally amoral” as Foucault.

Politically, the Frenchman’s amorality took a number of forms. To quote Kimball, he “championed various extreme forms of Marxism, including Maoism”; in 1978, looking back to the Cold War era, Foucault asked rhetorically: “What could politics mean when it was a question of choosing between Stalin’s USSR and Truman’s America?” (For Foucault, in other words, Stalin and Truman were equally unsavory alternatives.)

A recent article by Jeremy Stangroom in Philosophers’ Magazine recalled another example of Foucault’s useful stoogery: namely, his avid support for the Iranian revolution, as evidenced by several newspaper articles he wrote in 1978-79. In the armed uprising by followers of the Ayatollah Khomeini, Foucault saw a hope for a new “political spirituality” that dreamed of “utopia” and that could – with any luck! – transform not only Iran but the entire Middle East and even Europe itself, if only Europeans could develop a sufficient “faith in the creativity of Islam.” In one of his articles published during those fateful months, Foucault rhapsodized about the glories of Islam and the golden future time that Iranians would enjoy under the benign reign of Khomeini:

With respect to liberties, they will be respected to the extent that their exercise will not harm others….between men and women there will not be inequality with respect to rights, but difference, since there is natural difference….each person, as it is laid out in the Quran, should be able to stand up and hold accountable he who governs.

For those of you who are too young to remember what happened in Iran after Khomeini took power in February 1979, Stangroom offers a few bullet points:

Public whipping was introduced for alcohol consumption. Libraries were attacked if they held books that were “anti-Islamic.” Broadcast media was censored….on March 3rd, Khomeini decreed that women would be unable to serve as judges; on March 4th, that only a man could petition for divorce; on March 9th, women were banned from participating in sport; and on March 8th, as predicted by many more pessimistic voices, women were ordered to wear the chador.

And naturally there were executions aplenty. When it came to executions, those early days of the Khomeini era in Iran brought to mind France’s Reign of Terror in 1793-4. One thing’s for sure: Foucault, a gay infidel practitioner of S&M and author of a shelfful of non-Islamic books, would have been one of the first people to be arrested and summarily beheaded had he actually resided in Khomeini’s Iran. Instead, he lived on until 1984, when – after several more years of sexual adventures and academic triumphs on both sides of the Atlantic – he died of AIDS in Paris at age 57, having never breathed a word of apology for his zeal for Mao or Khomeini, or (for that matter) any of his disgraceful political enthusiasms.

Posted on October 14, 2016October 9, 2016 by usefulstooges 7

The case of Picasso

After World War II, the myth spread that Pablo Picasso, while living in Paris during the Nazi Occupation, had stood up valiantly to the Germans and served as a rallying point for the Resistance. In truth, Picasso had had nothing whatsoever to do with the Resistance. On the contrary, he’d frequently welcomed German officers to his studio on the rue des Grand-Augustins, where he hosted them with warmth and hospitality.

picassostalin — When Stalin died in 1953, the memorial issue of the Communist paper Les lettres françaises featured a front-page portrait of the dictator by Picasso

But if Picasso was, in a relatively small way, a useful stooge for Adolf Hitler, he went on to become a truly big-time stooge for the other great dictator of the day – Josef Stalin. Soon after the 1944 liberation of Paris, Picasso joined the French Communist Party. He explained this move in “Why I Became a Communist,” a 1945 essay for The New Masses. “My joining the Communist Party,” he wrote, “is a logical step in my life, my work and gives them their meaning.” While he had sought to serve man through his art, the Occupation had taught him that he “had to fight now only with painting but with my whole being.” He had joined the Party because it “strives more than any other to know and to build the world, to make men clearer thinkers, more free and more happy.”

None of this bilge satisfied his friend James Lord, the American writer, who in 1947 asked Picasso to explain why he’d joined the Party. Lord recorded Picasso’s curious reply in his 1994 memoir Picasso and Dora: “Everybody has to belong to something, he said, to have some tie, to accept a loyalty. One party being as good as another, he had joined the party of his friends, who were Communists.” Lord was troubled by this reply: “I had heard of Siberian concentration camps and ubiquitous secret police and the reign of terror, had read Darkness at Noon. And if I knew anything, Picasso must have known more, must have known especially of the murderous treacheries perpetrated in the name of the Party during the Civil War in his homeland. Could the painter of Guernica” – Lord’s reference, of course, is to Picasso’s 1937 antiwar painting inspired by the Spanish Civil War – “have failed to learn of all that?”

In the years that followed, Picasso became both the symbol of and primary source of funding for the French Communist Party. Lord wryly describes the painter’s “Communist Party hangers-on who often arrived just at lunchtime with fanatic appetites, ready to rant all afternoon against American perfidy and bourgeois evil, then ask Picasso for a hefty contribution before departing.” During these years, as Alex Danchev has written, “the conscience-wrenching dramas of the cold war seemed to pass him by. When Soviet tanks crushed the Hungarian uprising in 1956, and the Prague spring in 1968, he had nothing to say.” In a 1956 open letter, indeed, the Polish poet Czesław Miłosz upbraided Picasso for his silence on the Soviet invasion of Hungary.

guernica3 — Guernica (1937), Picasso’s famous antiwar mural

James Lord, too, addressed an open letter to Picasso that year. Noting that the Spanish artist had often attested to his belief in the “spirit of freedom” and to his “disgust for tyrants and assassins,” Lord asked him how he could possibly continue to identify freedom with the Soviet Union. “Today,” wrote Lord, “the hands of your comrades, those you have so often clasped, are dripping with blood; they have written once and for all in letters of iron and fire what Communism is….Can the painter of Guernica remain indifferent to the martyrdom of Hungary?” Lord urged Picasso to heed “the obligation which weighs upon artists, trustees of civilization” and to “repudiate the errors of your political sympathies.”

Picasso’s reply? First, he had a mutual friend phone Lord and give him hell: “How dare you write that way to Picasso?” Second, Picasso and several other Communists issued a statement in which they reaffirmed their unqualified devotion to the Party.

To sum up: he may have been the greatest artist of the twentieth century. But he was also, at best, a moral fool who befriended the functionaries of one monstrous dictatorship, and then – after only a few weeks of post-Liberation freedom – became a proud vassal and poster boy for another. Artistic genius does not guarantee either political wisdom or moral courage.

Posted on June 17, 2016June 10, 2016 by usefulstooges 2

Castro: A hug from Hollande

The headline of a Washington Post editorial on January 31 didn’t mince words: “Failure in Cuba.”

HAVANA, CUBA - AUGUST 14: Secretary of State John Kerry (R) watches as Marines raise the American flag at the U.S. Embassy August 14, 2015 in Havana, Cuba. Kerry will visited the reopened embassy, the first time an American secretary of state has visited Cuba since 1945, a symbolic act after the the two former Cold War enemies reestablished diplomatic relations in July. (Photo by Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images) — Secretary of State John Kerry at the reopening of the U.S. Embassy in Havana, August 14, 2015

“President Obama’s opening to Cuba,” argued the Post‘s editors, had failed in its declared objective, namely to “unleash the potential of 11 million Cubans,” to “engage and empower the Cuban people,” and to “empower the nascent Cuban private sector.” Obama, the editorial charged, had made concession after concession to the Castro regime without demanding human-rights advances, the release of dissidents from prison, the introduction of independent media, Internet access, or an end to state control of the economy.

4857483_6_3bbc_francois-hollande-et-raul-castro-a-l-elysee_62db6a9159fd50dbf26b3114362a8fae — Hollande and Raúl Castro at the Elysee Palace, Paris

In sum: while Fidel and Raúl Castro were profiting handsomely from Obama’s opening to Cuba, they were refusing to make any meaningful reforms. Obama kept making concession after concession to the Cuban tyrants, but in return the Cuban people were getting nada. “Autocrats everywhere,” wrote the Post‘s editors, “must be watching with envy the Castros’ good fortune.”

Cut to Paris, where Raúl Castro made a historic state visit on February 1. It was a perfect opportunity for French President François Hollande to call for precisely those changes in Cuba that the Post editorial had enumerated.

Yoani Sanchez, the internationally known Cuban blogger and pro-freedom activist, wrote an article urging Hollande to “take advantage of Raúl Castro’s official visit to demand a democratic opening.” France, she wrote, would lose nothing by taking “a stronger stance on the lack of freedom under which 11 million Cubans live.” Reporters without Borders agreed.

Did Hollande heed their call? Au contraire. He gave Castro (in the words of Voice of America) “the red-carpet treatment.” He hugged him. He threw a state dinner. And, according to one source, he actually “declared his love” for Castro.

Indeed, instead of criticizing the Cuban dictator, Hollande lectured Obama, exhorting him to make even more unilateral concessions to the Havana regime. The U.S. embargo, Hollande insisted, was a “vestige of the Cold War” and must be lifted in its entirety so that Cuba could “fully takes its place” in the community of nations. This, Hollande added, was not only “the will of this country” – i.e., France – but was also “the will of the international community.”

hollanderaul — Castro and Hollande raising a toast at the state dinner

Hollande made it clear, in short, he’s big on “normalizing” the world’s relations with Cuba. But he didn’t drop so much a hint that if the Cuban government wants its country to fully join the community of nations, it has its own job of “normalization” to do – it needs, quite simply, to grant its people the same individual liberties enjoyed by everyone else in the Western hemisphere.

hollandemay2015havana — Last May, Hollande visited Havana and met with Fidel

What’s the background to this Franco-Cuban lovefest? Briefly put, Hollande sees Cuba as a golden opportunity for French business development, and thinks U.S. policies are keeping many French entrepreneurs from diving in. Yet as one contractor told Le Monde, the main obstacle to Cuba’s re-entry into the community of nations isn’t the U.S. embargo; it’s the Castros’ refusal to turn their dictatorship into a nation of laws, with property rights, financial transparency, and so on. Without such reforms, many potential foreign investors will prefer to put their money elsewhere.

Meanwhile, we’re left with Hollande’s shameful silence on Cuban Communism. “This encounter,” lamented one Cuban emigre, “is all about profiting from Cuban slave labor. Nothing more, nothing less.”

Posted on February 12, 2016February 11, 2016 by usefulstooges 2

A putrid pedigree: Robert Malley

While in Paris with President Obama for the recent climate summit, White House press secretary Josh Earnest slipped a small detail into a briefing: the President, he said, had promoted Robert Malley, the National Security Council Coordinator for the Middle East and North Africa, to the position of Senior Advisor to the President for the Counter-ISIL Campaign in Iraq and Syria.

Who is Robert Malley? Born in 1963, he’s the son of two fiercely anti-Western, anti-democratic radicals. His mother, American-born Barbara Silverstein Malley, worked for the Algerian FLN’s delegation to the UN. His father, Simon Malley, was an Egyptian Jew, a leader of the Egyptian Communist Party, a friend and confidante of Yasir Arafat, a supporter of various terrorist groups (Algeria’s FLN) and dictators (Nasser, Nkrumah, Touré, Castro), and a rabid enemy of Israel. The family lived in France from 1969 to 1980, at which time Malley’s dad, who was suspected of engaging in clandestine pro-Soviet activities, was ordered to leave the country by then President Valéry Giscard d’Estaing.

French Interior Minister Christian Bonnet described some of the elder Malley’s articles as “genuine appeals to murder foreign chiefs of state.” Simon Malley published a magazine, Afrique-Asie, that “supported the Soviet military intervention in Afghanistan, the Cuban intervention in Angola and Ethiopia, the seizure of American hostages in Iran, the Algerian-backed guerrilla war in southern Morocco, and the Arab opposition to Israel and the Camp David agreements.” The Committee for Accuracy in Middle East Reporting in America has offered the following summing-up: “The world in which Robert Malley grew up was one in which Yasir Arafat, Fidel Castro, Leonid Brezhnev and Todor Zhivkov were heroes, any American leader – even Jimmy Carter! – was villainous, and Israeli leaders were veritable demons.”

151201-robert-malley-camp-david-831a_f2081b9f2afb6e31609c8b6d2f02502e.nbcnews-ux-2880-1000 — Malley (in glasses) at Camp David with Clinton, Arafat, and a Palestinian negotiator

Having been marinated in his parents’ extremist views, Robert Malley went to Yale, then Oxford. He attended Harvard Law at the same time as Obama. He then worked in the Clinton administration. Later – often in collaboration with former Arafat lackey Hussein Agha – he wrote a long series of flagrantly dishonest articles about the Middle East. In two 2001 op-eds, he blamed the failure of the previous year’s Camp David summit, in which he had played a key role, on Israel, not the Palestinians. This was a total lie – thoroughly rejected by other summit participants, including Bill Clinton and Ehud Barak – but his privileged position gave that lie legitimacy, and pro-Palestinian, anti-Israeli activists were quick to parrot it, giving it a currency that it still enjoys. In later articles Malley heaped praise on Arafat while arguing that Israel was ultimately responsible for Palestinian terror.

But all that was mere prelude. We’ll get around to the really dark stuff tomorrow.

Posted on January 14, 2016January 3, 2016 by usefulstooges 2

Depardieu et ses amis

Over the course of his long career, the veteran French actor Gérard Depardieu has been showered with numerous awards and nominations. He’s been nominated once for an Oscar and fifteen times for the César (France’s answer to the Oscar). He won the Golden Globe in 1991 for his role in Green Card as the unlikely love interest of Andie MacDowell. He’s also won best actor awards at the Cannes and Venice film festivals. He’s been named a Chevalier of the Légion d’honneur.

Depardieu-putin_2444226k — Les Deux amis

And he’s won one other major prize – the friendship of Russian president Vladimir Putin.

In June, we wrote about a Moscow event back in December 2010 at which Depardieu – along with a number of other screen idols, among them Sharon Stone, Goldie Hawn, and Mickey Rourke – partied into the night with Vladimir Putin.

But Depardieu appears to be especially close to the Kremlin leader. And this relationship has already won him yet another prize: in 2013, after Depardieu criticized his homeland, the Republic of France, for its high tax rates, Putin arranged for him to have a Russian passport. Depardieu snapped it up gratefully – and gleefully.

depardieupassport — Depardieu with his Russian passport

“I adore my Russian passport,” he has said. “I feel very Russian inside.”

He’s been a good friend to Putin. For example, he made comments suggesting that he fully supported his pal’s annexation of Crimea. In July, Ivan Kirilenko, Ukraine’s culture minister, reacted to his remarks by banning Depardieu from entering his country.

Flash forward to early October, when Depardieu had what was apparently a wide-ranging interview with Russian journalists. True to form, he wasn’t shy. Among other things, he expressed remarkable contempt for American culture. (This, as pointed out by many Western reporters who’ve passed along bits of his disparaging rant, from an actor who in Peter Weir’s Green Card “played a man willing to do anything to live in the USA.”)

One excerpt of Depardieu’s wisdom: “I have never wanted to be a U.S. citizen. That’s totally out of the question. They have a very aggressive culture. And I don’t like U.S. films.” This from an actor who’s accepted generous paychecks for appearing in several of them.

Here’s more: “The U.S.? They’re a people who have constantly destroyed others. They fought each other, destroyed the Indians, after that they perpetrated slavery, then there was the Civil War.” Then “they were the first to use the atomic bomb. Everywhere they go, they cause shit.” This from a Frenchman who was born in 1948, three years after American soldiers liberated his country from the Nazis.

(There’s no indication, by the way, that he said anything to those Russian reporters about some of the rather questionable activities of Napoleon, Stalin, and other familiar names from French and Russian history.)

“If the Europeans stopped listening to the Americans,” Depardieu concluded, “well, I’d be a lot happier.”

Depardieu also told his Russian interlocutors that he “prefers being Russian.” Not that he lives there. Some confusion seems to surround the question of where exactly he is currently domiciled. In September, he informed reporters that he planned to unload all his possessions in France – including a vineyard in the Loire Valley and a couple of restaurants in Paris. He’s now reportedly in Italy, although he’s also suggested that he might pack his things and relocate to Belarus. Why? One reason, he’s said, is that the vile autocrat who runs Belarus, Alexander Lukashenko – who is famously known as “Europe’s last dictator,” and who, if anything, is an even more transparent and unsavory thug than Putin – is a “nice guy.”

depardieuluka — Depardieu and Lusashenko out scything

Well, nice to Depardieu, anyway. This summer the two of them went out into the Belarusian countryside and scythed grass together. Pictures of their bucolic adventure, published in the Guardian, made them look like a chummy pair indeed.

That friendship, as it happens, has also paid off handsomely for Depardieu. In late September, the Hollywood Reporter noted that Lukashenko was kicking in $2 million to help finance a World War II film, Normandie-Niemen, starring the French actor. It’s good to have friends, n’est-ce pas?

Posted on December 3, 2015November 3, 2015 by usefulstooges 2

TV star thinks Cristina Kirchner is, like, really cool

Not to put too fine a point on it, but here’s a real airhead for you.

Cristina Fernández de Kirchner, whose autocratic, corruption-ridden presidency will finally come to an end in December, turns out to be a loyal viewer of the HBO fantasy series Game of Thrones. And her favorite member of the cast is British actress Emilia Clarke, who plays a character named Daenerys Targaryen. We don’t watch Game of Thrones, but we’ve poked around a bit on the Internet and discovered that Daenerys Targaryen is a “driven rebel queen…who births dragons” and “liberates legions of slaves.”

When Clarke found out that Kirchner is a fan of hers, she was surprised. “Really? I didn’t know that. I take it as a compliment. I love women in power.”

There’s a generalization for you: “I love women in power.” Apparently Clarke knows absolutely nothing about Cristina Kirchner.

Nor, we imagine, has she ever heard of the French queen Catherine de Medici, who bullied her son, King Charles IX, into ordering the 1572 St. Bartholemew’s Day Massacre, in which tens of thousands of French Protestants were killed all over France. Now there was a woman in power. But lovable? Not so much.

We wonder, too, whether Clarke learned in school about another sixteenth-century monarch, England’s Mary I (“Bloody Mary”), Queen Elizabeth I’s bitter, brutal older sister, who burned hundreds of Protestants at the stake, including Thomas Cranmer, author of the Book of Common Prayer. If so, is Clarke a fan?

Presumably Clarke has heard of Queen Isabella of Spain, who sponsored Christopher Columbus’s voyages of discovery. But does Clarke know that Isabella was also the mastermind of the Spanish Inquisition, in which thousands of Jews were tortured and killed? Talk about power! Clarke’s gotta love Isabella, no?

Clarke had more wisdom to offer on the subject of women in power. “Women who are leaders have a feminine sensibility in a masculine world,” she lectured. “As is the case with the dragon queen” – that is, her own Game of Thrones character – “they have to know when to be more aggressive and when to show more sensitivity.”

(Warning: we’re engaging here in what’s called “back-translating.” Clarke presumably spoke in English, but we’re relying on Spanish-language news reports – so when we translate those remarks back into English, we might not be reproducing them word-for-word.)

clarke2 — Clarke in character on Game of Thrones

That’s not all. Clarke was asked what advice she would give Kirchner. “Kill all the men!” she replied, adding: “No, no…I’m joking. Better to get some dragons.”

Funny joke. A charitable observer might suggest that Clarke has spent so much time inhabiting a fantasy world that she’s forgotten how horrifying the real world can be.

Or, more likely, she’s just plain dopey.

Posted on November 27, 2015November 16, 2015 by usefulstooges 1

Stiglitz’s Gallic delusion

stiglitz5 — Channeling Chaplin? (see photo below)

He’s been called “a ‘superstar’ of the Left” who “defaults to leftist ideologies at every turn,” who “offers an old-Keynesian approach to new problems,” who “has assumed the role of social-democratic public-intellectual-in-chief,” who “increasingly labels anyone disagreeing with him as a ‘market fundamentalist’ or a ‘conservative journalist,’” and who’s “essentially an economic crank.”

We’re talking about Columbia University economist Joseph Stiglitz, who, as we’ve seen in the last few days, is a fierce critic of the free market, of “American-style capitalism,” and of “economic inequality,” and a zealous enthusiast for welfare states, for an international currency and international tax system, and for the financially irresponsible governments of Greece and Argentina (for both of which, it turns out, he’s been a paid “advisor”).

The absurdity of Stiglitz’s economic views is crystallized in his relatively recent comments on France. As financial analyst Pater Tenebrarum noted a year ago, Stiglitz has been an outspoken fan of France’s profligate government spending – because, in Stiglitz’s view, lowering state spending is the path to economic disaster. Yet as Tenebrarum pointed out, France’s neighbor to the south, Spain, had “been outperforming France for the past several quarters.”

Why? Because, unlike France, Spain cut government spending, reformed its labor laws, and “ma[de] life easier for businesses” in a number of other respects. In short, as Tenebrarum put it, “Spain has done precisely what Mr. Stiglitz believes is leading to failure, while France has done precisely what he believes to guarantee success.” Commenting on Stiglitz’s statements about the French economy – including the claim that France is business-friendly – Tenebrarum could not disguise his incredulity:

At a 2010 Italian Trade Commission event in New York

He believes that a government that is spending a record 58% of GDP every year – more than any other government in the allegedly capitalist countries – and that is well-known for having instituted the highest tax rates in Europe and having put in place the most onerous business regulations imaginable, is a paragon of “pro business austerity”!

To say that this is utterly ridiculous is the understatement of the century. How can one make such an assertion and keep a straight face? Hundreds of thousands of young entrepreneurs have fled France for more business-friendly places such as the UK, because they simply felt they could not operate in France’s extremely hostile business climate….

Is Mr. Stiglitz unaware of the fact that France has introduced a 75% marginal tax rate for high income earners, which is in fact the highest in the world? Stiglitz should in fact explain to us why the sure-fire “success” of this policy in France is so conspicuous by its absence (since he asserts above that raising taxes on the rich will “boost the economy”!).

While acknowledging that one can have an opinion on business matters without ever having run a business, Tenebrarum added that “anyone who has struggled with establishing a small business in hostile bastions of socialism in the EU such as France” would be stunned by Stiglitz’s statement that “the level of corporate taxation has little effect on investment.” Tenebrarum’s own take on this claim:

This is spoken like a life-long leftist academic and bureaucrat who has never created one iota of real wealth in his life, who has never taken any personal risk or ever had to worry about paying someone else’s wages. Anyone who has ever taken the risks about which Mr. Stiglitz evidently knows nothing will confirm how utterly misinformed this comment is. In Europe, the entrepreneurial spirit has been completely crushed in many places due to extremely high taxation and massive over-regulation. And yet, how does Stiglitz believe new wealth is going to be produced? It’s not going to drop from the sky, that much is certain.

And that, in the end, is perhaps the most important thing that needs to be said about the economic preferences, proposals, pretenses, and prognostications of Columbia University’s own Professor Stiglitz.

Posted on October 26, 2015September 19, 2015 by usefulstooges 3

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