Brainwashed

by Ben Shapiro

  Not according to professors, of course.

  Less than 10 percent of professors support Bush’s tax plan, and only 3 percent of tenured faculty support it.17

  UCLA history professor Mary Corey finds any “request for permanent lower taxes rather bothersome.”18 Rather bothersome? A toothache is rather bothersome. Tax cuts are requirements for a healthy economy.

  UCLA Professor Lynn Vavreck labels as confused those who “want to help the poor, but also want lower taxes.”19 Last time I checked, lowering taxes not only does not hurt the poor, it helps them greatly. Simply put, if people have more money to spend, they will invariably create new industries, new markets, etc. This provides more jobs for the unemployed, and provides new capital for entrepreneurs. When Ronald Reagan pursued tax-cutting during his administration, median family income, median household income, and average household income all rose;20 from 1982 to 1989, the unemployment rate declined by 4.3 percent.21 And Vavreck says tax-cutting is bad for the poor?

  Professor Joel Blau of the State University of New York at Stoneybrook stated, “Instead of ‘compassionate conservatism’ and calls to leave no American behind, we are faced with a proposal that caters to the wealthiest segment of the population.”22 One question: If the wealthiest segment of the population has no money, who gives the poor their jobs? The government? There’s a name for that economic philosophy—communism.

  Professor Ellen Frank of Emmanuel College agreed with Blau: “If these tax cuts pass, Congress will have succeeded in . . . using surplus Social Security and Medicare revenues to finance tax cuts for the very wealthy.”23 Horse manure. The Bush tax cuts cut taxes across the board, not just for the wealthy. And again, why is there such a backlash against the rich keeping more of their own money?

  David E. Kaun, a professor of economics at UC Santa Cruz said that the Bush tax plan would “serve not to stimulate the economy and increase investment as advertised, but rather would further aggravate the unfairness that is rife across the nation.”24 If Kaun is so concerned about “unfairness,” why doesn’t he care that the people who work the hardest are those who are taxed the most? Why doesn’t he care that the current tax structure penalizes those who work their way to the top? Kaun isn’t concerned about fairness. He’s jealous of those who earn their money in the real world rather than the ivory towers of academia.

  MIT Professor of Economics and Dean Emeritus Lester Thurow fears that “If Bush and the Republicans come in and have a huge tax cut as Reagan did in 1980, we’ll be right back into the deficit hole.”25 Aha. Three questions. First, didn’t Reagan take over from Jimmy Carter, who had run the economy straight into the ground? Second, didn’t the American economy experience the largest peace-time economic growth rate in history under Reagan? And third, why isn’t cutting government spending a viable alternative to maintaining high taxes?

  In a submission to the Daily Bruin, UCLA Professor Robert Watson again puts in his two cents: “It’s wonderful how many reverse Robin Hoods leap out of the woods to protect the rich and powerful from criticism.”26 Sensing any class envy here?

  After UCLA economics professor Theodore Andersen confronted Watson’s economic illiteracy in a letter to the Daily Bruin, Watson fired back. (Note: Professor Watson occasionally does teach classes, when he can fit his teaching around writing submissions to the student newspaper.) Watson expressed his anger at right-wing politicians “who justify . . . limiting social services in order to provide tax-breaks for the already wealthy.”27 The professor has it backwards. Social services are not limited to provide for tax breaks; tax dollars fund the social services in the first place. To act as though money for social services magically appears and that tax cuts steal that magical money and hand it to the rich is absolutely false.

  But, then again, since when have leftists cared about truth?

  “MEDIA BIAS? WHAT MEDIA BIAS?”

  The university view of the media says that the New York Times is entirely objective, not wildly biased. Ditto for the Los Angeles Times. So too for CNN. In fact, the only non-objective news sources are Fox News, the Wall Street Journal, and the Drudge Report. There is no liberal bias in the media.

  Geoffrey Nunberg, a professor who has taught at UCLA, said that “If there is a bias here, in fact, the data suggest that it goes the other way—that the media consider liberals to be farther from the mainstream than conservatives are.”28 Has this guy ever picked up a newspaper or turned on the network news? If he thinks that the media is conservative, he must be bonkers.

  Professor David Domke of Washington University admits that there is “some evidence that the media leans to the left, but the amount of that lean is small.”29 Hell will freeze over before the amount of bias at the New York Times is small. The liberal media hates Republicans, the military, and Israel. Take, for example, the following teaser on ABCNews.com for Ted Koppel’s Nightline: “Tonight: Reaction to Israel’s deadly attack on Gaza City.” When that link was clicked, the headline that popped up read: “Cycle of Violence.”30 From original headline, it would seem that Israel, unprovoked, launched an attack on Gaza City, killing civilians for the fun of it. In reality, Israel was targeting the chief terrorist of Hamas, Saleh Shehadeh, a man responsible for several major attacks on Israeli civilians.

  Professor Steven Spiegel of UCLA characterized Harper’s Magazine and the New Republic as “centrist.”31 The editor of the New Republic is Martin Peretz, a notorious liberal and the longtime mentor of Albert Gore. Harper’s Magazine is a leftist rag; knee-jerk liar Stanley Fish appears frequently in Harper’s as did the equally outrageous Edward Said until his death last year. If these are centrist publications, then Pat Buchanan is a Ralph Nader backer.

  When they’re not properly labeling media outlets, professors show their leftist colors (various shades of red) by simply ignoring media not biased to the left. Professor Lynn Vavreck of UCLA characterizes the following media sources as “hard news”: The evening news reports of ABC, CBS, and NBC, CNN, MSNBC, Fox News, New York Times, Los Angeles Times, Time, Newsweek, U.S. News and World Report.32 Notice anything missing? Only the Wall Street Journal, the largest daily newspaper in the United States.

  An in-class assignment for a political science course at UCLA asked students to study the amount of “negative news” reported about a given candidate for political office. The professor wanted students to draw the conclusion that the level of media criticism was equal across party lines, and that Republican candidates only garnered more criticism since they were elected to the executive office more times—in short, that no media bias existed. Only one problem: This assignment had nothing to do with media bias. The question of media bias is not whether the media covers more scandals concerning Republicans than Democrats. It is a question of whether the media covers the same story differently depending on whether the subject is right-wing or left-wing.

  To cut them some slack, professors are usually on the far left of the Democratic party, so I suppose the New York Times must seem moderate by comparison.

  THE QUEST FOR “SOCIAL JUSTICE”

  For Democrats, the goal of society should be to ensure “social justice”—a nice-sounding abstraction that boils down to ham-fisted government intervention.

  “Just being responsive to the market won’t ensure that social justice is preserved,” said Professor Scott Bowman, guest lecturing to one of my political science classes. “Law isn’t only the key to the marketplace, it’s the key to social justice.”33 Professors believe that the free market forgets the little guy. They believe that the market only acts in the interest of the big corporation and seeks to exploit the ordinary Joe trying to earn a living. So, they say, government must step in to protect Joe with social programs. As an assigned political science textbook reads, “state jurisdiction over public goods that fall within its borders offers real advantages.”34

  Welfare is a big favorite of the professors. And not the watered-down version of welfare embodied in the 1996 Welfare Reform Act. They like
the big, expensive, useless form of welfare that keeps teen pregnancy high, work ethic low, and the upper class paying massive taxes.

  Professor Sheldon Danziger of the University of Michigan ripped into the 1996 Welfare Reform Act: “The harsh realities of the labor market mean that restricting assistance for welfare mothers will increase economic hardship. The likelihood that the new welfare law will cause harm will increase over time.”35

  Likewise, Professor Sheila Kamerman of Columbia University predicted that Welfare Reform would be a gigantic flop. “There is a fantasy that these changes are going to significantly reduce out-of-wedlock childbirth and teenage pregnancy. But very little attention is being paid to the consequences for children.”36

  Kamerman knows the trick: When you have no grounds for a real argument, weep for the children—a tactic (perhaps learned from leftist comrades in Congress) that gets good play in the press most every time it’s tried. Said Professor Peter Edelman of Georgetown University, “The new law doesn’t promote work effectively and doesn’t protect children. The old system involved at least a framework that was right.”37

  But, of course, Danziger, Kamerman, Edelman, and their ilk are wrong. The old framework hurt children. The Welfare Reform Act caused poverty, child poverty, illegitimate childbirth, and black child poverty to decline drastically.38

  Another favorite social policy of the Left is Social Security. With Boomers ripening at such a fast rate, the program will soon be overtaxed, but don’t even think about privatizing any part of it! Money is best left in the hands of government. The citizens of the United States are too stupid to save for the future.

  Professor Patricia E. Dilley of the University of Florida nearly went apoplectic in her attempt to demonize privatization. “A call to totally privatize the program would effectively end Social Security as we know it, and could endanger retirement benefits for countless Americans,” she said. When reminded that Social Security is in serious trouble, Dilley remarked, “whether society as a whole shares the cost of paying for their retirement through Social Security, or whether each individual has to save for his or her own retirement, the same amount of goods and services will have to be devoted to the elderly, either way. It’s just a matter of how the burden is distributed.”39

  Say what? She’s seriously advocating a no-change policy, saying that even if the worst happens, the taxpayers will pay for it. Remembering that the nation’s “rich” pay the biggest share of taxes, this is nothing more than class envy in action.

  Professor Alicia Munnell of Boston College, a former Clinton staffer, denied any problems with Social Security: “The system is not broken . . . they want to restructure it and cut Social Security benefits and replace it with individual accounts. I think that’s a bad idea.”40 This is a fundamental mischaracterization of Social Security privatization. Conservatives do not want to cut benefits to the already-retired. They merely want to give people the option of placing their benefits in safe stocks and bonds, instead of handing them over to the government. That’s a bad idea?

  Associate Professor Brad Roth of Wayne State University insulted any plan including privatization as “an ideological effort on the part of Republicans to undermine the role of government in serving people’s needs.”41 Excuse me, but it is not the job of the government to “serve people’s needs.” The government has only one basic role: to protect lives and property from harm and fraud. Mandating that citizens pay money into a government retirement fund shouldn’t be a part of the game plan.

  Minimum wage laws are also popular with the professors. If we’re going to subscribe to the free market on a global scale, they say, we must make sure the little person isn’t stepped upon. We must assure him a “living wage.” In reality, minimum wage laws create unemployment by forcing companies to cut back costs. The little guy is the one most hurt by the minimum wage.

  But professors don’t see it that way.

  According to Boston University Professor Kevin Lang, there would be “little or no” job losses if minimum wages were raised.42 Professor Robert Pollin of the University of Massachusetts at Amherst concurs: “The impact on businesses and governments is very small. If there were any evidence otherwise, it would have shut down the living-wage movement a long time ago.”43 That’s not exactly true. Most economists oppose minimum wage laws, but that never prevents the laws from being written. The living wage movement lives on, not because of any merit, but because it’s a popular political move to back anything that “helps the poor.”

  Professor Alan Krueger of Princeton declared, “There’s no indication that the last increases have had an adverse impact on employment.”44 Krueger and Professor David Card of UC Berkeley co-authored a study on minimum wage that concluded that any minimum wage would have little or no effect on employment.45 How is it possible that a minimum wage would not cause a decline in employment or curtail a rise in employment? The answer is, it’s not possible. As Larry Elder relates in his book, The Ten Things You Can’t Say in America,

  When other researchers tried to duplicate the results [of the Krueger-Card study], they could not. Turns out that those working for Card and Krueger simply picked up the telephone and asked employers whether they intended to increase, decrease, or keep employment flat. Researchers seeking to duplicate the results of Card and Krueger went one step further. They requested payroll cards in order to verify employment. When researchers requested payroll cards, the non-effect of hiking minimum wage completely disappeared. In fact, both Pennsylvania and New Jersey suffered a decrease in employment following their minimum wage hike.46

  The Democratic tendency of the professors isn’t confined to laws already on the books. For example, many professors support nationalization of the health care industry, in accordance with the Hillary-care plan.

  A “debate” at Oral Roberts University pitted Professor George Gillen and Professor William Walker (pro-nationalization) against Professor Timothy Brooker (anti-nationalization). Gillen stated that the reason for rising prescription drug prices is the fact that the pharmaceutical industry is an oligopoly - only a few companies control the entire field. His solution? Nationalize the health care system. Brooker, Gillen’s supposed opponent, explained that the free-market system drives innovation in the pharmaceutical industry. Still, in the end, Brooker conceded, and he and Gillen agreed that nationalization was required to some extent.47 So much for defending your principles. I’m sure the students felt very enlightened after hearing “both sides of the story.”

  Ray Moseley, an associate professor of medical ethics at the University of Florida College of Medicine, claimed that “Americans are becoming aware that those in countries with nationalized health programs are receiving better medical care than in the United States . . . Other countries are spending half as much and getting better results.”48 That’s interesting. Last time I checked, heads of state came to America for health care, not Cuba. And socialized medicine is having its problems in Canada. Canada lags behind America in its medical technology and its ability to cope with an overcrowded system.

  The answer to every “social justice” question is more taxes and regulation, say the professors. People are poor and have illegitimate children to support? Tax the rich and give money to the poor. People are unemployed? Tax the rich and pay the unemployed. A small percentage of the elderly can’t plan for the future? Make everyone pay into Social Security. A small percentage of people aren’t getting proper health care? Nationalize the whole system.

  If we listened to the professors, we’d be living like the Cubans already.

  STUPID REPUBLICAN TRICKS

  Being good little Democrats, professors think that Republicans are the scourge of the Earth. The dastardly Republican party is stupid, bumbling, and destructive to America. It’s a good thing the brilliant Democrats are here to prevent Republicans from killing all the poor people and setting up an aristocracy with David Duke as king.

  Conservatives are just plain stupid. A UC Berkeley study by
Jack Glaser and Frank Sulloway, John Jost of Stanford University, and Arie Kruglanski of the University of Maryland at College Park, detailed the conservative mindset. According to the researchers, the basis of political conservatism is tolerance for inequality and resistance to change; some psychological factors associated with conservatism are dogmatism and intolerance of ambiguity, fear and aggression, uncertainty avoidance, need for cognitive closure, and terror management. In short, conservatives are mentally defective.

  The authors stated that conservatives across the board share the aforementioned qualities and lump Ronald Reagan and Rush Limbaugh together with Hitler and Mussolini. Not only that—they attempt to categorize Stalin, Khrushchev, and Castro as “conservative.”

  Just because conservatives are less “integratively complex,” Professor Glaser mouths, “it doesn’t mean they’re simple-minded.”49 How reassuring.

  One of my teaching assistants addressed “conservative stupidity” while tangentially discussing the nature of taxi drivers. “I’ve met some genius taxi drivers, and I’ve met some people who listen to Rush Limbaugh all day.” He paused, then continued: “and they’re clearly on crack because even they don’t even understand what Rush is saying.”50 The implication: only an idiot would listen to Rush Limbaugh. There sure are a lot of idiots out there—twenty million, in fact. I’m one of them.

  Conservatives are portrayed as members of a conspiratorial power structure. Lane Community College Ethnic Studies Professor Mark Harris believes we should “look at all cultural perspectives to sustain hope and energy in the face of a conservative power structure.”51 But while right-wingers are busy being nefarious and diabolical, liberals are uniformly deeply concerned and brilliant. Professor Robert Watson of the UCLA English Department describes radical-leftism as “the determination to ask hard questions about the things a society has been most comfortable assuming.”52 University of Oregon Survival Center co-director Randy Newnham agrees: “‘I would describe more students as being radical because many of the students that I work with are anti-capitalism, pro-labor equality, pro-liberation and think critically about world events.’”53