Beck Like Marx Should Stop Theorizing About Capital and Go Out and Earn Some (Honestly), March 28, 2011
This review is from: Broke: The Plan to Restore Our Trust, Truth and Treasure (Hardcover)
I must admit that this looks like a carefully-thought-out book. It has side bars and historical quotations and is even peppered with some facts. It stretches over a few hundred pages. And the writing style is at times amusing, at times amusingly pompous, but rarely boring. However, appearances are deceptive as any Fox News viewer should have discovered long ago, and anyone who expects to be enlightened by this book by a former chemically dependent Top 40 DJ turned part über-patriot, part televangelist Fox employee, will be as disappointed as one should expect considering the source. Beck illustrates the dangers of trying to get historical, political, or economic advice from professional entertainers. Let's start as Beck does, with religion. On page 6, Beck cites the fact that 12% of Americans state they have "no religion" in 2008 versus 2% in 1948. Since he gives this sidebar along with other indicators establishing the decline of what he calls American "empire," and inserts it in a parallel discussion of the decline of the Roman empire, we can only conclude that he believes that a decline in religious affiliation (and he elsewhere says of the Judeo-Christian variety) is associated with a decline in empire. Perhaps he does not realize this, but early Christian writers such as Augustine were tortured by it: the Roman Empire which lasted centuries collapsed shortly after adopting Christianity as the official state religion. This may have been true, true, and unrelated, but it does not support his case that religiosity is important to empire maintenance. There was a correlation between Christianity and empire in the case of the Romans - an inverse one.
It is unclear why Beck holds up the Roman Empire as a model to emulate anyway, since only a minority of wealthy men could engage in politics, slavery was a cherished institution, and torture, aggressive war, and mass crucifixions were considered appropriate powers to be granted to a central government. This hardly seems the stuff of the "Don't Tread on Me" Tea Party.
The "simple" recipe that Beck gives for the decline of this Empire, however little it is analogous to the world we live in, is that "the state encroaches on freedom... people want more handouts ... taxes go up to pay for the handouts." Now I will admit to not being a Roman historian by trade, but I have read and studied the works of those who are, and have never heard this theory. Beck is the first person I know of who has ever described ancient Rome as a welfare state. Rome's fall was complex, but it wasn't that it cared for its poor or paid its teachers too much (it didn't have any publicly paid teachers anyway).
"God's hand has been evident throughout American history" he tells us on page 13, and he attributes to this deity the additional gift of books, technology, and history. This is an interesting theory since European Christians spent so much energy destroying the works of pre-Christian Greece that many were lost forever and those that we have were largely preserved in the Muslim world. The Romans were far more steeped in the intricacies of Greek history and civilization than Mr. Beck - many sent their children to be educated in Athens - but that did not prevent their empire from collapsing.
At any rate, and this seems a far bigger flaw, Beck repeatedly confuses freedom and empire. Many would argue they are diametrically opposed. Yes, being a subject of a great empire such as Rome gives you a certain freedom - from raids by enemies of that empire, for example - but you must exchange certain freedoms and pay tribute (taxes, Mr. Beck, lots of them) to Rome and provide men for the Roman Army. You must pledge loyalty to the Roman emperor and in the final days of the Roman empire you had to renounce your religion in favor of the state religion (Christianity). Whether these losses of freedom (to worship according to your conscience, to be loyal to your local leaders, government, and tribe, and to retain money and men that would have to be handed over to the state) were offset by the freedoms membership in that empire gave you is debatable, but the fact that the Roman Empire generally expanded through the sword, not persuasion or buy-in of the conquered, argues otherwise. Even after many areas were conquered, such as Judea or present-day Germany, the Romans were subject to frequent violent uprisings; Jews and Germanic tribes and Gauls and many others apparently did not share Beck's rosy view of the Roman legions as liberators.
Beck passes off another myth of the religious right, that the "United States was founded on Judeo-Christian principles." Adams and Jefferson are both on record, as is Congress in a resolution to that effect, that the United States is in "no sense a Christian nation." God is mentioned not at all in the Constitution and only twice in the Declaration of Independence (in passing as the god of nature, not Jesus or Yahweh). "In God we trust" did not appear on our coins until the Civil War and the words "under God" were not inserted into our Pledge of Allegiance until the height of the McCarthyist hysteria in 1954. Most of the founders were Deists. At least one (Jefferson) was an atheist.
Beck bemoans the fact that 12% of Americans cite no religion in 2008 but only 18% of Americans belonged to a church in 1776. True, the 82% who did not attend church may have told a pollster back then that they still considered themselves to have some sort of religious affiliation, but the generation of the Minute Men and the (real) Tea Party was far less religious than Beck's generation (slightly fewer than 60% of Americans belong to a church today).
The idea of the "Judeo" part of that Judeo-Christian formulation would have been particularly curious to our founders. After all, we were a country that had strict quotas limiting the number of Jewish immigrants even during the Holocaust or that limited Jews from joining certain clubs or even attending certain universities (the SAT was developed in part to counter claims of Jewish preference by those who felt too many Jewish students were getting into the nation's top colleges).
Beck's frequent quotations of Benjamin Franklin and even Aesop's fables on the importance of frugality and hard work are curious coming from a man who spent most of his life as a Top 40s DJ and by his own admission was often chemically altered and spiritually lost. If Beck, who now works as a highly paid entertainer, had a real job at some point in his life, it's not evident on his CV. Yet he feels he is in a position to lecture to the millions of hard-working Americans who do that they should stop whining about their working conditions or compensation and help him keep the hundreds of thousands he saves each years in taxes on his multi-million income stream as a Fox News and radio entertainer.
There is something almost offensive about a man such as Beck misrepresenting Benjamin Franklin who fought so hard to keep religiosity out of the public square. Franklin successfully argued for substituting the phrase "self-evident" (reflecting his enlightenment preference for observation and reason) instead of "sacred and undeniable" (Thomas Jefferson's original wording) in the Declaration of Independence. He said light houses are more useful than churches. Franklin also had some progressive ideas that Beck would ridicule (if he knew about them, which apparently he does not). For example, Franklin never patented his inventions, believed scientific inventions should all benefit mankind. Greed did not motivate him. He had made his fortune by hard work at age 42, but said he wanted to spend the rest of his life finding a way to "do well by doing good." He invented the Franklin stove in 1741 because other designs led to frequent house fires and burn accidents, as well as smoke inhalation. He created in 1751 the first hospital in America, Pennsylvania Hospital. It still stands today. It was raised using matching private-public grants. He found the Philadelphia Academy which became University of Pennsylvania to promote public curiosity and service through the liberal arts in its students. Yes, LIBERAL arts, Mr. Beck.
It's also interesting that nowhere does Beck mention one of my favorite Benjamin Franklin quotations, in which Franklin chastises people like Beck who whine about their high taxes. "Friends and neighbors complain that taxes are indeed very heavy, and if those laid on by the government were the only ones we had to pay, we might the more easily discharge them; but we have many others, and much more grievous to some of us. We are taxed twice as much by our idleness, three times as much by our pride, and four times as much by our folly." In other words: get over it. We tax ourselves far more than our government does (but which do you think it easier to complain about?).
And let's not forget - before getting too misty-eyed about the days of Ben Franklin and his fear of a government that might tax one tenth of his income that in his America, fully 1 out of 5 Americans had a 100% tax rate. Slaves - who of course were not paid at all - in effect had all of their wages taxed away even though it flowed not to the government but to their owners. That works out to an average American tax rate of 20% before any other taxes are even considered, far higher than the current 15% (of GDP) tax "burden." The much higher tariffs of the time not just internationally but between states represented an embedded tax in every product. Beck ignores slavery in this book and in his calculations about the burden of government, but it is hard to see why we should be trying to hard to turn back the clock to a time when our government collaborated with slave-owners to insure they could expropriate 100% of their income and even beat them to death or sell them like animals if they chose. Of all the evil powers Beck believes our out-of-control federal government, it does not - thank God! - have that one.
Beck claims, without any supporting data (a theme of his approach to just about everything he writes), that "frugality ignites freedom." Is this really true? Do nations with higher savings rates have higher freedom? By that measure Japan should have far greater freedom than the United States. So too should socialist Germany and communist China (which he condemns elsewhere despite its eagerness to buy our debt). If it is government frugality he extols, is it true that governments that spend less as a percentage of GDP are found in countries enjoying greater freedom? Was the United States freer at its founding when the central government was so small and spent so little that it essentially did not work, requiring the Articles of Confederation to be scrapped for our current system? I imagine if Beck had surveyed the one out of five Americans who were slaves in Colonial America, his answer not only would have been no, but hell no. If he had asked the 50% of citizens who were female and therefore unable to vote, own property directly, or have their testimony fully counted in court, they would have also not given a glowing endorsement of Beck's freedom through frugality thesis.
On page 33, he takes one of the first of his gratuitous swipes at "progressives" who did not appreciate the fruits of the "Tree of Liberty." No, in those days which Beck wants us to believe were so golden because the government spent less and had less debt, progressives felt that our country should be judged by more than one variable, and that freedom should not be the gift of a few white men (only 7% of the country could vote in Beck's Golden Age of Low Government Spending) but the right of all people, including women and people of color. One of those crazy progressives who had such subversive ideas? None other than Ben Franklin whom Beck spent so many earlier pages praising. Not only did Franklin promote progressive societies for improving public education and public health using public funds but he also was one of the first proponents of this radical notion that would become known as emancipation. What a liberal!
Beck goes on to praise Lincoln while somehow sidestepping the fact that Lincoln introduced the first federal income tax (to pay for the Civil War).
He gives a cartoon-like summary of the Cold War on page 320, stating that we wisely outspent the Soviets, driving them into bankruptcy by patiently waiting for oil prices to decline "drying up one of their main sources of income." Hmmm. A cursory examination of oil prices will show that the glasnost and the revolt against Soviet communism was relatively uncorrelated with oil prices, and Russian dependence on oil revenues increased exponentially after the collapse of communism, not before, as improvements in technology and better East-West partnerships led to more efficient exploitation of this natural resource. Again, Beck offers an idiosyncratic view of history that is generally not taught because it is generally not true.
One of the most maddening things about Beck's approach is that he claims as his ideological soul-mates people who espoused progressive ideas radically different than Beck's. Besides Franklin and Lincoln (and Jesus), Beck also feels compelled to quote President Dwight Eisenhower on page 321, who made the point that security is the product of economic and military strength. Fair enough, but Eisenhower also railed against the "military-industrial complex" (a term he coined) that Beck adores, and reminded us that ever dollar spent on bombs is a dollar that cannot be spent on schools or roads or the poor. He slammed those who now form the ideological core of Beck's Tea Party, calling them "a splinter group" that wants to "abolish social security, unemployment insurance and eliminate labor laws and farm programs," and that "among them are a few Texas oil millionaires" but "their number is negligible and they are stupid." (- Dwight David Eisenhower, 11/8/1954). Today such a remark would probably merit a special place of honor for President Eisenhower on Beck's chalkboard of shame, perhaps with an arrow pointing straight back at Mao.
"Warriors aren't whiners," Beck intones. "Our soldiers, sailors, airmen, and marines are the best damn [sic] people on the planet. Period." Yet despite this high praise, Beck did not feel it necessary when younger to serve in the military. He did cheer them on from the sidelines, however, spinning tunes for them as a disc jockey and this is something perhaps, but his absence of service undercuts the credibility of his praise. In his defense, though, he does advocate slashing military spending by 30-40% but his means of doing (reducing overhead) is beyond idealistic. I would argue, as would Eisenhower, that we need to move away from a permanent wartime level of spending in which every politician and many American workers and contractors have a deep dependence on military contracts. It is unclear what advantage we gain from having 6,000 nuclear warheads (6,000!) in an age when 19 guys with box cutters make those weapons beyond obsolete.
I agree with Beck that our tax code is complicated, but there is a difference between complexity and fairness. He deliberately conflates the two. He states that a progressive tax code punishes the wealthy but offers no example to support this. The wealthiest countries in the world all have progressive tax codes. The poorest and most corrupt don't. A progressive tax code is not an advanced, wealthy society's obstacle, but its natural byproduct. Taxes are the dues for living in a civil society.
He makes ludicrous claims about a monolithic movement of which I am unaware he calls "progressives" who, he tells us on page 351, want "to take this country from self-sufficiency to serfdom; from pursuit of happiness for all, to guaranteed happiness for none." I have never heard anyone advocating such a plan. I have heard them advocating a return of marginal tax rates to Clinton era levels (or the even higher Reagan era levels in some cases), or doing something about the 59 million Americans without health insurance, or enacting sensible firearm legislation to prevent someone so mentally unstable he was evicted from a college and rejected from the Army from purchasing a 9 mm semiautomatic weapon with an extended round magazine. That sort of thing. The "guaranteed happiness for none" part is alien to me.
Beck has lots of quotations and some cute sidebars, but what he lacks is any sense of context. As is true with many self-educated and self-declared pundits who seem to confuse a large (but shrinking) television audience with credibility, Beck's gaping holes in scholarship make his premises so full of holes that his conclusions cannot be taken seriously. Only a man who does not understand (or perhaps does not care) about the horrors slaves had to endure in Colonial America or those conquered and crucified by the Roman empire (including one long-haired, bearded pacifist who preached a far more radical form of wealth redistribution than any contemporary progressive) would hold these periods up up as worthy of emulation. Only someone who is clueless about Benjamin Franklin's progressive secularism would devote so much of the early part of the book to him. And only someone who does not understand that tax cuts and out of control spending on a military equipped to fight an enemy that no longer exists have led us into our fiscal crisis, not the relative pittance we spend to help the least among us, can write this book and expect anyone to take it seriously.
Beck is on record as calling our first African American president a "racist" with a "deep-seated hatred of white people." He condemned those who rose up for democratic reform in Egypt and Tunisia and Libya as a "virus" that would infect the entire region. Never has a man who had been so wrong so loudly and so repeatedly been paid so much to do so little. We could say the same thing about Beck and other right wing blowhards that the mother of another wildly speculating but generally unproductive and incorrect pseudo-intellectual, Karl Marx, once said: I wish he would stop theorizing about capital and go out and earn some. Honestly.
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