The Distinguished Professor, Brian Leiter, is such an ass. In his own way, he's analogous to or a counterpart to Sarah Palin, who is Too Fucking Stupid to Take Seriously (TFSTTS, or TFS for short). He's close to the archetype of the out-of-touch, arrogant, elitist academic professor of the Humanities. (He's actually a professor of Law first and foremost; as a philosopher it's clear he's an incompetent piece of shit in virtue of his blind and ignorant hatred of any and all things capitalistic. That's right, a piece of shit. A big, fat, ugly, walrus-looking, fucking piece of shit. I'm thinking maybe a hybrid of Balph Eubank and Wesley Mouch. Come the Revolution, he's completely discredited and out of a job qua philosopher-pretender. Thus spake the Ultimate Philosopher.) His latest piece of hatred of the good for being the good mostly quotes from another article. The question: Does Wall Street Produce Anything of Value? (Like I said, a piece of shit who hates the good for being the good.) The Distinguished Professor says, "yes, but not much," according to an assessment he regards as "sensible."
It really makes no difference to this that he's quoting from an "economics reporter" (anyone with common sense should know that this is codeword for "pundit with an econ degree," and pundits are almost uniformly idiots - near-sighted idiots - fucking idiots). Economics reporters get things wrong all the time - which is why there are people out there, smarter than they are, who beat the market and the CW/punditry. Who are those smarter people, exactly? Youuuuu guessed it - the ones hated most by the Leiters of the world. The ones who "owe" the rest of society for their superior mind and vision. And Leiter is fundamentally a dishonest evader at root, picking and choosing which "economics reporter" he decides to find "sensible commentary" from. I mean, isn't it obvious how dishonest and cowardly his whole M.O. is?
Now, what does the pro-capitalist mentality say, in reaction to the higher-than-before salaries commanded by "not very productive" Wall Street people? One thing the capitalism-hating mentality can't seem to get its head anywhere near around, is globalization and its effects. Globalization is like the exact opposite of what the Academy is all about. With globalization, there's no tenure. There's no taxpayer-subsidized intellectual fraud. There's no incentive and reward for stagnation and conformity and ass-kissing. There's only the thing the leftists pathologically fear and hate: the capitalistic process of supply and demand. It is supply and demand that determines prices, including salaries. In an anti-capitalist, globalization-ignorant, economics-ignorant, market-ignorant mindset, it's incomprehensible how the greater Wall Street salaries can be tied to greater economic value.
(Remember that Piece-of-Shit Leiter's intellectual hero is another piece of shit, Karl Marx, who dishonestly promoted the idea that workers are the source of all value and that capitalists are exploiters. One thing about Marx is that he was a loser who mooched off of Engels, and played the victim of capitalists his whole life. Marx also fantasized that capitalism and individualism would be transcended and superseded by communism. What an idiot! One could discern that he was an idiot, well before historical experience discredited him entirely. In the facepalm department, this dishonest idiot still makes the top ten amongst philosophers most cited in the mainstream academic journals.)
If we are forward-looking and visionary - much like capitalists but much unlike tenured academic leftists - we can use the Wall Street People's superior earning-power as an example to emulate rather than one to denounce, denigrate, undercut and hate. We could use their example to learn important lessons. We might do things like discover what underlies this shift in market values from the way they were before, prior to advancing globalization. What this shift tells us is that America and Americans could - given the right leadership and direction - very well play a certain kind of role as globalization inevitably advances further and the developing world becomes industrialized. The role I have in mind is one of extreme profitability: Americans increasingly become like the Wall Street People (though hopefully with a more philosophical and less philistinic mindset than the current crop). In other words, Americans increasingly would fill the job of deciding how investment resources get directed worldwide. America would become more and more like Wall Street itself.
In other words, the average American would become a big-time capitalist, and profit immensely.
Now, whose philosophy do you think would best equip and encourage Americans to take on this role as financiers to the world? Karl Marx's? John Rawls's? Immanuel Kant's? G.W.F. Hegel's? Plato's? (Plato, the proto-communist, the intellectual and spiritual father of all the terrible shit that happens under the banner of philosophy, starting with the wholly arbitrary Forms?) Martin Heidegger's? (Heidegger, the guy who signed onto National Socialism?) Jesus's? Some other major thinker with insidiously anti-individualist, anti-capitalist ideas? Some other mainstream/left academic? Some other intellectual figure out to stifle people by making them feel guilty for making money while others are in need?
Are you fucking kidding me?
This stuff is so slam-dunk, innit?
[ADDENDUM: On tonight's new episode of The Simpsons, Moe remarks that the people of Detroit are "living in Mad Max times." I'd like to propose an experiment: carpet-bomb Detroit . . . with books like Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal. I think it could be absolutely mind-blowing just how much difference a good idea can make, even amongst the nation's supposed throwaway-people. Besides, they've been carpet-bombed enough, so to speak, by The Communist Manifesto and A Theory of Justice; why not give the truth a chance for a change? Prediction: Detroit would be a mecca of greatness within a generation. No shittin'! Just gotta think big . . . like a capitalist.]
