The truth is definitely kept out at truth-out.org, where Henry Giroux has recently written an article entitled “The Disappearing Intellectual in the Age of Economic Darwinism.” It’s a typical left-statist propaganda piece, lashing out against right-statism and mistakenly calling it laissez-faire. The article contains no small amount of bashing of its enemies as a bunch of reactionary idiots. I’ll not argue the personal issues, but I’ll try to overlook the venom and respond to its issues of substance–the parts of his essay which attack specific issues.
First of all, there is the matter of how John Stossel called for the repeal of portions of the 1964 Civil Rights Act. Now, there is nothing inherently wrong with disagreeing with John Stossel on this issue, but I want to draw attention to the way Prof. Giroux handles this issue. Look at his approach:
While there are plenty of talking heads spewing lies, insults and nonsense in the various media, it would be wrong to suggest that these right-wing populist are intellectuals. They are neither knowledgeable nor self-reflective, but largely ideological hacks catering to the worst impulses in American society. Some obvious examples would include John Stossel calling for the repeal of that “section of the 1964 Civil Rights Act that bans discrimination in public places.”[1]
In his conflation of right-statism with libertarianism, Giroux completely misses the point that Stossel is not a right-winger, but is rather an (as far as I can tell) consistent libertarian who opposes such “Republican” things as the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. Giroux decries the lack of critical thinking he sees on the right, but like a typical ideologue immediately assumes that John Stossel is an “obvious example” of a racist. Nevermind that radical libertarians have always opposed slavery, Jim Crow laws, and forcing private establishments to be morally upright. Whether one agrees or disagrees with the radical libertarian stance on the 1964 Civil Rights Act, no one can decry their opponents lack of “critical thinking” and then brand them as “racist” because they fail to agree as to how involved government should be in enforcing that property owners act morally. Let us keep in mind that the first successes of desegregation, including the Greensboro sit-ins, were done by means of private individual work that succeeded without government intervention, and that John Stossel has personally promised to boycott any institution that racially discriminates.
Quoting Richard Cohen, Giroux holds up another example of what he calls right-wing ignorance:
We now have politicians who lack a child’s knowledge of government. In Nevada, Sharron Angle has won the GOP Senate nomination espousing phasing out Social Security and repealing the income tax as well as abolishing that durable conservative target, the Education Department.
Again, Giroux simply points to a set of positions he disagrees with and decides that anyone who holds them must be more ignorant than a child. Not good for someone who is decrying a lack of critical thinking. He also assumes that the latest economic crisis is the result of laissez-faire economics, which is an incredibly ignorant statement given that the US government (federal, state, and local) spends a whopping total of 47% of the nation’s GDP while the US government subsidises all sorts of businesses while spending $5 for every $3 of tax revenue, with a government debt of $119,000 per taxpayer and a fiat currency-based fractional reserve banking system which, propped up by government, has inflated away 97% of the dollar’s gold value in the last four decades. Nevertheless, Giroux, like all too many on the left, continues to live in a fairy-tale world where our country is a failing “laissez-faire” state. The fact that professors are even listened to as they pretend that our country is run by laissez-faire while simultaneously castigating their opponents as ignorant is a shameful indictment of the sort of thinking in our country.
He also pretends that the Tea Party movement, an amorphous collection of libertarian-leaning protesters, is out to “abolish government,” which is of course a complete distortion. The US has never had any large anarchist movement (though perhaps our national dialogue would be considerably enriched if we did). Giroux also feels that “corporations” have too much influence over college education, keeping pro-government professors from speaking out on controversial topics, while completely ignoring the fact that professors in our government-run education system are consistently more in favor of government intervention than the population as a whole. But, of course, in Giroux’s view it is only committed statism that includes critical thinking.
Particularly strange is Giroux’s characterisation of laissez-faire economics as “Darwinistic,” by which he means a brutal system in which the big are able to beat up the small. But the idea of laissez-faire is the belief that government should enforce the right of individuals to do as they wish with their own property, and that individuals should be enabled to freely do as they will so long as they don’t use violence against others. Laissez-faire, a system which allows only voluntary trading of goods and services as a means of amassing wealth, is thus the opposite of Darwinistic economics. No, if we are to look for a system in which the strong may take from the weak, we can only look to two groups of people: robbers and government. They are the only two agencies which use force to take from some to give to others. If we are really worried about economic Darwinism, we should fear government redistribution, which is nothing more than the most powerful agents in society (government) being allowed to take from less powerful agencies (private individuals). But the critical distinction between voluntary exchanges on the market and the forced exchanges of government is another one of those issues that Giroux, a champion of what he calls “critical thinking,” decides to completely ignore.
Giroux also is upset about the failure of academia to “speak truth to power,” which he somehow imagines will be accomplished only with more government funding of education and less private funding. This only makes sense if we assume that private individuals have no interest in truth, while somehow government, the biggest power in society, will empower individuals to be critical of the powerful. Giroux can talk all he likes about how it is the duty of academics to “oppose all orthodoxies,” but if in the end he proposes to do that by keeping education under the thumb of government his anti-authoritarian talk is only talk.
He can talk all he wants about the need for “critical thinking,” but, in his last chapter, he defines “critical thinking” as opposition to the market. And because “market” means nothing more than freedom of economic exchange, all his big words and such mean only one thing. Like some sort of Orwellian government agent, he pretends that increasing government power is the way to freedom, and that curtailing the basic human freedom to mind one’s own business is the only path to freedom. He’d make a great Stalinist.
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