Admit the Truth

For many years I had a sign over my desk that read, “Admit the Truth.” Not “tell the truth,” but admit the truth. Although I hate to make mistakes, and find it even more painful to acknowledge them publicly, I wanted to remind myself that it is better to come clean when you are wrong, than to keep fighting for a falsehood.

I came to this conclusion after witnessing a fight between my father and a favorite uncle. They were arguing about whether soldiers were allowed to bring home money from Europe at the conclusion of World War II. My father insisted that they couldn’t, while my uncle said they could.

After going back and forth for almost a half hour, my uncle finally capitulated and agreed that they could not. What made this interesting was that my father had not served in the military, whereas my uncle fought under General Patton. In other words, my uncle had first hand knowledge, while my father did not.

After observing how my father bullied his way to success, I decided that this was a Pyrrhic victory. It didn’t matter if my uncle yielded. What mattered was who was right. Simply forcing someone to give in would not change the truth. What was more, the truth was likely to determine later events.

And so I concluded that it did not make sense for me to fight for what was wrong either. Once I realized that someone with whom I disagreed was correct, admitting my error and getting on to the next piece of business would save us both grief. Even I would benefit from adding a new bit of knowledge to my stockpile.

All of this is by way of analyzing Barack Obama’s recent speech about how he would address our impending deficit disaster. Almost everyone who has done the math recognizes that the current deficit spending cannot be sustained. They soon realize that the required interest payments alone will eventually swallow up everything else.

Obama, of course, had a few months earlier submitted a budget that increased federal spending. Now he decided that the accounts needed to be brought into balance. This was forced upon him by Rep Paul Ryan’s budget plan. It drastically reduced deficits, mostly by reducing what the government spent.

But Obama would have none of this. Most of his speech was very vague about expenditure cuts. Somehow getting rid of waste, fraud, and corruption would reduce government outlays. Still, the Obama administration had not been able to make much of a dent in any of these despite two plus years in office. Nevertheless, the future would be different.

Where the president’s heart was, however, was in tax increases. He would rescind the Bush tax cuts so that the rich finally paid their fair share. Never mind that under Bush the wealthy were paying a larger share than under Clinton. Never mind that Obama defined the rich as anyone earning over two hundred and fifty thousand dollars.

All this raised eyebrows, but the worst part of this plan was that it totally ignored history. Whether under the auspices of Andrew Mellon, John Kennedy, Ronald Reagan, or George W. Bush, the evidence was unambiguous. Reducing taxes increased tax-receipts—it did not reduce them.

Indeed, when first Herbert Hoover and then Franklin Delano Roosevelt increased the tax rate on the rich in order to pay for expenditures during the Great Depression, their strategy backfired. Instead of more money flowing into federal coffers, the amount was nearly cut in half.

So low did income tax receipts fall that Roosevelt was forced to nearly double the excise taxes on ordinary Americans. In other words, the rich paid less and the poor paid more. On top of this, with less money available to them, the rich reduced their investments. As a consequence, Roosevelt lambasted them for their selfishness, but they had neither the resources nor the incentive to comply with his demands.

And now it is Obama who is lambasting the wealthy and promising to confiscate more of their incomes. Unable to admit that he is wrong, either he has not read history or he has not understood it. In any event, the truth does not seem to matter to him. Intent on winning reelection, he is more concerned with the bill of goods he can sell the public.

But the truth is the truth, and if it does not bite him in the backside, it is sure to bite the rest of us.

Melvyn L. Fein. Ph.D.

Professor of Sociology

Kennesaw State University

Hybrid Corn

Some months ago a reader wrote me to complain about a column. Although he agreed with many of my opinions, he was not happy about what I said regarding Georgia. I had written that the state had an opportunity to be great, but he insisted that it was already great.

My correspondent wrote that this mistake was probably due to the fact that I was a transplanted Yankee. Had I been a native born Georgian, I would surely have had a better grasp of the state’s glorious history.

This put me in mind of a piece of advice my father-in-law had given me. He is a retired Ohio farmer, hence when my wife and I were having difficulty growing corn, we asked what we were doing wrong. Part of his response was that we must make sure to use hybrid corn seed. It grew much better than non-hybrid varieties.

This, in turn, reminded me of a lesson I learned while still in high school. Back then our biology teacher introduced us to the notion of “hybrid vigor.” According to him, when plants and animals that differ from one another are mated, they frequently produce offspring with greater strength than their parents.

The reason this occurred to me is that it reminded me of Georgia. In recent decades, the state has been growing at an unprecedented rate. Migrants have been attracted to it from all corners of the country—and beyond. Thus, northerners, southerners, westerners, and even foreigners are now rubbing shoulders in a potent mix of abilities and attitudes.

Far from having weakened the state, this has helped turn it into an international powerhouse. But let me confine myself to northerners and southerners. When, some twenty years ago, I arrived from New York, I discovered that my perspective differed from that of many natives. For one thing, I was more direct in my communications.

As I now tell my classes the first day we meet, every good southern child learns that if you do not have something good to say, you should say nothing at all. Meanwhile, I in the north learned that if you have something to say, you should spit it out. This didn’t mean that I hated the object of my words, only that I was being candid.

By the same token, when I return to Georgia from a trip out of state, I am always pleasantly surprised. There is a graciousness to Georgia that is on display even on its highways. Although many natives complain about the driving habits of their fellow citizens, these are so much better than those in the North, or even south Florida, that the comparison is startling.

This graciousness has even been of help in elevating the quality of teaching at Kennesaw State University. Many of the professors we have hired from elsewhere subsequently told me that they decided to come, in part, because of the warm welcome they received at the school and from the community.

So what does this add up to? The bottom line is that Georgia a better place for having blended the virtues of people from different locals, including some that are very far away. All of us benefit from interacting with others who are different from ourselves. Indeed, most of us are strengthened because of it.

In the end, this has allowed Georgia, and will continue to allow it, to become a national leader. Once the South was a sleepy backwater, but today it is a source of endless innovations. Not the old centers of power, but we here in the capital of the New South are liable to deliver a large proportion of the improvements that keep our country in the forefront of economic and social progress.

I think of this as a march toward further greatness. While I understand that many good things happened in Georgia before I arrived, I expect even better things to occur in the future. I know I am doing better than I did before I came, and I like to think that many native southerners have been enhanced by my humble contributions.

I love Georgia! And want nothing but the best for it. Moving down here was one of the best things I ever did. Some natives may bridle at considering me a Georgian, but that’s how I now think of myself. I may be a Georgian of a different stripe, but that does not keep me from appreciating the opportunities and achievements of those who are nowadays my fellow Georgians.

So I say, let us all move together toward greater heights.

Melvyn L. Fein. Ph.D.

Professor of Sociology

Kennesaw State University

First Impressions

People can be hard to judge. Most of the time when we first meet, they put forward a good front. And since most of us assume that a majority of others are good people, we take them at face value. Rather than question their motives, we believe that they are who they say they are.

Only later are many of us disabused by ensuing events. Although we make mistakes in our initial assessments, we allow these to be modified by what others do. We have learned—often through the school of hard knocks—that how people behave is a better indicator of who they are than what they verbalize.

This is true in our personal life and our occupational life. It should also be true in the political arena. By now anyone who has been keeping score knows that politicians are addicted to hyperbole. Many of them make wild claims in the hope that this will persuade voters to put them in office.

Recent events have only underlined the degree to which this penchant applies to Barack Obama. Our president is an eloquent man, but increasing numbers of Americans are concluding that he is not the man they once assumed he was. As current polls demonstrate, many of them are no longer certain that he is the effective leader they previously supposed.

What the record now shows is that Obama tends to spurn leadership. Although he still affects the pose of a dynamic leader, he prefers to defer to others for concrete inspiration. We see this, for instance, in his reaction to the looming budget deficits. Despite calls that he present a plan for dealing with these, he prefers to hang back to see what Republicans propose. Then, no doubt, he will leap to the fore to assert that they—scoundrels that they are—have got it all wrong.

We also see this pattern in his response to the Libyan crisis. Although he early on demanded that Qaddafi leave office, there was little follow-up. It was only after the French and British dove into the breach that he decided something had to be done. Even then, however, he boasted of stepping aside to allow others, in this case NATO, to take the lead.

But this pattern is not new. It was visible at the outset of his administration. Obama knew that he had to do something about the recession, yet instead of putting forth a legislative proposal of his own, he deferred to Nancy Pelosi. She, and her congressional team, then cobbled together a stimulus package the contents of which we are only now fully discovering.

The same, of course, was famously true of Obamacare. During the fight to enact it, Ms. Pelosi opined that congress would have to pass it before we could find out what was in it. And where was the president? Well he was back in the White House surreptitiously making deals to pass legislation the details of which he himself probably did not know.

How does any of this count as leadership? Clearly, it doesn’t. One last example of this tendency to abdicate responsibility was Obama’s recent speech on energy policy. In it he boldly asserted that we would drastically cut the amount of oil imported from abroad. Then he offered not a single tangible proposal on how to achieve this.

Meanwhile members of the fourth estate (i.e., the mainstream media) continue to laud the president’s skillful guidance. They, however, must be seeing things in the man that many of us have missed. More probably they are transfixed by their fantasy version of what they once thought he was.

Unable to modify their initial impressions because they prefer to embrace what they hoped for rather than acknowledge actual developments, they have become a travesty of what objective reportage should be. Far from reflecting events as they are, they merely provide accounts of what is in their imagination.

Let us hope that the public has a better grounding in reality. Since it will not be long before voters are asked to determine who our next national leader will be, ordinary Americans need to distinguish between what is said and what has been done. If not, if people allow their own aspirations for Obama to color their judgments, we may all be in trouble.

Melvyn L. Fein. Ph.D.

Professor of Sociology

Kennesaw State University

The Liberal Disease: Social Myopia

It is astounding the degree to which liberals have been making fundamental mistakes. They almost seem to be suffering from a physiological disorder. It is as if they are physically unable to see what is there to be seen.

For some reason, contemporary liberals are deficient in both hind and foresight. Evidently the victims of social myopia, they remain fixated on ideological fantasies and/or their immediate political advantage. Oblivious of what failed to work in the past and blind to what is likely to go wrong in the future, they flail about hoping against hope that their dreams will still come true.

Barack Obama has taken to chanting that his administration is dedicated to “winning the future.” This mantra, invoked as a magical incantation, makes it unnecessary to perceive that similar policies failed abysmally when earlier undertaken by Franklin Roosevelt. Keynesianism looked good on paper, but spending billions to revive a faltering economy succeeded only in increasing the nation’s debt.

Obama insists he has saved us from economic ruin, but cannot offer compelling evidence that he has. Meanwhile unemployment remains stubbornly high and is predicted to remain so for the foreseeable future. The president knows this and promises to focus like a laser on improving the economy, but then does the opposite.

By now the news is out that Obama’s current budget proposals are unlikely to reduce the deficit. He says he is doing so, but it is clear that his proposals will increase the national debt by almost ten trillion dollars over the next decade. Amazingly, it does this while also increasing taxes by about a trillion.

But let us put these numbers aside. Let us assume, as many commentators have, that the president’s budget was a ploy; that he punted so as to put Republicans on the defensive. His goal may indeed be to force them to make unpopular cuts that he can later demagogue to death.

Let us go even further. Let us suppose that he succeeds. Having jacked up federal spending by almost twenty-five percent, let us assume the opposition will be forced to accept the status quo. Obama says he will veto deep cuts, so let us take him at his word and agree that the House will be unable to override him without shutting down the government.

What then will be the outcome? Does anyone believe the deficits will suddenly come under control? Even the president acknowledges this is unlikely. It’s just that he does not worry about it. Gifted with an inability to see ahead, it does not matter to him that he is driving us over a cliff. Pleased with himself for, by his own account, getting us out of a ditch, he doesn’t care where we are now headed.

So what will happen when inflation kicks in? And what will occur when the economy remains in idle for a lost decade analogous to that experienced during the Great Depression? What too will transpire when Medicare, Medicaid, and social security go broke? Anyone who can add numbers understands this must happen, but do Obama or his crew?

It looks like they do not, hoping instead to keep doing business as usual. Evidently they expect to convince the electorate the problem is not serious. But it is. There is a disaster waiting around the corner. Denying it will not make it go away. Painting it over with a rosy scenario or hiding it under accounting tricks will not either. Nor will persuading the public that he is right.

So what happens when the deluge arrives? If things get really bad, and it looks like they will, who gets blamed? Even if Obama wins reelection, if there is an economic crisis, he and his party will not get away with pointing fingers at others. This time there has been ample warning. This time others have seen what he refuses to see and sounded the alarm.

So what will the outcome be for Obama and company? I suggest that they prepare for a generation in the political wilderness. Refusing to see what is there to be seen and declining to do what requires doing will not rescue them when the nation collides with reality. They may not believe this, but there is an iceberg dead ahead and they had best open their eyes or get lasic surgery.

Melvyn L. Fein. Ph.D.

Professor of Sociology

Kennesaw State University

Academic Freedom Revisited

Am I a contrarian? In response to several of my recent columns in the Marietta Daily Journal, several readers have concluded that I am. In this, they are probably correct. I do tend to disagree fairly vociferously with opinions I believe to be wrong, even when I am in the minority.

As a consequence, I am very fond of academic freedom. My right to say out loud what others may not appreciate strikes me as an essential tool in pursuing the truth. While I know that I make mistakes, a constant fear of retribution would hamper my efforts to rectify where I have gone astray.

Much of this attitude derives from my childhood in Brooklyn, New York. To this day, I warmly remember my high school teachers quoting Voltaire as saying “I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it.” This always struck me as the essence of fair-minded scholarship.

My teachers back then were all liberals, so I assumed that liberalism implied the encouragement of diverse ideas. It was only when I migrated to neo-conservatism that I discovered this was not the case. Previous allies suddenly became extraordinarily intolerant of disagreements emanating from my new direction.

In time, it became apparent that liberals are in favor of free speech—for liberals. When it comes to effective competitors, they are all too eager to suppress articulate dissent. While they fancy themselves contrarians, they are not nearly as approving of determined opposition.

This, sad to say, is the situation on most American college campuses. Dominated as they are by a liberal consensus, they do not welcome efforts to challenge what they take to be obvious truths. For many university professors, criticism of their views—in any form—is tantamount to an assault on academic freedom. So surrounded are they by like-minded colleagues that is does not occur to them that silencing those who dissent is an attack on the latter’s academic freedom.

Yet if truth is to emerge, academic freedom must be even handed. Criticisms must be tolerated, not as evidence of a desire to stifle particular views, but as part of the process of testing what is correct. However convinced people are of the validity of their positions, if these cannot survive scrutiny from doubters, the odds are they are not well-founded.

These considerations apply to our college campuses, but also to a larger social context. Universities have acquired a vital role in our techno-commercial society. They prepare large numbers of individuals to perform difficult tasks, in the absence of which we would all suffer.

Put another way, ours is becoming a professionalized society. More people than ever must be self-motivated experts in what they do if they are to supply the goods and services upon which we rely for our survival and/or comfort. Furthermore, it is our universities that groom millions of people for these professionalized jobs.

This fact positions institutions of higher education as social gatekeepers. Like it or not, the degrees they confer have become tickets to socially responsible activities. As a result, for most people, if they hope to achieve social mobility, they must first obtain evidence of academic success.

This means that society as a whole has a fundamental interest in overseeing how universities perform their jobs. We, all of us—not just professors and students—are legitimately concerned with how effectively colleges train their graduates for the chores they must eventually execute.

Which brings us back to academic freedom. If what universities are teaching interferes with people becoming effectively professionalized, they deserve to be criticized. If, to be more specific, a pervasive neo-Marxism undermines the capacity of college graduates to participate in a market economy and democratic traditions, it is not just the right, but also the duty, of ordinary citizens to say so.

Academics accustomed to being ensconced in a bubble of impunity may recoil at this prospect. Nevertheless it is not their comfort that should determine social policy. There are larger issues at stake. One is social survival, and another is the truth itself.

Melvyn L. Fein. Ph.D.

Professor of Sociology

Kennesaw State University