Siegel gets an F

Jeremy Siegel, a professor in socialized education, has posited that progressive thinkers [aka “kids”] are increasingly embracing socialism [to replace or adulterate capitalism] due to their ignorance of [ie. failure to learn in school about] economics and history.



It is impossible to know which of the following will best characterize Siegel’s claim in retrospect:

• insightful observation [ala Socrates’ avoidance of the “unexamined life”]
• boneheaded ignorance [ala Antoinette’s “Let them eat cake”]
• acute irony [ala Swift’s “Modest Proposal”]
• malicious propaganda [ala Goebbels’ “Work sets you free”]
• doublethink doublespeak [ala The Ministry of Truth’s “War is Peace”]
• sheer madness [ala Dalio’s recent “The world has gone mad”] or
• some entirely new and advanced formulation of thoughts.

But, this uncertainty aside, some things are clear enough.

• Keynes spoke truth when he asserted that ... “Lenin was certainly right [when he] declared that the best way to destroy the Capitalist System was to debauch the currency. … There is no subtler, no surer means of overturning the existing basis of society than to debauch the currency. The process engages all the hidden forces of economic law on the side of destruction, and does it in a manner which not one man in a million [including Siegel?] is able to diagnose."
• American “democratic capitalism”, which is history at best [fable at worst], has morphed into a monstrosity that needs to be clearly rearticulated and honestly renamed … Orwell’s “oligarchical collectivism” or Wolin’s “inverted totalitarianism” would be good options … to reflect the systematic reality of uneducated Labor financially violated, economically exploited and politically disenfranchised by a US based global cabal of counterfeiting Banks, greedy Corporations and corrupt Government.
• Siegel should consider refresher courses in ethics, logic and literature, because, as Chesterton reminds us in “Heretics”, a knowledge of religion and philosophy [which used to dominate our study and practice of every subject] has gone missing in our culture and thinking ... and without it as our touchstone we are [as Shakespeare’s MacBeth reminds us] idiots and fools strutting about full of sound and fury signifying nothing.

Perhaps, Lear’s Edmund expressed it best in Act I:

 “[It is] an admirable evasion of whore-master man, to lay his goatish disposition to the charge of a star!”