Remember when Ben Stein was the endearingly droning voice in a John Hughes movie, saying "Bueller? Bueller?" over and over? And remember when he was the lovable and funny host of Win Ben Stein's Money? Back then, the fact that he had been a speechwriter for Richard Nixon was just a fun bit of trivia.In the last five or six years however he has re-embraced his Republican roots with a vengeance, taking advantage of the Fox News / right wing media universe to shoulder his way into the orbit of Glenn Beck and comparable bloviators. Most significantly, he wrote and produced a documentary titled Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed, an apologia for Creationism dressed up as a critique of closed-minded left-wing university classrooms.
I've always liked Ben Stein, sometimes against my better judgment, and I wish he'd show some of that academic pedigree he boasts of (degree in economic from Columbia, law degree from Yale, a respectable early law career and work in both the Nixon and Ford administrations) ... but instead he seems to want to be the clown, and produce such tendentious and shallow crap as Expelled.
Then he goes and writes things like this about the current state of the U.S. economy:
The people who have been laid off and cannot find work are generally people with poor work habits and poor personalities. I say "generally" because there are exceptions. But in general, as I survey the ranks of those who are unemployed, I see people who have overbearing and unpleasant personalities and/or who do not know how to do a day's work. They are people who create either little utility or negative utility on the job. Again, there are powerful exceptions and I know some, but when employers are looking to lay off, they lay off the least productive or the most negative. To assure that a worker is not one of them, he should learn how to work and how to get along—not always easy.
This little gem of wisdom comes, it should be noted, after he observes that the current recession is the worst he has ever seen and that "many of my friends, who thought they were rolling in real estate equity, find themselves without work and also upside down on their homes, with lofty mortgages to pay, and no ability to sell their homes." So apparently many of Stein's friends have "poor work habits and poor personalities"? Who are you hanging out with, Ben? Oh, right—you live in Hollywood.
But seriously—the "poor people are lazy" meme doesn't tend to get so baldly stated any more, at least not in a crappy economy caused by some of the wealthiest people in the U.S. Before the meltdown, unemployment hovered at just below 6%; it has since jumped over three percent, peaking out here and there in the double digits. That translates into millions of Americans unemployed all at once. Sure, Stein allows, there are exceptions. But in a column where he makes some otherwise good observations about prudence and austerity—noting that those who survived the meltdown more or less intact had kept their money in unspectacular but safe investments—it is very nearly criminal to focus so specifically on the victims of the bad economy and say "really, it's your fault for being unemployable to begin with" as opposed to skewering the high-rolling Wall Street types who played fast and loose with billions of dollars of other people's money and lost spectacularly.