The Enlightened Wanderer

The Enlightened Wanderer
The Enlightened Wanderer

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Saturday, January 28, 2012

Peter Schiff and the Capitalist Future of America




Peter Schiff is an American economist, investment banker, economic commentator, and is the CEO and chief global strategist of Pacific Capital Inc.  An adamant follower of the ideas from the Austrian School’s on economics, Peter Schiff has frequently appeared on financial televisions shows to talk about how our country is going down the path towards socialism and is against many of the policies our government is imposing on Wall Street.  He has argued many times against government intervention in our economy and has championed for a more capitalist society where there are not government institutions that control or regulate Wall Street.  And has written books such as “Crash Proof: How to Profit From the Coming Economic Collapse” and “How an Economy Grows and Why it Crashes,” which are his takes America’s current economic situation and his capitalist solutions for America to get out of this crisis.  But does that make him an intellectual?

Drawing from the “The Wicked Paradox” we should determine what is or is not a public intellectual.  Is a public intellectual one that is like or known?  Should that person be a scholar or work in scholarship settings? Is a public intellectual someone who regards the thoughts of others when writing their ideas? Or in the case of the of the article, can a religious intellectual be a public intellectual regardless of the certainty that many in the “intellectual community” would not accept the ideas behind religion?  These questions make more difficult to define who or what a public intellectual is?

In reading “The Role of the Public Intellectual” by Alan Lightman, I started to realize the definition of a public intellectual, and it clarified for me the definition of a public intellectual.  He categorized public intellectual as followed:
Let me now define what I mean by the public intellectual today" Such a person is often a trained in a particular discipline, such as linguistics, biology, history, economics, literary criticism, and who is on the faculty of a college or university. When such a person decides to write and speak to a larger audience than their professional colleagues, he or she becomes a "public intellectual."
·        Level I: Speaking and writing for the public exclusively about your discipline. This kind of discourse is extremely important, and it involves good, clear, simplified explanations of the national debt, the how cancer genes work, or whatever your subject is. A recent book that illustrates this level is Brian Green's excellent book The Elegant Universe, on the branch of physics called string theory.

·        Level II: Speaking and writing about your discipline and how it relates to the social, cultural, and political world around it. A scientist in this Level II category might include a lot of biographical material, glimpses into the society and anthopology of the culture of science. For example, James Watson's The Double Helix, or Steven Weinberg's essays about science and culture or science and religion in The New York Review of Books. Gerald Early's book, The Culture of Bruising, with essays on how racial issues are played out in prizefighting, would fit into this category. Or Steve Pinker's op ed piece in the The New York Times a year or so ago about the deeper meaning of President Clinton's use of language in the Monica Lewinsky scandal.

·         Level III: By invitation only. The intellectual has become elevated to a symbol, a person that stands for something far larger than the discipline from which he or she originated. A Level III intellectual is asked to write and speak about a large range of public issues, not necessarily directly connected to their original field of expertise at all. After he became famous in 1919, Einstein was asked to give public addresses on religion, education, ethics, philosophy, and world politics. Einstein had become a symbol of gentle rationality and human nobility. Gloria Steinheim has become a symbol of modern feminist thought. Lester Thurow has become a symbol of the global economy.
Some other contemporary people I would place in this Level III category include: Noam Chomsky, Carl Sagan, E.O. Wilson, Steven Jay Gould, Susan Sontag, John Updike, Edward Said, Henry Louis Gates, Camille Paglia. In my opinion, our other two distinguished panelists, Gerald Early and Steve Pinker, have recently entered, or are in the process of entering, Level III.

In understanding his classification of a public intellectual I feel that Peter Schiff is an ‘economic intellectual’ floating around the level I or level II rating of a public intellectual as he is not as prestigious as his other economist such as Paul Krugman or Jeffers Sachs.  But he does make clear and simple explanations as to why the government policies for Wall Street are bad and that the government should stay out of our economy.  And goes out into the public sphere through all channels of communications, from  web series and video blogs, to radio talk shows, and appearances on the major syndicated financial news shows driving his ideas across to the general American public, in my opinion makes him a public intellectual.

Though he has cause a lot of controversy when he went to the occupy Wall Street movement and tried to debate for capitalism as a way to solve our economic problems.  His world view is that governments across the globe should not meddle in their economies, and that if the business in the country fail then they should let them fail not bail them out; as that would share the burden with everyone instead of just the select view.  His opinions though bold have been challenged by others. In his video blog, “Peter Schiff Speaks for 1 Percent at Occupy Wall Street” he argues that capitalism is a compassionate system, and has charged that the government should not have imposed their policies in Wall Street, and should have allowed for the banks to fail when during the 2008 economic crisis.

A reason.com article Peter Schiff at Occupy Wall Street: "Walmart Doesn't Hold a Gun to Your Head!" by columnists Nick Gillespie and Anthony Fisher, categorizes him as a person who:

“… believes that capitalism offers is the only hope for young, frustrated people to have a vibrant and prosperous future (get information on his latest book, How an Economy Grows and Why it Crashes, here). So he went to Occupy Wall Street to engage and debate the protesters.”

Though Peter Schiff is not a scholar and does not teach at any institution, I still consider him a public intellectual as he has written time and time again in his books that our government should not meddle in our economy as it would cause to crumble as he wrote in his 2007 book Crash Point.  He is an expert in his field of investment banking and how the markets and the economy works and how it should be free of government intervention such as bail outs or government takeover, such as the general motors’ take over by the federal government. He has clashed with economist on talk shows as to what America should do to overcome our current predicament and give advice as to how our economy should move forward into the future. 

His books and his appearances on television give him a general audience as to his ideas but there are many that do not consider him a public intellectual, but some have classified him as a radical and that his ideas are too extreme for America today.  He challenges those who want to move towards a socialist economy and is against any and all of the current economic policy of regulations of the market and wants a more free market capitalist economy that can see growth beyond the bounds of what we have today.  Which scares some and infuriates others, but as we see the current state of our economy what we need is change. And though President Obama offered change, what we have seen is more debt and more control of the economy, which has not benefited the economy in a positive way but made our fragile economy weaker.

A pubic intellectual from what I understand is one sets out an idea and challenges those who challenge his ideas, and I believe that Peter Schiff is one who exemplifies that idea, though he may not be a well known or even liked intellectual his ideas go farther than what many believe or want to understand, and that is something an intellectual does in his writings.

 

 “Peter Schiff Speaks for 1 Percent at Occupy Wall Street”


Occupy Wall Street, ObamaCare, and Bailouts