Tag Archives: Tom Perkins

General discussion

Das Eisernes Kreuz

3 Comments

There’s a strategy to going ad hitlerum–at least I imagine there is (but I’m not sure I hope there is).

It’s difficult to break through the enormous media clutter without bringing in the rhetorical heavies.  The subtleties of tax policy or gun control are lost on most people, so you may think; if you want to contribute to a discussion, you have to go big.  Once you do, you’re assured of a prime place on Talking Points Memo, the Huffington Post, and so forth.  Here’s from yesterday’s Talking Points Memo:

The billionaire founder of Home Depot just pulled a Tom Perkins.

Ken Langone, a major GOP donor, was among “the denizens of Wall Street and wealthy precincts around the nation” who spoke to Politico for a piece published Tuesday and titled “The rich strike back.”

“I hope it’s not working,” Langone told Politico, referring to populist political appeals. “Because if you go back to 1933, with different words, this is what Hitler was saying in Germany. You don’t survive as a society if you encourage and thrive on envy or jealousy.”

Politico noted that Langone’s comments would inevitably “draw ire from those who find such comparisons to Nazi Germany insensitive” and that he “showed no hesitancy” in invoking the Nazis.

The last part’s the hilarious part–even Politico has noticed the cravenness of the strategy.

Naturally, your Nazi analogy is absurd, and hopefully you know it.  This requires you “to apologize.”  Here again, Talking Points Memo:

The billionaire founder of Home Depot apologized late Tuesday for taking a page from the Tom Perkins playbook in comparing the fight against income inequality to Nazi Germany.

“My remarks were intended to discourage pitting one group against another group in a society,” Ken Langone said in a statement obtained by the New York Daily News. “If my choice of words was inappropriate — and they well may have been that — I extend my profound apologies to anyone and everyone who I may have offended.”

Langone had told Politico that populist political appeals currently en vogue parallel the rhetoric Hitler used in Nazi Germany, albeit in “different words.”

It’s the words you see–not the thought.  What we have here is a kind of self-iron manning: I say we call it the “Iron Cross” in honor of the Nazis who dominate the form.

Here’s how it works:

Step one: go ad hitlerum to get attention: modest adjustments in tax reform are just like the populism that carried Hitler to power!  Wait one day while news organizations report on your absurd analogy.

Step two:  “apologize” for the “words” you’ve used, but caution that the thought–though much altered to exclude the Nazi part–stands.  Wait one day while news organizations report on your apology.

Step three: reap the rewards of a discussion turned your way.  Though you began with a manifestly absurd move that ought to have earned you STFU points, it doesn’t, because you come back with the apology.  Your opponent–the critic–in other words, has to waste a move (and you only get so many) pointing out how wrong you are.

I wonder, short of ignoring the likes of Iron Crossers such as Langone, etc., is there any move open here to the critic?

General discussion

Innumeracy

1 Comment
Math

You don’t have to be good at maths to be rich.  Here’s Godwinizer Tom Perkins on taxing the “1 percent” (from TPM):

“The fear is wealth tax, higher taxes, higher death taxes — just more taxes until there is no more 1%,” he said, as quoted by CNN Money. “And that that will creep down to the 5% and then the 10%.“

In addition to failing to understand marginal tax rates and basic math, this also a slippery slope.  This is probably worse than his proposal that every dollar of tax paid ought to equal a vote:

“The Tom Perkins system is: You don’t get to vote unless you pay a dollar of taxes,” Perkins responded, as quoted by CNNMoney. “But what I really think is, it should be like a corporation. You pay a million dollars in taxes, you get a million votes. How’s that?

It might be easier just to give people who pay no taxes less than an entire vote, say 3/5ths.

General discussion

Keeping up with the Godwins

6 Comments

“Godwin’s Blog” ought to exist (probably does actually).  If it did, hardly an hour would go by without something to write about.  Here’s novelist Danielle Steel’s ex-husband’s letter to the editor of The Wall Street Journal comparing criticism of income inequality with Kristallnacht :

Regarding your editorial “Censors on Campus” (Jan. 18): Writing from the epicenter of progressive thought, San Francisco, I would call attention to the parallels of fascist Nazi Germany to its war on its “one percent,” namely its Jews, to the progressive war on the American one percent, namely the “rich.”

From the Occupy movement to the demonization of the rich embedded in virtually every word of our local newspaper, the San Francisco Chronicle, I perceive a rising tide of hatred of the successful one percent. There is outraged public reaction to the Google buses carrying technology workers from the city to the peninsula high-tech companies which employ them. We have outrage over the rising real-estate prices which these “techno geeks” can pay. We have, for example, libelous and cruel attacks in the Chronicle on our number-one celebrity, the author Danielle Steel, alleging that she is a “snob” despite the millions she has spent on our city’s homeless and mentally ill over the past decades.

This is a very dangerous drift in our American thinking. Kristallnacht was unthinkable in 1930; is its descendant “progressive” radicalism unthinkable now?

Tom Perkins

San Francisco

Mr. Perkins is a founder of Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers.

Yes, it’s unthinkable now, because, in part, this comparison makes no sense.