Ben Stein Watch: September 30, 2007

I'm a uniter, not a divider. I'm a lover, not a fighter. I don't like to engage in the politics of personal destruction. But as Jonathan Landman might say, we have to stop Ben Stein from writing for the Times. Right now. And so, by popular demand, the first weekly Ben Stein Watch.

Stein uses his column this week to ask a question: "Is It Responsible to Shun Military Contractors?". Stein is a believer that investing isn't just about money:

I certainly believe in socially responsible investing for myself. I sold my tobacco shares long ago. (They have done fantastically well since then, but I don’t regret my decision.)

Unfortunately, Stein doesn't tell us why he sold his tobacco shares. So we're going to just have to take a wild guess: maybe it's because cigarettes kill people?

Yet somehow Stein just can't comprehend why some socially responsible investors don't want to invest in arms manufacturers. "I don’t understand this whole attitude," he writes. "Maybe someone can explain it to me."

Here, Ben, let me try, in words of one syllable:

Guns and bombs kill people.

Oh, damn, "people" is two syllables.

But let me rewind, to the very first sentence of Stein's column:

Henry Blodget should have started out as a writer.

I might point Stein to the second sentence of Blodget's wikipedia page:

Blodget received a Bachelor of Arts degree from Yale University and began his career as a freelance journalist and was a proofreader for Harper's Magazine.

Sigh. But then again, we're talking here about a man who can't even quote himself accurately. Last week, he wrote this:

This famous equation, MV = PT, had long been thought to explain everything, and maybe it did. But why, then, if M rose and V and T showed only modest growth, if any, didn't P rise? (Anyone? Anyone? Bueller? Bueller?)

Stein, of course, is the man who played the economics teacher in Ferris Bueller's Day Off. "Anyone? Anyone? Bueller?" is funny when it comes from Brad DeLong, attacking Stein. But the thing is, Stein's character never actually says it in the movie.

Stein finishes up his column seemingly asking the SEC to regulate everything that absolutely anybody might conceivably invest in. He doesn't claim that this massive expansion of regulatory responsibilities would do any good, mind you; he just ends his column, cryptically enough, by saying that "the ladder of law should have no top and no bottom." It's a Bob Dylan lyric which Stein obviously loves, since this is the second time this year he's trundled it out.

So here's my idea. Since Stein clearly isn't being featured in the business section on the grounds of his economic expertise, he's obviously got this gig on the grounds of his celebrity status. Maybe the Times has no desire to replace Stein with someone (like DeLong, say) who actually knows what he's talking about – what they want is a writer who's vaguely familiar with economic concepts but who's also something of a household name. My suggestion: Bob Dylan.

Update: Of course, the column came out in September, not October (which was in my original headline). Thanks to Mark Thoma for catching the cock-up.