By Marc Jampole
Michael A. Carvin,
Yaakov M. Roth and Michael Saltsman have a lot in common. All three are highly educated and learned
white males who work for professional services firms as knowledge workers
dedicated to both written and unwritten sets of ethics and professional
conduct. All three generally serve corporate clients with right-wing interests.
All have written articles that appeared
on the same opinion page on the same day in the Wall Street Journal. Both of their articles (Carvin and Roth work
as a team) propose public policies that while, disastrous for the country,
would help their clients.
One more thing they
have in common: Their articles depend upon fallacious reasoning.
Saltsman is no
newcomer to the opinion pages of right-wing media. He is rapidly becoming
notorious for his specious reasoning and empty rhetoric in a slew of articles
arguing against the minimum wage. He identifies himself as research director
at the Employment
Policies Institute, but an on-line biography lists him as an employee of Richard Berman,
whose public relations agency specializes in creating pseudo think tanks to
spew out white papers favorable to his clients—generally large businesses. But Carvin and Roth, both lawyers at the
mega-enormous international law firm Jones Day, are new to the game of misrepresenting
facts and using fallacious reasoning in the news media to support their
client’s position. They may do it in the court room and during negotiations all
the time—I’m not in a position to comment.
Let’s take a look at
what these intellectual sell-outs are proposing:
In “Courts Should Stay Out of Political Fact-Checking,” Carvin and Roth want to declare
unconstitutional all state laws that prohibit lying in political advertising;
currently there are 15 states that make it a crime. Carvin and Roth, by the
way, are part of the legal team that Jones Day has put together to represent
the plaintiffs in the case before the Supreme Court that is considering the
matter. The client wants to invalidate
laws prohibiting lying in political ads.
Here’s the reason
Carvin and Roth give for not wanting laws against lying in political ads: the
voters and not judges should decide what is and is not a lie. By letting the people decide, they of course
mean by voting on Election Day.
There are three
problems with this view:
·
The
voters have no standing and are incapable of deciding if a commercial has told
an out-and-out lie. They aren’t experts in gathering and weighing evidence.
·
People
vote for certain candidates for a variety of reasons. A vote is not a mandate
for whether an ad contained an overt lie. It is an endorsement of one candidate
over another. I can imagine many scenarios in which someone might vote for
someone whose campaign was caught is a lie.
·
There is
no recourse, i.e., punishment when there is no law with penalties.
To Carvin and Roth
every statement made in a political campaign is both true and untrue, depending
upon what candidate you are supporting. But in the real world, many statements
are incontrovertibly true and false. And when a candidate delivers provable
falsities in an ad, that ad should be taken off the air and the campaign
penalized.
Right below the Carvin and Roth article on the printed page sits “Why Subway Doesn’t Serve a $14 Reuben Sandwich, “another hyperventilating screed
from Saltsman against raising the minimum wage.
He thinks the economy will plummet if the minimum wage is raised so that
it has the purchasing power that it once had. Over the past few decades,
minimum wage workers have lost 40% of their purchasing power, while most goods
and services had felt the effects of inflation.
The 40% rise in the minimum wage that President Obama is advocating is Saltsman’s
“bête noire.”
Near the end of the article he notes that a double cheeseburger at Shake
Shack, which starts employees at more than the minimum wage, costs in excess of
40% more than a McDonald’s Double Quarter Pounder. He goes on to postulate that
McDonald’s would lose a ton of customers if a higher minimum wage raised its
starting salaries by 40%.
There are two problems with this conflation of the Shake Shack and the
McDonald’s version of the double cheese burger:
First of all, the two food products aren’t the same thing: Shake Shack
uses hormone- and antibiotic-free meat which costs much more than the fatty,
chemical-infused stuff McDonald’s processes. Other Shake Shack ingredients also
cost more than those at McDonald’s, plus the preparation process is more
staff-intensive. Finally, not only do people pay for the higher quality
ingredients at Shake Shack, they also pay for the perception of quality, which
is integral to the Shake Shack brand, just as the perception of cheapness is
integral to the McDonald’s brand. So you
can’t compare the Shake Shack and McDonald’s products and say the only reason
that one is so much more expensive than the other is because the workers make more
money.
The second fallacious part of Saltsman’s reasoning is that he assumes
that if the minimum wage went up 40%, MacDonald’s costs would go up 40%. Wages
are only one part of cost to operate a McDonald’s franchise, which also includes
rent, utilities, raw materials, payments to the corporation and marketing.
Let’s not forget, too, that the price also includes profit to the franchisee. We
know that labor constitutes 20% of franchisees’ cost of operation. Even assuming that the franchisees make no
profit, figuring in all these factors means that if labor costs went up 40%,
the price of the double cheese burger would have to go from $3.99 to $4.31,
which is 8%, not the 40% upon which Saltsman based his argument.
Seeing these two articles on the same page made me think of Julian
Benda’s important 1927 essay, The
Betrayal of the Intellectuals (Le
Trahison des clercs in the original French) Benda argues that European intellectuals
of the preceding hundred years often ceased to follow their professional
dictates to reason dispassionately about political, economic and military
matters, instead becoming apologists for nationalism, warmongering and racism.
In going to any lengths to support the interests of their clients, Saltsman, Carvin
and Roth have abandoned the principles of good reasoning, clear thought and
factually based arguments that stand as the foundation stones of their
professions. They are intellectuals who have betrayed the public. They have
sold out to right-wing money.
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