Let Them Eat Cake And Make Mistakes

“The real enemy of intelligence is the illusion of intelligence.” Stephen Hawking

Growing up in Kentucky, I saw many examples of this. I was lucky to have my mentor Martin whose IQ was over 200. He graduated from college when he was 16, got his first doctorate in chemistry when he was 19. He gave me books to read and books to buy. Like most geniuses, he had a warped sense of humor. When I was 17, he told me to read Atlas Shrugged.

Since I was a big fan by then of Twain and Dickens, I read it. As I did, it felt like I was getting daggers shoved into my brain. It wasn’t even a good story about a railroad baron but I stuck it out because I thought maybe it was something over my intellectual abilities. I remember being impressed that Alan Greenspan loved the book and that he was a smart man I thought but that sense of overwhelming boredom never left me.

When I got done, I called Martin to ask why he wanted me to read it? He said, “because you needed a reference for the truly awful.” In time and more education, I learned that Alan Greenspan was an idiot. He was one of Reagan’s favorite acolytes who just loved the flat imbecility of Art Laffer’s ‘trickle down’ economics theory. We now have 40 years of verifiable data that trickle down economics has never and will never work but that doesn’t bother the business-minded Republican scumbags…