Avoid the Passive Voice

Brad De Long delong at econ.Berkeley.EDU
Tue Oct 6 07:30:41 PDT 1998



>
>Since Chomsky has written extensively about these topics it should be easy to
>find a reference to support the ad hominen attacks shown in the first
>paragraph
>and below. This was not done.
>

Avoid the passive voice. It makes for weak prose, and fuzzy thought.

Noam Chomsky is old enough to know that in the context of 1945-1955 the economic benefits from a program to stimulate exports and create a higher-pressure economy were a bit more equally distributed than the then-current distribution of income, and were much more equally distributed than the post-1945 tax burden. He knows as well as I do that a program to use tax money to boost exports--the Marshall Plan, in its domestic-impact facet--was not an inequality-increasing transfer of wealth away from hard-working American taxpayers.

And Noam Chomsky knows as well as I do the first obligation of every participant in any speech situation: to do your best to raise the level of the debate--not to create false consciousness.

The use of political debate as an opportunity to create false consciousness... The opposing of hard-working "taxpayers" to sinister parasites... The invocation of nationalism... The condemnation of social democracy as a mask for plutocratic interests, coupled with a certain... fuzziness... as to what the alternative set of economic arrangements is.

You can call this political complexion whatever you want. You can even ignore that it exists. But it *is* a kissing cousin to Action Francaise, Benito Mussolini, Francisco Franco, and the National Socialist German Workers' Party. It isn't full-blown fascism. But it is proto- or pseudo-fascism.

I don't have to bury my head in the sand and pretend that we aren't hearing more of it from *all* directions on the political spectrum.

And I don't have to like it either.

Brad DeLong



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