Billy Mays, Free Market Hero

Wow. Had the author of that article spent 5 minutes watching the reality show on TV, "Pitchmen", he or she would have realized that the guy was solely intent on promoting products that would be useful to people - not just superfluous junk.

Then again, when the author goes on to allude to just needing nails and a hammer to hang pictures on the wall, I guess the guy hasn't lived in a house with drywall before.

It's weird that something like this post even has to be committed to writing and explained to people.

Gee, I've almost always lived in houses with drywall and I've somehow had brains enough to hang things with nails. Colson: drywall has studs behind it.

Thanks morgster - you make a great point: there are people who will only hang pictures where there is a stud behind the wall and there are those who will hang pictures anywhere they want. Keep on thinking inside the box.

Ha! That's funny, as I just read this article by Mises last night titled, "Is Advertising a Sham?".

http://mises.org/story/3519

Right Colson. Pitchmen showed Mays in a different light. How he and partner Sullivan made decisions on which products to pitch and seeing the man behind the yelling was great.

Thanks for fighting the prevailing idiocy. Perhaps you can run for political office. If Franken can win...

Good post. I agree.

The benefits of mutually beneficial, voluntary exchange is lost on most people who engage in it several times daily as if the standard of living we enjoy, even in these bad times, came about some other way.

http://www.awkwardutopia.com/?p=289

Thank you John for another spot on post. www.apolloswabbie.blogspot.com

BUT WAIT! THAT'S NOT ALL! He also encouraged innovation by supporting many individual inventors. Many of the products he sold were invented by individuals who had invested their savings or quit their jobs to follow an idea. Mr. Mays is an American hero if you ask me.

Mr. Stossel almost got it right. What really irks twentieth century liberal elites is that people are free to choose and thus always make the "wrong" choices, i.e., according to twentieth century liberal elitist standards. (Both Friedman and Sowell have written extensively on this, of course.)

Nothing wrong with pitchmen. Thomas Sowell noted that whenever two parties voluntairily exchange assets (money for product) no one has been cheated.

How ironic that Campbell should sneer at Billy Mays, when Campbell himself is purchasing what may the world's most questionably useful degree.

William A. Pannapacker, Ph.D. in English, writes about the academic profession for the Chronicle of Higher Education. In a recent column, he pointed out that only half of all doctorate holders -- after nearly a decade of preparation -- will ever find a tenure-track position, the academic equivalent of a full time job.

Pannapacker warns aspiring graduate students, "What almost no prospective graduate students can understand is the extent to which doctoral education in the humanities socializes idealistic, naïve, and psychologically vulnerable people into a profession with a very clear set of values. It teaches them that life outside of academe means failure, which explains the large numbers of graduates who labor for decades as adjuncts, just so they can stay on the periphery of academe."

Given a choice of professional values, I choose the values of the salesman over the values of the professor. The motives of the saleman are transparent. He wants the customer to buy. The values of the professor are carefully disguised. Behind the veneer of scholarly inquiry, he wants to exploit "naïve, and psychologically vulnerable people." Under the noble banner of knowledge, he promises that a superfluous degree is the ticket to a better life. Who is the better huckster here?

Professor Pannapacker concludes, "It's hard to tell young people that universities recognize that their idealism and energy — and lack of information — are an exploitable resource. For universities, the impact of graduate programs on the lives of those students is an acceptable externality, like dumping toxins into a river. If you cannot find a tenure-track position, your university will no longer court you; it will pretend you do not exist and will act as if your unemployability is entirely your fault. It will make you feel ashamed, and you will probably just disappear, convinced it's right rather than that the game was rigged from the beginning."

How ironic that Campbell should sneer at Billy Mays, when Campbell himself is purchasing what may the world's most questionably useful degree.

William A. Pannapacker, Ph.D. in English, writes about the academic profession for the Chronicle of Higher Education. In a recent column, he pointed out that only half of all doctorate holders -- after nearly a decade of preparation -- will ever find a tenure-track position, the academic equivalent of a full time job.

Pannapacker warns aspiring graduate students, "What almost no prospective graduate students can understand is the extent to which doctoral education in the humanities socializes idealistic, naïve, and psychologically vulnerable people into a profession with a very clear set of values. It teaches them that life outside of academe means failure, which explains the large numbers of graduates who labor for decades as adjuncts, just so they can stay on the periphery of academe."

Given a choice of professional values, I choose the values of the salesman over the values of the professor. The motives of the saleman are transparent. He wants the customer to buy. The values of the professor are carefully disguised. Behind the veneer of scholarly inquiry, he wants to exploit "naïve, and psychologically vulnerable people." Under the noble banner of knowledge, he promises that a superfluous degree is the ticket to a better life. Who is the better huckster here?

Professor Pannapacker concludes, "It's hard to tell young people that universities recognize that their idealism and energy — and lack of information — are an exploitable resource. For universities, the impact of graduate programs on the lives of those students is an acceptable externality, like dumping toxins into a river. If you cannot find a tenure-track position, your university will no longer court you; it will pretend you do not exist and will act as if your unemployability is entirely your fault. It will make you feel ashamed, and you will probably just disappear, convinced it's right rather than that the game was rigged from the beginning."

What about pitching overpriced cleaning supplies makes a man a hero? I think Campbell has a point.

If Billy Mays really did sell crap, at least it wasn't as individually expensive or socially harmful as the crap universities are selling graduate students in the humanities.

Stossel and the rest of the far-Right are just *adorable* these days!

As their empire crumbles around them, they grasp at straws by elevating hucksters and carnival barkers like Billy Mays to hero status. Classic!

Thanks, John, for the laugh, and for the continued validation that the days of the empty-headed Right are indeed over.

I read the piece and didn't find it to be so anti-free market as you suggest. You take one sentence out of the entire piece, throw in a phrase like "elitist author," and I suppose you get the reaction you're after. This is just intellectually lazy.

John, are you writing this? I don't see an author reference on the site, but in my RSS reader I see Frank Mastropolo as author. What's up with that?