The May 5, 2003 edition of USA TODAY indicated that Bennett played mostly slots and video poker. The linked article also indicates that Newsweek and The Washington Monthly magazine reviewed internal casino documents that showed that at one time Bennett had wired $1.4 million to cover losses over one two-month period.
Contrast that with this comment from his wife:
Of course, it’s possible that he had been perfectly honest with her about how often he was gambling and how much he was losing and that she was the one misrepresenting the facts.
His behavior has all of the earmarks of addiction.
I don’t personally judge addictive behavior as immoral, but I would think that William Bennett would feel some sense of shame at his inability to contol himself. I have felt that way about compulsive eating and compulsive spending, and I didn’t edit a bestselling book about virtue.
Since I didn’t publish the book, am I any less a hypocrite? I freuently fail to live up to the standards which I advocate.
Let’s stipulate that he was. It would hardly be surprising: in the pantheon of the founding fathers, Ben Franklin was the closest we had to Coyote. And?
Franklin’s words were not relative. They were absolutes. The author, and anyone who “quotes them with approval,” cannot possibly live up to them… not anyone who lives a normal life as part of society. I concede a monk, or other ascetic, may live up to the literal reading of this advice… but no person making an ordinary life in American society today can truly, literally, be said to:
Make no expense but to do good to others or yourself; i.e., waste nothing.
Lose no time; be always employ’d in something useful; cut off all unnecessary actions
Imitate Jesus and Socrates.
For this reason, I contend that this guidance is not meant to be taken literally; the author himself did not do so and no reasonable person would offer this as literal guidance. It’s not a reasonable interpretation of the advice.
If you interpret Bennett’s advice as meaning you should lietrally follow Franklin’s words, then I agree: he is a hypocrite.
I do not take Bennett’s writing as compelling that conclusion. It’s an absurd jump. I grant the literal words make him a hypocrite, but it’s the same thing as calling me a hypocrite for failing to murder my son after announcing “I’m gonna kill that kid.”
Yes, he was. In many many ways. By his own admission, in fact. Nice strawman.
Now explain why a person who promotes frugality and waste nothing while gambling $8 million, regardless of who wrote the quote he was pimping, does not stand guilty of hypocrisy.
Ah, good old Ben. “Do I contradict myself? Very well then, I contradict myself. (I am large, I contain multitudes.)” Whitman could have been writing about him.
The man was like a cross between Cecil Adams and Bill Clinton. He rocked the whole free world and France.
What? Are you suggesting that when Bennett wrote, “industry and frugality are the sources not only of material success but of good and satisfactory living as well,” he was speaking metaphorically, hyperbolically? Are you suggesting that Bennett doesn’t really believe that frugality is one of the sources of good and satisfactory living, that if you said, “C’mon, really?” he woulda said, “Naw, just kidding”?
It’s not at all the same thing as calling you a hypocrite for not meaning, “I’m going to kill that kid,” because you’d be speaking hyperbolically, metaphorically, when saying that. It seems bizarre to treat Bennett’s statement as a metaphor.
But of course…what normal person could resist the temptation to blow millions of dollars in gambling binges?
Maybe the stress involved in overseeing a moral code for his fellow citizens just overwhelmed Bennett, and he couldn’t help himself.
We shouldn’t be so hard on the poor fellow. :rolleyes:
Not as a metaphor… but not as an absolute, either.
I believe I’m frugal. But I gamble. I also occasionally give away prizes on this board for answering trivia. Does that vitiate my frugality? Yes, or no?
I am not the personal arbiter of sinful dollar amounts. However, if you had given away eight million dollars on this board, then yes, you would no longer be frugal in my book.
Look, it’s just another power of ten, you say. There’s no reason why the step from 10^5 to 10^6 should be so meaningful. Million is just a word, you say. Call me emotional, but the list of things you can spend millions of dollars on and still be frugal is a very short list.
You can slip away by saying that the quote didn’t endorse moderation, but I don’t think you’d do that.
You can slip away by saying that Bennett didn’t endorse frugality in absolute terms, but that’s clearly not what you asked for above.
Bennett clearly and unambiguously endorsed frugality. If you want to go back on what you said, I won’t blame you for doing so: maybe you posted that bit hastily before you’d thought fully on it.
But it’s silly to argue that your request wasn’t met in letter and spirit.
As for comparisons with your betting, again we gotta ask: is there no relevant difference (i.e., a difference of frugality) between betting a bottle of scotch, and betting so much that your gambling debts total eight million bucks? Is there really a relevant definition of frugality that includes gambling on such a colossal scale?
What other form of entertainment could a frugal man spend eight million bucks on?
No, you’re quite right. It was met, certainly in letter, and arguably in spirit. I am moving the goalposts, because it’s now clear to me that meeting my original request didn’t prove what I thought it would. I acknowledge I’m moving the goalposts… but it’s because I now believe I placed the goalposts wrongly.
It’s all a matter of scale.
We agree that I may still consider myself reasonably frugal if I give away, say, $80 per year on this board as prizes for trivia contests?
Then I contend that if I made ten times my current salary, I could give away $800 and still be frugal. One hundred times, and $8000 giveaways would still be frugal. And so forth.
I do NOT accept the idea that there is some hard-and-fast rule that, no matter what your net worth, losing $X dollars is profligate.
No matter what my personal worth? If I were worth a Bill-Gates-like sum, where I could lose $8 million every day for a year, you say that a million is a magic number?
I don’t agree. It’s all relative. What if we were in Japan, counting things by yen? Would the frugality I had here vanish, somehow?
No, there really isn’t a hard and fast rule. BUT $8 MILLION DOLLARS WORTH OF GAMBLING LOSSES IS STILL EXCESSIVE ESPECIALLY ON VIDEO POKER GAMES!!!
Do you have any idea how much gambling you would have to do to lose that much money, or how much money you would have to be risking. This isn’t about his net worth because it doesn’t fucking matter. $8 million is a lot of money and it takes a lot of gambling to lose it. The dude lost $1.4 million in two months. That doesn’t seem excessive to you?
Here I disagree. Certainly a billionaire acting frugally may look different from a pauper acting frugally; the billionaire may not hold his shoes together with duct tape and still be called frugal.
But spending eight million dollars on gambling just doesn’t pass the sniff test for frugality for me, no way, no how.
That’s not to say there’s anything wrong with it: personally, I think frugality is a matter of practicality, not a matter of innate virtue. But Bennett DOES treat frugality as an inherent virtue, and so for him to behave is such an un-frugal manner brands him a hypocrite.
Where, precisely, is the bright line, the one at which frugality is breached no matter the wealth of the person?
Does the monetary unit matter? If this were lire instead of dollars, would it be OK to spend 8 million lire? Is the fact that it’s a million of SOMETHING that causes the problem? Would it help if I said he merely lost 10,000 shares of Washington Post stock over the course of several years?
