The New York Times demonstrates why nobody trusts the ‘media’ any more.
Nothing is more perennially green than a thumb-sucker in a major newspaper bashing ‘the rich’. They seem to be the only category of people that it’s okay to hate on.
Mostly this is just pandering to the envious — ‘why do they have all that money while we, who are much better people, have so little?’ — and the envious we have always with us. Nobody (especially newspapers) ever lost money hating on the fashionable whipping boys (or girls).
And, if there isn’t a fashionable whipping boy available, the clickbait-business-model media will be happy to create one.
The problem is that this usually involves perpetuating harmful mythology which the ‘news media’ could easily correct but don’t care to.
Case in point: ‘It’s an idea that’s going around. Mark Zuckerberg, the Facebook founder who is worth close to $70 billion, is apparently open to it. “I don’t know that I have an exact threshold on what amount of money someone should have,” he said in live-streamed question-and-answer session with company employees in early October. “But on some level, no one deserves to have that much money.”’
The truth: Zuckerberg doesn’t have ‘that much money’. What he does have is a lot of stock in Facebook, which, if he could sell it for what somebody recently paid for some Facebook stock, might possibly be worth that much money. But of actual money he has far less — much more than you an me, perhaps, but rich people don’t just pile up snowdrift’s of cash in a Money Bin like Scrooge McDuck for the sole purpose of going swimming around in it; they keep it invested and working so that it will generate more money, as anybody with two brain cells to rub together (I’m excluding journalists here) does. So that money isn’t idle in some ginormous wallet, but rather out making stuff for people to use.
Or take Jeff Bezos (please), reputedly worth $130 billion. He didn’t inherit that from Unca Scrooge, nor was he passing by one day and found it by the side of the road for him to pick up and throw in the trunk. It represents (mostly) his ownership interest in Amazon, a company that he built from an idea over the course of 30 years by making it a company that people like to do business with. That ‘money’ is hard at work bringing you stuff from all over the country. To say, as Barack Obama famously did, ‘You didn’t build that’ is like saying that Beethoven didn’t create any of his symphonies because it needs a large number of (poorly paid) musicians to turn them from ink stains on a page to beautiful noise that makes people happy. To go down that path requires two legs, Ignorance and Stupidity (and Barack has plenty of both).
