Kristof on the Hedge Fund Republic
19th November 2010
Fisking New York Times columnists is usually about as challenging as correcting sixth-grade English papers for grammar and spelling, but it can be fun.
New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof is out with a piece headlined “A Hedge Fund Republic?”
He writes, “inequality in the United States has soared to levels comparable to those in Argentina six decades ago — with 1 percent controlling 24 percent of American income in 2007.”
Mr. Kristof uses the word “controlling” rather than “earning” so as not to allow his readers to consider the possibility that these earners might have done something such as work to create value so that customers were willing to pay them that compensation voluntarily.
The major problem is, of course, that most Crustian opinion-mongers are stuck at 1900 and are under the impression that the reason rich people are rich is because their ancestors stole something from somebody sometime and just inherited it. (After all, why is the opinion-monger not rich, being so obviously more deserving? Must be a plot on somebody’s part.)
Remember when Newt Gingrich brought up the subject of orphanages and Hillary Clinton went all Charles Dickens on him? Nobody bothered to tell her that the stuff Dickens wrote about was (a) stuff he made up and (b) a hundred and fifty years ago. And the reason for that is (c) they all believe the same way she does, that absolutely no progress has been made in the past century and a half–we still have people starving in the streets (despite welfare programs that allow poor people to get morbidly obese), black people being lynched (despite affirmative action programs that put the likes of Charlie Rangel and Barack Obama in positions of power), and workers being paid just pennies a day (despite unionized auto assembly line people who make more than a lot of lawyers and accountants).
That’s why they want to get rid of automobiles and planes and go back to horses, bicycles, and trains; it’s where they feel most comfortable.