“Eight years after the financial crisis, unemployment is at 5 percent, deficits are down and G.D.P. is growing,” declares the subheadline of an Andrew Ross Sorkin story in the forthcoming New York Times magazine. “Why do so many voters feel left behind? The president has a theory.”
We have a theory, too. The favorable unemployment figure doesn’t tell the full story. Sorkin:
As Obama also acknowledged, the public anger about the economy is not without empirical basis. A large swath of the nation has dropped out of the labor force completely, and the reality for the average American family is that its household income is $4,000 less than it was when Bill Clinton left office.
When an unemployed person drops out of the labor force—i.e., stops looking for a job—he no longer counts as “unemployed,” even though he is not employed.
As for the deficit, to say that it is down considerably since Obama took office is true but misleading, as the left-leaning site PolitifFact noted last year. The fiscal 2009 deficit—George W. Bush’s last—was a staggering $1.4 trillion; by 2014 it had declined to $485 billion. But the 2009 deficit was unusually high owing to the bank bailout after the 2008 financial crisis. The deficit for each year from 2010 through 2014 was also higher than in any of the other Bush years, 2002 through 2008. And the national debt—the cumulation of all those deficits—has nearly doubled during Obama’s presidency.
And although gross domestic product is growing, it is doing so very slowly. “First-quarter U.S. gross domestic product hit the Tape this morning, and it was pretty poor,” The Wall Street Journal reports. “The economy grew at a 0.5% annualized rate, below just about everybody’s already weak expectations and the worst ‘print’ in two years.”
What’s Obama’s theory? It’s not a new one. Things have been going well, he insists; he’s just done a lousy job of explaining how well:
Obama . . . was unable or unwilling to rhetorically underscore the severity of the crisis as it unfolded, so perhaps what should have been seen as successes were seen as failures. “It was a delicate balance throughout 2009 and 2010 to be straight with the American people about the depths of the problem, how close we were to disaster, without scaring the heck out of them,” Obama said.
Making matters worse, Obama faced political opposition, as is normal for a national leader in a two-party democratic republic:
“How people feel about the economy,” Obama told me, giving one part of his own theory, is influenced by “what they hear.” He went on: “And if you have a political party—in this case, the Republicans—that denies any progress and is constantly channeling to their base, which is sizable, say, 40 percent of the population, that things are terrible all the time, then people will start absorbing that.”
The president also tells Sorkin: “I mean, the truth of the matter is that if we had been able to more effectively communicate all the steps we had taken to the swing voter, then we might have maintained a majority in the House or the Senate.”
There are a couple of problems with this part of the theory. For one, it’s not just Republicans who’ve criticized the Obama economy:
“Millions and millions and millions and millions of people look at that pretty picture of America he painted and they cannot find themselves in it to save their lives,” [Bill] Clinton himself said of Obama’s economy in March, while on the campaign trail for his wife. “People are upset, frankly; they’re anxiety-ridden, they’re disoriented, because they don’t see themselves in that picture.”
For another, the president’s claim that the Democrats’ losses in Congress were the result of failure to communicate leaves out a crucial part of the story. The president and his Democratic allies in Congress spent much of 2009 and 2010 promoting and bullying through a “health-care reform” bill, the public opposition to which was a key factor if notthe key factor in the Democrats’ loss of the House in 2010.
The piece does eventually get around to ObamaCare, about which Sorkin observes: “Americans do not yet seem to be feeling the benefits of the new program, in part because the benefits remain uncertain.” That’s quite an understatement.
Sorkin himself undercuts Obama’s theory by observing: “Whether a president can truly improve, or damage, an economy remains an open question.” The interview took place during a February visit to a federally subsidized battery factory in Jacksonville, Fla., which occasioned these observations from the interviewer:
In a way, . . . the plant was inadvertently telling a more complicated story, about globalization and the changing nature of commerce. Saft America is a unit of Saft Groupe, a French company with holdings around the world. Sales of lithium-ion batteries have been considerably slower than anticipated, and the factory has yet to turn a profit. The French parent doesn’t expect profitability for another two or three years and has already written down part of its investment on the factory. . . .
When the president’s motorcade left Saft to head back to Air Force One, I noticed something unusual: The plant’s parking lot was extremely small. It dawned on me that Obama’s tour of the factory, filled with photo ops and handshakes, had included very little interaction with workers. Instead, he was shown machine after machine, mostly operated by computers. . . . This giant mecca of innovation, a physical marvel that if built several decades ago would have easily employed a few thousand people, employs only 300. . . .
Obama noted the robots, too. “We just saw here those robots were pretty impressive, but also pointed to the direction the economy is going,” he said.
Such innovations are a mixed blessing, for which one can hardly blame (or credit) the president. But to say the president can’t do very much is different from saying, as Obama does, that he has done great things but has been denied credit because of his inferior communication skills.
The article concludes with Obama restating his theory and disparaging Ronald Reagan:
“If we can’t puncture some of the mythology around austerity, politics or tax cuts or the mythology that’s been built up around the Reagan revolution, where somehow people genuinely think that he slashed government and slashed the deficit and that the recovery was because of all these massive tax cuts, as opposed to a shift in interest-rate policy—if we can’t describe that effectively, then we’re doomed to keep on making more and more mistakes.”
Reagan was known as the “Great Communicator,” which, while not inaccurate, was something of a backhanded compliment. The implication was that while he was an effective salesman, his policies were no good—or at least that was the implication intended by those who, like Obama, opposed Reagan’s policies on ideological grounds.
Obama, then, is the anti-Reagan: His approach to policy is roughly the opposite, and when the public does not respond with enthusiasm, he must be the Rotten Communicator. The actual economic results don’t figure into the theory.
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No comments on Obama’s self-generated bad PR
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The next time a Comrade Sanders supporter says college should be free, show them this, from Gail MarksJarvis:
How could anyone be against free college tuition?
It’s a mom-and-apple-pie issue. Millennials, suffering from debilitating student loans, love it. Parents, who can’t wring enough out of paychecks to save for college and retirement, see it as salvation. Many Americans who believe the country will be stronger if young people go to college and boost their potential and lifetime earnings, embrace it too.
Democratic presidential candidate Bernie Sanders is running on it. The other Democratic candidate, Hillary Clinton, doesn’t go as far as Sanders but favors more aid for low- and moderate-income students, not everyone.
Yet now, with election-year crowds cheering for college student relief, the think tanks are taking aim at the idea of free college for everyone, and the idea isn’t sounding as sweet as mom and her apple pie.
First, the Tax Policy Center, a respected think tank on tax issues, knocked holes — big ones — in the funding Sanders has been suggesting. Then the Brookings Institution joined the critics.
Brookings leans left, so you might think it would be friendly to a proposal that would free future generations from killer college debt.
But that’s where Brookings takes issue. In a report released Thursday by Brookings, Matthew Chingos criticizes the plan for spending too much money helping affluent and rich families and shortchanging the low-income students who he says need help the most.
Free college would mean “spending billions on upper-income groups that could afford to pay,” said Chingos, who is a senior fellow for the Urban Institute. In his report, he notes that under the Sanders proposal that’s been so popular with young voters, “the top half of the income distribution would receive 24 percent more in dollar value from eliminating tuition than students from the lower half” of incomes.
The top half, according to Chingos’ data, includes families with incomes over $62,500.
Although many families close to that cutoff don’t consider themselves affluent and are struggling to get their children through college, Chingos notes “there are trade-offs.”
“When college is free for everybody,” he said, there’s less public money for the lowest-income families.
For low-income students, “even free college isn’t cheap enough,” he said.
Chingos argues that while Sanders’ free college proposal would eliminate tuition and fees at public colleges, lower-income students struggle with living expenses that end up costing even more than their college tuition and fees. So relieving the students of those direct college costs doesn’t go far enough.
He notes that families with incomes under $62,500 spend $18 billion out-of-pocket on living expenses. That’s where free college fails, he argues. Rather than giving tuition and fees free to affluent and rich people, he would like to see more funding go to lower-income people for living expenses in addition to tuition.
In addition, Chingos argues that free college for all students will not be equal for all because more affluent students pick the public colleges and universities that tend to be more expensive than those selected by lower-income students. In particular, many lower-income students go to community college, where the average tuition is $1,673. He contrasts that with a student at a four-year college paying between $6,119 and $7,319.
With free tuition, Chingos said the lower-income students would save $1.8 billion in tuition costs but still need to pay $4.5 billion in living expenses and other college costs.
“The upshot is that dependent students from the most affluent 25 percent of families represent 11 percent of students at public colleges, but would receive 18 percent of the benefits if tuition were eliminated,” he said. Yet, students in the bottom fourth of income “make up 14 percent of public college students and would receive 16 percent of free tuition benefits.”
Many lower-income students are living independently of their parents. They go to school only part time as they struggle to hold jobs to pay for college and living expenses. Meanwhile, more affluent students depend on parents, and 68 percent go to college full time.
As a result, Chingos calculates, the top half of students by income would receive $16.8 billion by eliminating tuition costs, while the lower half could get $13.5 billion.
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Today is the 56th anniversary of what I used to consider the greatest radio station on the planet in its best format:
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The number one single today in 1965:
Today in 1970, the Jimi Hendrix Experience played the first of its 13-show U.S. tour at the Milwaukee Auditorium:
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The number one single today in 1960:
The number one British album today in 1966 was the Rolling Stones’ “Aftermath”:
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At some point writers usually are given a copy of William Zinsser’s On Writing Well: The Classic Guide to Writing Nonfiction.
What follows is not nonfiction. But what follows here isn’t good writing either, as compiled from current and past popular fiction by BrainJet in the spirit of the famous Bulwer–Lytton Bad Writing Contest.
We begin with the immensely popular, yet immensely bad, 50 Shades of Grey:
I am all gushing and breathy—like a child, not a grown woman who can vote and drink legally in the state of Washington.
Jeez, he looks so freaking hot. My subconscious is frantically fanning herself, and my inner goddess is swaying and writhing to some primal carnal rhythm.
Someone named Ron Miller wrote something called Silk and Steel, in which …
Her legs were quills. They were bundles of wicker, they were candelabra; the muscles were summer lightning, that flickered like a passing thought; they were captured eels or a cable on a windlass. Her thighs were geese, pythons, schooners. They were cypress or banyan; her thighs were a forge, they were shears; her thighs were sandstone, they were the sandstone buttresses of a cathedral, they were silk or cobwebs. Her calves were sweet with the sap of elders, her feet were bleached bones, her feet were driftwood. Her feet were springs, marmosets or locusts; her toes were snails, they were snails with shells of tears.
Stephenie Meyer, writer of the Twilight manglings of vampires, contributed:
Aro laughed. “Ha ha ha,” he giggled.
(Technically, a laugh and a giggle are not quite the same thing. “Ha ha ha” isn’t a giggle either.)
“Stop!” I shrieked, my voice echoing in the silence, jumping forward to put myself between them.
Claire Delacroix, not Yoda, wrote this in Unicorn Vengeance:
Like the wolf he was named for was he, he realized, for his life was solitary above all else.
(As one comment pointed out, however, wolves are pack animals, which makes this sentence not only badly constructed but based on a false premise.)
Dan Brown of The Da Vinci Code fame wrote elsewhere:
Physicist Leonardo Vetra smelled burning flesh, and he knew it was his own.
(And how did he know that? Did Vetra run test flesh burnings?)
Overhanging her precarious body was a jaundiced face whose skin resembled a sheet of parchment paper punctured by two emotionless eyes.
Just because you’re popular doesn’t mean every word is a pearl. Lee Child, Jack Reacher’s creator:
It was about as distinctive as the most distinctive thing you could ever think of.
Dean Koontz in Whispers:
“For a minute, the three of them sat in silence, within the expensive, single-engine, overhead-wing, two-hundred-mile-per-hour, sixteen-mile-per-gallon, white and red and mustard-yellow, airborne cocoon.”
Tom Clancy in Red Storm Rising:
“Fighter weather,” agreed Lieutenant Colonel Bill Jeffers, commander of the 57th Fighter Interceptor Squadron, the “Black Knights,” most of whose F-15 Eagle interceptors were sitting in the open a bare hundred yards away.
Bad writing is not a recent thing. Langston Hughes wrote in Thank You, M’Am:
He did not trust the woman not to trust him. And he did not want to be mistrusted now.
(I think that’s a double negative. Or something.)
Not many people may realize the human cartoon Rambo came off a serious movie, “First Blood,” which came from a novel that included …
One man came running off the corner to stop him, but Rambo kicked him away and then he was whipping left around the corner, and for now he was safe and he really got that cycle going.
This was found in a novel spun off the new “Star Wars” movie:
The TIE wibbles and wobbles through the air; careening drunkenly across the Myrran rooftops – it zigzags herkily-jerkily out of sight.
One wonders if any of these writers had editors. As one comment put it:
Our readers today are so illiterate, they wouldn’t know bad writing if their phones depended on it.
At least the creator of this list took the time to read more than one book, which based on another comment may not have been necessary:
I feel like just posting every sentence from 50 Shades of Grey would have been sufficient to make this list. Literally nothing ever written is as horrible as anything in that sad excuse for a book.
The existence of this list was derided as jealousy of successful writers by some. The counter to that is that popularity and quality are not the same thing, and all you need do is look at the Kardashians.
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Today in 1976, after a concert in Memphis, Bruce Springsteen scaled the walls of Graceland … where he was arrested by a security guard.
Today in 2003, a $5 million lawsuit filed by a personal injury lawyer against John Fogerty was dismissed.
The lawyer claimed he suffered hearing loss at a 1997 Fogerty concert.
The judge ruled the lawyer assumed the risk of hearing loss by attending the concert. The lawyer replied, “What?”
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Two weeks ago I wrote here about Gannett’s swallowing up of what used to be Journal Communications, formerly Wisconsin’s largest media company.
Having gobbled up Journal Media Group, Gannett is now looking south, reports the Chicago Tribune:
Gannett announced Monday an offer to buy Tribune Publishing, publisher of the Chicago Tribune and the Los Angeles Times, for $815 million, including the assumption of $390 million in debt.
The unsolicited, all-cash offer, which translates to $12.25 a share, represents a 63 percent premium over Friday’s $7.52 a share closing price, as well as a premium over the $8.50 share price at which Tribune recently issued common shares, Gannett said.
Robert Dickey, president and CEO of Gannett, said in an interview Monday the company has been eyeing Tribune Publishing since June, and that it sees $50 million in savings annually and a platform for expanding its recently launched USA Today Network online. He said Tribune Publishing markets such as Chicago, Los Angeles, Baltimore and Orlando specifically “filled a number of geographic gaps” for Gannett.
Poynter provides a preview:
A hostile $815 million bid for Tribune Publishing by Gannett, owner of USA TODAY and 100 other properties, inspired anxiety in Tribune newsrooms for reasons that Gannett shouldn’t deny. Staffers I spoke with at the Los Angeles Times, Chicago Tribune and The Baltimore Sun — three of Tribune’s best-known dailies — are nervous, partly because of Gannett’s lingering image of being in a different league qualitatively, even with the success of USA TODAY (of which I am a fan). After nearly a decade of internal tumult, including bankruptcy, they’re well-practiced at being shell-shocked. This time, the news reinforced their falling fortunes. Not long ago you would have needed far more money just to buy either the Tribune or Times, forget all 11 papers.
Whether you’re “the best orthopedic surgeon in town” or a “sleazeball lawyer,” reputations are hard to lose. Thus, here was industry analyst Ken Doctor’s Cliff’s Notes on Gannett in a phone chat: “Middle-brow, small towns, tight rein on management, publishers ascendant and editors not as strong, excellent financial engineers, best balance sheet in the business, still searching for its community voice.” And there are few Pulitzer Prizes around their newsrooms.
It is not necessarily true that size means mediocrity, and it is not true that chain ownership of media properties is necessarily a bad thing. It depends on who the owner is. And that requires some state media history.
I became a Journal Communications employee in 1994, as editor of the late great Marketplace Magazine. Journal owned the Milwaukee Journal and Milwaukee Sentinel (which would merge in 1995), the most established AM radio station in the state, the first commercial TV station in the state, and numerous weekly newspapers. Journal was an employee-owned company, heavily invested in Wisconsin and the Milwaukee area specifically (though even then Journal owned out-of-state TV and radio stations), and the preferred employer for us media types.
At the time Gannett owned only the Green Bay Press–Gazette and the Wausau Daily Herald. The big print competitor was Thomson Newspapers, a British company that owned the Appleton, Fond du Lac, Manitowoc, Sheboygan, Marshfield and Wisconsin Rapids newspapers. The Oshkosh and Stevens Point newspapers were independently owned until Thomson purchased the Stevens Point newspaper and, after the Oshkosh newspaper was sold to an out-of-state company, Thomson bought the Oshkosh newspaper one year after its sale.
Gannett already had a reputation for trying to kill its competition, in Green Bay’s case the Green Bay News–Chronicle, a newspaper started by striking Press–Gazette employees in the early 1970s. The News–Chronicle’s owner, Frank Wood, brought in Richard McCord, who had experience with Gannett in New Mexico, for a project to save the Newx–Chronicle, which prompted a book, The Chain Gang: One Newspaper Versus the Gannett Empire. (Long story short: Gannett ended up buying the News–Chronicle and closing it. Wood’s sons, however, are still in print, and own the portion of Journal I used to work for.)
Gannett’s business practices were one thing. How Thomson ran its newspapers was another thing. A friend of mine in Appleton told the story about how, in the early days of his marriage when he and his wife lacked money for entertainment, they would have a nightly contest to find typographical errors in the newspaper, with the loser having to do the dishes that night. To call the rest of Thomson’s newspapers “mediocre” would have been a compliment.
Thomson then came upon what management thought was a great idea. In this country, unless you’ve been in the profession for a long time, journalism requires a four-year degree. In Britain, journalism is considered a trade instead of a profession, requiring the British equivalent of a two-year degree. (Which is interesting given that one of the things journalism students learn is libel law; in Britain libel is a criminal offense, and lacking a First Amendment newspapers are forced to apologize for misreporting.)
Whether Thomson wanted to drag down reporter salaries lower than they already were, or wanted its reporters to do whatever editors wanted to them to do, Thomson decided to create the Reader Inc. Editorial Training Center. According to Editor & Publisher:
Motivated by high editorial staff churn and difficulty landing journalism graduates for the long haul, Thomson Newspapers is launching an in-house journalism school for aspiring reporters with as little as a high school diploma or equivalency.
The plan to spend over $1 million of corporate training funds was propelled by the desire to reverse the trend shared by many newspaper companies — the revolving door of reporters on community beats. Thomson executives say the turnover creates confusion and diminishes credibility in the 58 community papers Thomson operates in North America.
Dubbed the Reader Inc. Editorial Training Center, after Thomson’s Reader Inc. initiative aimed at fostering newspaper readership, the center will ensure “new journalists bring a passion for readers to their work, unencumbered by lofty preconceptions of what journalism is all about,” says Stuart Garner, president and CEO of Stamford, Conn.-based Thomson Newspapers.
The venture, apparently the only U.S. effort of its kind, mirrors features of the Thomson Editorial Training Center in Great Britain, which became Trinity Editorial Training Center after Toronto-based Thomson Corp. sold some U.K. properties in 1994. The school has trained thousands of journalists in the past two decades, says Jim Jennings, vice president and editorial director, Thomson Newspapers, who directed the British program in the 1990s.
“We brought the best of what we had done and added a North American feel,” Jennings says. Thomson plans a program in August 1999, and three programs per year starting in 2000. Recruiting will start in a few months in each newspaper’s own circulation area.
The initiative raises the longstanding argument over whether journalism schools should be trade schools or should provide a broader perspective of how the world operates. Eric Meyer, professor of journalism at the University of Illinois, calls the Thomson training course a dangerous move because journalism shouldn’t be about technical training. “We believe you must know something about the world before you begin reporting about it,” he says. “We want [journalism students] to take political science, meteorology, [and] biology to give them a broad understanding about what the issues really are. … If you don’t do that, you run a serious risk of simply transcribing notes.”
Thomson’s Jennings says Meyer is absolutely right. “Journalists need a broad-based education,” he says. But Jennings doesn’t think academic journalism programs are always the right answer.
Meyer believes the move is only designed to save Thomson money. “They very often look for the least expensive solution,” he says. “If they can hire 100 reporters at $15,000 per year instead of $25,000, they are saving a lot of money.
I was aware of one “graduate” of the Thomson School of “Journalism,” a person who made my life difficult at a later employer by blocking (or so I thought) coverage of my employer in the newspaper he worked for because (we believed) he had been asked to leave my employer. He denied that was the case, but once he left, magically the newspaper started covering my employer much more.
I predicted in Marketplace that Thomson would end up buying out Gannett’s Wisconsin newspapers because it didn’t make sense for Gannett to own just two newspapers in the state. I was correct, though I got the buyer and seller confused. In 2000, Gannett ended up buying all of the Thomson newspapers when Thomson decided to get out of newspapering.
In between my stints at Journal, Journal made the decision to sell its stock privately, in order to grow. That ended up, as you know, with the ultimate death of Journal, when Journal and Scripps “merged,” with Scripps controlling Journal’s former broadcast properties and, one year later, Gannett buying Journal’s remaining print properties. Change is not necessarily positive change.
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Lawrence W. Reed writes:
Last Sunday, at a height of 35,000 feet, I was reading the generally anticapitalist but profit-seeking New York Times while speeding from Salt Lake City to Atlanta at 400 miles per hour in a giant, metallic, winged tube whose precursor was invented by two profit-seeking bicycle mechanics in Dayton, Ohio (on their own nickel, by the way).
I peruse the Times mainly for the obituaries. Even that paper will sometimes offer a kind word about a capitalist once he’s been taxed good and hard or is gone altogether. That’s where I learned of the death from Alzheimer’s disease of Richard K. Ransom, founder of Hickory Farms, on April 11, 2016. He was 96.
The obit explained that not long after returning from fighting for his country in the Pacific theater of World War II, a young Ransom was tired of driving a vegetable truck around rural Ohio for his parents’ wholesale produce business. So he started selling hand-cut cheeses at flower shows and boat shows. Soon he added summer sausage, then expanded to county fairs around the Midwest.… By the time he sold it in 1980, Hickory Farms was a $164-million-dollar-a-year specialty food business, with outlets in every state but Mississippi.
One of the pioneering features of his stores was the free sample. Lots of them. Free cheese. Free sausage. Free crackers. Imagine that: giving free food to people whether they actually became customers or not. But of course, an awful lot of them did, because they liked what he offered.
Ransom appears to have lived a good and full life: active in community affairs and philanthropy; married to the same woman for 63 years; a son and 3 daughters; 9 grandchildren and 12 great-grandchildren; a leader on the boards of local banks, a private school, and the Toledo Zoo; and a fundraiser for children’s charities ever since he witnessed the suffering of children on the island of Okinawa, Japan.
An April 13 story in Toledo’s daily newspaper, the Blade, quoted a longtime associate’s summation of him: “He had really good basic values — honesty, integrity. He could relate to people and could make great friends that would last.”
I never had the pleasure of meeting Ransom, but as I read his obit, I thought to myself:
Here’s a man who built a fine enterprise from scratch. It brought employment and goods and services to a great many people. It was successful enough during his tenure that it surely put him in what some would disdain as “the 1 percent” of income earners, though his personal wealth was an insignificant fraction of what he created and a small price to pay for the risks he took. He and his company paid millions in taxes over the years, much of which was squandered by politicians and bureaucracies. Then he founded a wonderful charity that locates families who will adopt children in foster care. He was a generous, long-time donor to Assistance Dogs of America as well.
And yet there’s a ubiquitous barbarian mindset afoot that wants us to view people like Ransom with suspicion and disgust so we can feel good about demagogues who will “protect” us from them. This barbarianism typically makes no distinction between creators who make their fortunes the honest way on their own and the far smaller number who use their political connections to do it. We’re to punish them all and empower the noncreators in government to buy votes with the fruits of their life’s work. Something in history, economics, and basic morality tells me that this evil way of thinking cannot end well, and never, ever has.
I’m reminded of the words of Tacitus some 2,000 years ago: “When men of talents are punished, authority is strengthened.”
By what twisted principle of justice do we sneer at successful people like Ransom? Did the wealth he created — including the relatively small portion he enjoyed himself — make someone else poorer? Would the rest of us have gotten as much out of him if, instead of a life in business, he had pursued the life of a reclusive hermit or a cloistered monk or even that of a tenured, socialist academic?
It seems obvious to me that Ransom baked a bigger pie; he didn’t simply claim a larger slice for himself. He gave the world far more than he took. He didn’t think he was entitled to much, other than the freedom to peacefully put his talents and ideas to work for others as well as himself. I have known a great many such people. In fact, I shun the ones who (unlike Ransom) sully the reputation of capitalism with their very uncapitalist seeking of favors from government. They don’t donate to groups like FEE, I might add, and I’m proud they don’t.
Inebriated with never-ending anger and victimhood, so-called progressives and democratic socialists can’t bring themselves to single out a Richard K. Ransom and praise his accomplishments, let alone the profit motive that played an important role in them. Bernie Sanders, for instance, has built a national campaign around denigrating success. He says, “We are living in a world where greed has become for the wealthiest people their own religion, and they make no apologies for it.”
Not some of the wealthiest, but all of the wealthiest, by virtue of their wealth itself, are irretrievably “greedy” according to Sanders’s flippant declaration. Their greed is nothing less than a “religion,” he pontificates. And, of course, allof them must be taxed more, so people like Bernie can buy votes with their money. He’s telling you, whether he’ll admit it or not, that wealth must be punished because it’s not his or yours. It’s theirs.
In any other walk of life but the dirty business of politics, demonizing an entire class of people with such sweeping verdicts would be dismissed as the meanest, most superficial bigotry. We would see through the demagogue’s flimsy logic. We would immediately think of the many exceptions we personally know. If someone stupidly, offensively proclaimed that all people of a particular viewpoint are bad and must be punished, decent people would rise to the defense of those of that perspective whom they know to be good and undeserving of retribution. We would condemn the demagogue for his carelessness, for his cruelty, and for his ignorance.
But in wide swaths of today’s America, this antisocial behavior turns out huge, cheering throngs to beg for more.
In a genuinely free, capitalist economy, rich people don’t cause poor people. Five hundred or a thousand years ago, the gap between rich and poor was immense and intractable. Mobility from one income level to another was minimal. Most people were economically frozen in place because the rich enjoyed the one thing that ensured and enforced that deep freeze — political power. Not until that power was diminished by ideas that blossomed in the Enlightenment were the enterprising Richard K. Ransoms of the world able to work their magic.
When I hear the class-warfare nonsense of the wealth-destroying Bernies of the world, I feel as though I need a good, hot shower. The millions of hard-working, risk-taking entrepreneurs that Bernie and his friends lump with the few bad eggs don’t deserve such treatment.
RIP, Richard K. Ransom. No one ordered you to, but you did so much to lift people up. You created the wealth that the barbarians in our midst only talk about, steal, and squander. By every measure, you were so much better than they are.
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Steve Prestegard.com: The Presteblog 