Michelle Malkin:

Last week, a prominent self-made tech mogul dared to diagnose the problem publicly. His passionate letter to the Wall Street Journal decried the “progressive war on the American 1 percent.” He called on the Left to stop demonizing “the rich,” and he condemned the Occupy movement’s “rising tide of hatred.”

The mini-manifesto was newsworthy because this truth-teller is not a GOP politician or conservative activist or Fox News personality. As he points out, he lives in the “epicenter of progressive thought, San Francisco.” No matter. The mob is shooting the messenger anyway. But maybe, just maybe, his critical message in defense of our nation’s achievers will transcend, inspire, embolden, and prevail.

The letter-writer is Tom Perkins, a Silicon Valley pioneer with an MIT degree in electrical engineering and computer science and a Harvard MBA. He started out at the bottom at Hewlett-Packard, founded his own separate laser company on the side, and then teamed up with fellow entrepreneur Eugene Kleiner to establish one of the nation’s oldest and most important venture-capital firms — Kleiner Perkins Caufield and Byers. …

Because he dared to compare the seething resentment of modern progressives to Kristallnacht and Nazi Germany, the grievance industry attacked Perkins and dismissed his message. His former colleagues at the venture-capital firm he founded threw him under the bus. Left-wing punk journalists immediately branded him “nuts” and a “rich idiot.”

Please note: Not one of those sanctimonious grievance-mongers had anything to say about the Molotov cocktail–fueled riots and fires set by the Occupy mobs at banks, car dealerships, and restaurants in Oakland that provoked Perkins’s comparison in the first place.

While he regrets invoking Kristallnacht specifically, Perkins unequivocally refused to back down from his message defending the “creative 1 percent.” He reiterated his fundamental point in a TV interview on Monday: “Anytime the majority starts to demonize a minority, no matter what it is, it’s wrong, and dangerous, and no good ever comes from it.”

Perkins also chastised those who bemoan “income inequality,” including his erstwhile “friends” Al Gore, Jerry Brown, and Barack Obama: “The 1 percent are not causing the inequality. They are the job creators. . . .  I think Kleiner Perkins itself over the years has created pretty close to a million jobs, and we’re still doing it. It’s absurd to demonize the rich for being rich and for doing what the rich do, which is get richer by creating opportunity for others.”

Amen, amen, and amen. Perkins barely scratched the surface of the War on Wealth that has spread under the Obama regime. Anti-capitalism saboteurs have organized wealth-shaming protests at corporate CEOs’ private homes in New York and in private neighborhoods in Connecticut. Hypocrite wealth-basher and former paid Enron adviser Paul Krugman at the New York Times whipped up hatred against the “plutocrats” in solidarity with the Occupy mob. New York state lawmakers received threatening mail saying it was “time to kill the wealthy” if they didn’t renew the state’s tax surcharge on millionaires.

“If you don’t, I’m going to pay a visit with my carbine to one of those tech companies you are so proud of and shoot every spoiled Ivy League [expletive] I can find,” the death threat read. In Perkins’s own backyard, Bay Area celebrity rapper Boots Riley infamously penned “5 Million Ways to Kill a CEO” (“Toss a dollar in the river, and when he jump in / If you find he can swim, put lead boots on him and do it again”) before making cameo appearances at vandal-infested Occupy Oakland marches over the past few years.

But the most dangerous threats to the nation’s job creators don’t come from Oakland rappers or social-justice guerillas or San Francisco neighbors griping about tech workers’ private buses and big homes. The deadliest threats come from the men in power in Washington who stoke bottomless hatred against “millionaires and billionaires” through class-bashing rhetoric and entrepreneur-crushing policies — while they pocket the hard-earned money of the achievers trying to buy immunity. It’s high time to shame the wealth-shamers and their cowed enablers. Silence is complicity.

Perkins‘ letter …

Regarding your editorial “Censors on Campus” (Jan. 18): Writing from the epicenter of progressive thought, San Francisco, I would call attention to the parallels of fascist Nazi Germany to its war on its “one percent,” namely its Jews, to the progressive war on the American one percent, namely the “rich.”

From the Occupy movement to the demonization of the rich embedded in virtually every word of our local newspaper, the San Francisco Chronicle, I perceive a rising tide of hatred of the successful one percent. There is outraged public reaction to the Google buses carrying technology workers from the city to the peninsula high-tech companies which employ them. We have outrage over the rising real-estate prices which these “techno geeks” can pay. We have, for example, libelous and cruel attacks in the Chronicle on our number-one celebrity, the author Danielle Steel, alleging that she is a “snob” despite the millions she has spent on our city’s homeless and mentally ill over the past decades.

This is a very dangerous drift in our American thinking. Kristallnacht was unthinkable in 1930; is its descendant “progressive” radicalism unthinkable now?

… and Malkin’s column prompted this response that correctly criticized both the left and populist right …

The economy is global. Always has been. Breakdowns in communist barriers have allowed prosperity to flow to the poorest people in the world. Those are not Americans. The only American prosperity that has existed since then has come in the form of profiting from foreign growth. Few Americans do this, and they tend to get quite wealthy as a result.

Xenophobes decry opportunity and success for those outside the magical lines that border our country and demand that we take what little they have to feed people inside the lines who already have far more. They invent copious “data” to justify their racism, but it is what it is.

They advocate creating more bureaucracy to bribe and lobby so that avenues for advancement other than pleasing customers become easier and honest work becomes harder, and they do this by suggesting that anyone who uses modern logistical technology to please millions or billions of customers has somehow stolen his wealth, even though they cannot show any particular instances of theft. The consequences of their actions – the corrupt rising above the honest – are blamed on their enemies instead of themselves, and they present more of themselves as the solution, ensuring an incestuous feedback loop.

Those who seek to eliminate the entire channel in which corruption exists are painted as the problem, as though the channel were the solution.

… while another criticized limousine liberals:

I always find it amusing when people such as the rapper mentioned criticize businessmen. Were we to make a list of the biggest parasites with the most undeservedly bloated paychecks, folks in the entertainment industry, especially “artists” would prominently figure at the top. A guy who funds businesses creating tens of thousands of jobs and gets rich thereby is some scheming money grubber who is undeserving of what he has, but some half-wit recites angry inarticulancies making millions thereby, which he usually proceeds to spend on conspicuous consumption and hedonistic pursuits (many of them not legal), and the latter feels the former is the untalented parasite.

Hollywood and much of the rest of the entertainment industry is hypocrisy central. And if you wish to find the truly undeserving idle rich who have too much money for too little economic reason, the true boil on democracy’s butt, there’s the best place to start.

Regular readers know that the actually pertinent unemployment measure is what the feds call U6 — the unemployed, plus those working part-time who want to work full-time, and those who have given up looking for work.

With the sensational job Barack Obama and his minions have done wrecking the American economy, what if the U.S. economy looks like this forevermore?

Consider a selection from the 22 Independent Journal “fun facts” about Obama’s economy that are not fun at all:

1. The Number Of Americans That Have Joined The Food Stamp Program Since Obama Took Office: 19.4 Million.

2. The Number Of People Unemployed At The End Of Obama’s Fifth Year As President: 10.4 Million.

3. The Number Of People Working Part-Time That Would Like To Work Full-Time: 7.8 Million.

4. The Number Of People That Have Entered Poverty Since 2008: 6.7 Million.

5. Americans Who Received Cancellation Notices For Their Health Plans Due To ObamaCare After Obama Promised They Could Keep Their Plans In His 2010 State Of The Union Address: 5 Million.

6. The Number Of Americans Struggling With Long-Term Unemployment Of 27 Weeks Or Over: 3.9 Million.

7. The Increase In Americans Struggling With Long-Term Unemployment Since Obama Became President: 1.2 Million.

8. Construction Jobs (aka “Shovel-Ready Jobs”) Lost Since Obama Took Office: 721,000.

9. Manufacturing Jobs Lost Since Obama Took Office: 528,000.

10. The Number Of People That Left The Labor Force In December: 347,000. …

14. The Decline In Median House Hold Income Since Obama Became President: $3,827.

15. Increase In Family Health Care Premiums Under Obama, Despite His Claim That ObamaCare Would Reduce Premiums During His 2010 State Of The Union Address (Subsidies Being Irrelevant): $3,671.

16. The Last Time The Labor Force Participation Rate Was At Its Current level: 1978.

17. Increase In The Average Price Per Gallon Of Gas Since Obama Took Office: 79%.

18. The Percent Of Unemployed That Are 18-34 Year Olds: 46%.

19. Average Number Of Weeks Someone Will Be Unemployed: 37.

All this prompts Mark Steyn to observe:

Who has a greater grasp of the economic contours of the day after tomorrow — [Amazon.com’s Jeff] Bezos or Obama? My colleague Jonah Goldberg notes that the day before the president’s speech on “inequality,” Applebee’s announced that it was introducing computer “menu tablets” to its restaurants. Automated supermarket checkout, 3D printing, driverless vehicles . . . what has the “minimum wage” to do with any of that? To get your minimum wage increased, you first have to have a minimum-wage job. …

What do millions of people do in a world in which, in Marxian terms, “capital” no longer needs “labor”? America’s liberal elite seem to enjoy having a domestic-servant class on hand, but, unlike the Downton Abbey crowd, are vaguely uncomfortable with having them drawn from the sturdy yokel stock of the village, and thus favor, to a degree only the Saudis can match, importing their maids and pool-boys from a permanent subordinate class of cheap foreign labor. Hence the fetishization of the “undocumented,” soon to be reflected in the multi-million bipartisan amnesty for those willing to do “the jobs Americans won’t do.”

So what jobs will Americans get to do? We dignify the new age as “the knowledge economy,” although, to the casual observer, it doesn’t seem to require a lot of knowledge. One of the advantages of Obamacare, according to Nancy Pelosi, is that it will liberate the citizenry: “Think of an economy where people could be an artist or a photographer or a writer without worrying about keeping their day job in order to have health insurance.” It’s certainly true that employer-based health coverage distorts the job market, but what’s more likely in a world without work? A new golden age of American sculpture and opera? Or millions more people who live vicariously through celebrity gossip and electronic diversions? One of the differences between government health care in America compared to, say, Sweden is the costs of obesity, heart disease, childhood diabetes, etc. In an ever more sedentary society where fewer and fewer have to get up to go to work in the morning, is it likely that those trends will diminish or increase?

Consider Vermont. Unlike my own state of New Hampshire, it has a bucolic image: Holsteins, dirt roads, the Vermont Teddy Bear Company, Ben & Jerry’s, Howard Dean . . . And yet the Green Mountain State has appalling levels of heroin and meth addiction, and the social chaos that follows. Geoffrey Norman began a recent essay in The Weekly Standard with a vignette from a town I know very well — St. Johnsbury, population 7,600, motto “Very Vermont,” the capital of the remote North-East Kingdom hard by the Quebec border and as far from urban pathologies as you can get. Or so you’d think. But on a recent Saturday morning, Norman reports, there were more cars parked at the needle-exchange clinic than at the farmers’ market. In Vermont, there’s no inner-city underclass, because there are no cities, inner or outer; there’s no disadvantaged minorities, because there’s only three blacks and seven Hispanics in the entire state; there’s no nothing. Which is the real problem. …

“Work” and “purpose” are intimately connected: Researchers at the University of Michigan, for example, found that welfare payments make one unhappier than a modest income honestly earned and used to provide for one’s family. “It drains too much of the life from life,” said Charles Murray in a speech in 2009. “And that statement applies as much to the lives of janitors — even more to the lives of janitors — as it does to the lives of CEOs.” Self-reliance — “work” — is intimately connected to human dignity — “purpose.”

So what does every initiative of the Obama era have in common? Obamacare, Obamaphones, Social Security disability expansion, 50 million people on food stamps . . . The assumption is that mass, multi-generational dependency is now a permanent feature of life. A coastal elite will devise ever smarter and slicker trinkets, and pretty much everyone else will be a member of either the dependency class or the vast bureaucracy that ministers to them. And, if you’re wondering why every Big Government program assumes you’re a feeble child, that’s because a citizenry without “work and purpose” is ultimately incompatible with liberty. The elites think a smart society will be wealthy enough to relieve the masses from the need to work. In reality, it would be neo-feudal, but with fatter, sicker peasants. It wouldn’t just be “economic inequality,” but a far more profound kind, and seething with resentments.