Buy pitchfork futures
by digby
Reading the Nick Hanauer piece that David flags below, I can’t help but be reminded of a little dust-up that happened back in 2010, when all the rich boys were whining to the newspapers about how tough it was to get by on their millions and how the plebes really didn’t understand how much worse it was to lose some of your income when you’re rich because you’re used to having so much more than a poor person. I used to used the pitchfork metaphor quite often.
In fact, at one point, writing about a particularly annoying screed by Ben Stein, I said “I’ll be sharpening my pitchfork. After all, according to these people I’ve got nothing to lose,” which evoked this response from conservative economist Tyler Cowan:
I read about this guy [me] and his pitchfork and it genuinely scared me, especially his description of Ben Stein and his intermingling of the political and the aesthetic.
I responded to that with a little reprise of Ben Stein’s greatest hits as a celebrity and actor and a political commentator. Talk about intermingling the political and the aesthetic …
Anyway, at the time I made this point, which I think Nick Hanauer would appreciate:
But Cowan’s argument [is] about whether or not people have a moral right to complain about money if they are better off than some portion of the population and I’m sure there is an interesting philosophical argument to be had about that. But that’s not really the point. Perhaps these people do have a right to complain without issuing a disclaimer that there are others who are worse off than they are. But regardless of where you come down in the moral argument, I think there’s little debate among decent people that it’s just plain tacky for people in the upper one percent to publicly complain about the fact that after saving 60k a year, paying for their million dollar home, fancy educations and servants that they don’t have much money left over for their well-deserved $200 dinners, much less taxes. Not to mention that it’s also just plain stupid to rub salt in the wounds of millions who lost their jobs and homes and futures in this stalled economy. The arch comment about pitchforks was meant to convey where this level of arrogant stupidity leads.
This is one of the things that’s puzzled me the most in the last couple of years. It’s one thing for the wealthy to lobby the government on their own behalf. There’s nothing new or even controversial in that. It’s always been the case. But it’s quite another for them to lobby the public with endless plaintive wails about how hard they have it in a time of economic crisis. They are in better shape than any time in history. Their tax rates are the envy of wealthy people all over the industrialized world. They have the leaders of both parties tied up in knots trying to keep the metaphorical pitchforks at bay. And still it’s not enough. They seem to need sympathy from the proles — their millions just aren’t enough to keep them warm at night.
If they’d kept a low profile and worked the politics solely behind the scenes, they’d probably get off with a modest tax hike, as few regulations as possible and they’d be back in business collecting their vastly outsized portion of the nation’s wealth with little notice. If they’d thrown a couple of sacrificial lambs to the slaughter and gone on a Celebrity rehab Mea Culpa tour, even better. Instead they keep whining and shrieking (and lying) about how unfair it is for them to pay slightly higher taxes on their bloated wealth, while the average worker is experiencing a huge, probably unrecoverable, contraction in their fortunes and expectations. It’s unnecessary and shortsighted and it only provides more evidence that the failure of the financial system wasn’t a fluke — it was because the wealthy elite aren’t as smart as they think they are.
This is a simple equation: when the majority of the population is hurting economically and your biggest problem is being unable to keep up with the Hiltons, it’s the better part of valor to STFU and suffer in silence. If you want to know why people have no faith in the elite institutions, this is exhibit one: those who run them seem to have the emotional maturity of 15 year old kids.
Hanauer has his work cut out for him if he expects to make the capitalist’s smartest self-interested case against being a total greedhead. I’m not sure this generation of Marie Antoinettes are reachable. And they’re intent upon taking the rest of us down with them.
The best play for a wily capitalist is to buy pitchfork futures …
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