Kristof's columns are routinely reprehensibly dishonest and myopic, but this one is especially revealing in its analogy of choice:
Imagine a kindergarten with 100 students, lavishly supplied with books, crayons and toys.Kristof of course goes on from there to analogize the top 1 percent of wealth holders as the equivalent of that greedy kindergarten boy.
Yet you gasp: one avaricious little boy is jealously guarding a mountain of toys for himself. A handful of other children are quietly playing with a few toys each, while 90 of the children are looking on forlornly — empty-handed.The one greedy boy has hoarded more toys than all those 90 children put together!“What’s going on?” you ask. “Let’s learn to share! One child shouldn’t hog everything for himself!”
Well, let's make your analogy more accurate, Mr. Kristof, shall we?
Look again at where those boy's toys came from. Some were given to him by his parents. Some he received from a classroom system set up to reward those who worked hard in class. Some he bartered with other students who got a fair trade (candy, other toys, information, whatever) for the toy. None of the toys simply came from some communitarian pool of toys that he greedily hoarded.
After obtaining all his toys in such legitimate fashion, is it fair for the teacher to simply come and take them from him? Without compensation?
And here the analogy breaks down utterly because who the hell is this teacher?
Of course, we know the teacher is meant to represent the government. Kristof believes that citizens of this nation are to the government as a small child is to a teacher. To him we are not autonomous independent citizens of a republic. A classroom is not a republic. A classroom is a tyranny ruled by a dictator with awesome unilateral powers. That, apparently, is how Kristof wishes the U.S. was governed -- by a tyrannical federal government that believes all the wealth of the classroom -- erm, nation -- is really its to redistribute as it sees fit.
Of course, I know Kristof is a fan of democracy. But say all the other children voted to take that child's toys away. Yay! Democracy! It also sounds a lot like Lord of the Flies or the classic "two wolves and a sheep sitting around voting on what to have for dinner." Fortunately, thank God, we don't live in a democracy, we live in a constitutional republic.
Kristof's article and the analogy he bases it around is a nearly perfect distillation of the politics of greed. Kindergarteners are greedy, selfish, usually incapable of self-control, and prone to acts of cruelty and mass chaos. That's Kristof's America.
In the adult America, we have to look at issues with more than a Kindergartner's greedy perspective.
I take exception to Kristof's cherished inequality bugaboo. He lists some bullet points, starting off with "The six heirs of Sam Walton, the founder of Walmart, own as much wealth as the bottom 100 million Americans." (The article that Kristof links to for this point phrases it much differently, and more accurately, though ultimately, the article is as gross a mischaracterization of the situation as Kristof's:"In 2007, it was reported that the Walton family wealth was as large as the bottom 35 million families in the wealth distribution combined, or 30.5 percent of all American families.")
Well, who are those 100 million? They're overwhelmingly young families, just starting out. They have virtually no wealth, often negative wealth. (Update, to clarify: Negative wealth is when you have more debt than assets. If you're a bright, young neurosurgeon with a wife and child, just out of your internship, you may have a home mortgage, car payments, and tens of thousands of dollars of student loan debt. You are deep into negative wealth despite being a very prosperous and elite member of society. Simply having one more dollar in assets than debt is actually doing quite well in modern society were virtually nobody buys a home outright with cash. In fact, you can be a poor renter with nothing more valuable to your name than a 10-year-old Toyota and have more positive wealth than many people more affluent than you. Having a low or negative amount of wealth is by no means the terrible thing that Kristoff implies.). Is there any way one can argue that these people are entitled to a completely unearned piece of someone else's wealth? How would one even redistribute it meaningfully? Would the poor benefit from tearing the Walmart empire apart and parceling it out to them? Hardly.
Taxing the rich wouldn't make those poor people less poor. Name me anyone who has amassed wealth due to being a recipient of tax money who isn't already a wealthy business owner, a politician or a bureaucrat. It's a ridiculous idea that the government is better at creating jobs than an actual business like Walmart that creates jobs for millions of people.
The classic argument -- and where Kristoff goes with this -- is that the money should be used to educate the poor. Right. When you've been engaged in a cycle of dramatically increasing spending on public education and public funding of private education for more than 60 years and your results are flat, what you naturally think to do is ... spend more money.
The glut of public money for college tuitions has encouraged colleges to raise their costs far beyond the inflation rate for decades, locking students into mountains of public debt for less and less return. A big chunk of those 100 million Americans or 35 percent of American families who have less wealth than the Walmart heirs are in that bracket because of student loan debt!
In our elementary and high schools, we spend more per pupil, adjusted for inflation, than we ever have and we're not seeing better results. Kristof's desire to steal more and more from "the rich" isn't tied to any particular evidence that the money can be well-used, no less a moral justification for taking it.
Let's take a look at the poor, downtrodden 90 percent, again. Those poor waifs who sit by while that greedy kid has all the toys. Most of those people live better not only than most of the people on the planet, but better than most of the people who have ever lived in the history of mankind. The high water of American prosperity has raised all the boats. Frankly, Americans live so well and so healthily now, even at the lowest economic levels, that you simply can't mandate meaningful improvement in the American lifestyle.
The fact that a few at the top of the wealth scale have amazing, unheard-of levels of wealth is not a sign of injustice.
Furthermore, if I was in dire straits and had to turn to some group to help lift me out of poverty, who should I turn to?
The government? The government will give me unemployment for a couple years that might be meaningful if I had a significant work history to deserve it. They'll provide foodstamps and Temporary Assistance to Needy Families to keep me and my family from starving, but they're not getting me out of poverty. To get out of poverty I need a ... a ... what do you call it ... a job!
Hmmm. Where can I get a job? Oh ... Walmart. Or Target, or Microsoft, or IBM, or AT&T or one of the many large and small oil and gas companies benefitting from the private industry explosion in fracking and oil exploration. Hey, wait, all these things are ... private corporations run by millionaire CEOs, board members and stockholders!
I used to work for a newspaper owned and published by a multi-millionaire heir of a multi-millionaire family. The guy wasn't exactly a "man of the people." He spent his time in his private office suite and tooled around in a classic Rolls Royce. I always told people that what was good for that guy was good for me. Indeed, as his fortunes and the fortunes of newspapers in general have fallen, it's been very hard for the employees of that newspaper. Every one of them should have been pulling for him to continue to be as wealthy and successful as he wanted to be, because he and his family were the enablers of their employees success. The government wasn't going to step in and give those people the sorts of pay and opportunity that private one-percenter was.
I'll throw in my lot with living off the "scraps" of the one-percenters over the government any day, because the one-percenters are the enablers of all real wealth-creation.
When government takes money, from you or from the one percent, it spends some of it on legitimate government functions -- roads, police and national defense -- but an enormous chunk is simply squandered on enriching the power brokers in Washington and giving pork and favoritism to cronies of the elected officials and bureaucrats. The government power-broker class is the real "elite" of which we need to be wary.
The biggest chunk goes to entitlement programs. Government has succeeded in conning generations of citizens into believing that they're not competent to make arrangements for their own retirement and health care in order to build a giant, rickety ponzi scheme that sucks up a disproportionate share of the nation's wealth. But that's an article in itself.
Kristof's kindergarten analogy is an insult to adult U.S. citizens and has approximately the same moral weight as a kindergartener screaming because he's not getting to play with the toy he wants.
