I was happy to see that ED took on Andrew Sullivan’s silly post about liberals’ supposed refusal to acknowledge the awesome work ethic of some rich people.
What bothers me about Sullivan’s post — and this is the reason I find it impossible to take Sullivan seriously as commentator, despite a lot of thoughtful insights — is the obsession with what people are willing to “acknowledge”. In this context acknowledge always means “feel that”; it never refers to any actual policy decision. It’s a kissing cousin to “rooting for”. Democrats were rooting for failure in Iraq! I know that it’s a two-way street, we heard a lot about how Rush Limbaugh was rooting for Obama to fail, too.
It’s all fruit from the same poison tree that brought us “clap louder” and “who would you rather have a beer with”. Democrats need to clap louder in order to acknowledge the importance of victory in Iraq. I’d like to have a beer with George Bush because I know he acknowledges the power of the American dream. Obama needs to show us that he acknowledges that Americans are hurting and not just try to pass legislation that would help stop the hurting.
Why the fuck does it matter what Democrats are willing to acknowledge about how hard some rich people work when they’re not proposing a marginal tax rate much over 40%? For God’s sake, isn’t it enough that we don’t tax rich people much, now we have to get down on our knees and tell them how great they are for working so hard? And what would fellating these geniuses accomplish anyway? I guess maybe it would make them feel more appreciated so that they’d be less likely to go Galt. So everybody, drop what you’re doing and send Greg Mankiw an email telling him you appreciate how hard he works so that he doesn’t withhold his productivity.
Maybe this isn’t such a bad idea. If wealthy people are willing to accept higher marginal rates in return for bumper stickers that say “Obama says I’m a hard worker”, then I’m all for it, because we have a government to run and it requires tax money.
NobodySpecial
I’m willing to acknowledge that the little racist has no value to society. I’d like to tax stupidity at 125 percent, too, just so I could take everything from him down to the matchbooks he’d use to balance his tables.
I’d be quite happy to see Sullivan under a bridge, eating mechanically separated sparrow on a stick.
WereBear
What about other people who work hard? Those guys who got killed in that mine accident… didn’t they work hard, too?
arguingwithsignposts
Not. Gonna. Happen.
djheru
Minor quibble:
Democrats were rooting for failure in Iraq! I know that it’s a two-way street, we heard a lot about how Rush Limbaugh was rooting for Obama to fail, too.
Rush was literally rooting for Obama to fail. He said many times “I want him to fail”
I don’t recall dems doing the same vis a vis Iraq
Calvin Jones and the 13th Apostle
I have a serious question for Mankiw. Why don’t you just “Go Galt” already? I can guarantee with 100% certainty that you won’t be missed. And that our discourse will actually improve, if even just a little.
Ash Can
The ones who demand to be appreciated are the ones who need to go Galt in the first place. If it makes them finally run home and lock themselves in their rooms, vow never to come out again, and at long last get the goddamned hell out of the way, then by all means, diss away.
soonergrunt
The most productive think Mankiw and others like him could do would be to shoot themselves. I’d thank them then.
different church-lady
Here’s the thing I don’t get about the whole “the rich work harder” idea.
When I started in my career, I was making about $10 an hour. Today I make anywhere from $50 to $90 an hour.
And… (wait for it…) I’m not working any harder today. In fact, on a lot of days I’m working a lot less hard than when I was a kid.
It’s almost a willful delusion that these people have. And it’s one of the reasons I enjoy reading BJ: John is more than willing to call BS on this issue.
soonergrunt
@WereBear: No, they didn’t because they weren’t being paid tens of millions of dollars a year. That’s how this works.
Nobody who ever worked for less than $200k/year ever earned anything, especially government employees.
DougJ is the business and economics editor for Balloon Juice.
@different church-lady:
Even if they did work harder, they get paid for it, so why do we have to tell them what special hard workers they are. That’s what the money is for, to quote Don Draper.
Why do they need a pat on the head and a reacharound in addition to the high salary?
John Cole
Actually, Mr. Broder, Limbaugh actually was and is rooting for Obama to fail. The Democrats and IRaq- not so much.
Elia
I feel like you’re just missing how this “acknowledgement” idea is central to Oakeshott’s understanding of Augustine’s 3rd Epistle to his cousin and, thus, Sullivan’s principled, Whiggish, Tory, conservative, libertarian and, most of all, conservative conservatism.
BGinCHI
This is really fucking simple:
without a functioning society, made possible by the redistribution and circulation of wealth, no one will be able to become wealthy. I acknowledge that very rich people who don’t care about the context from which they made their money should not be surprised when poor, starving, hopeless people break down their gates and take it from them.
Why do the rich want to live in a Colonial empire? Why do they want to make this country resemble the 3rd World?
Do they think it will make us better at soccer?
Belafon (formerly anonevent)
@different church-lady: Those are the kinds of realities that I think cause people to stick their heads in the sand. One of the things we have set up in Capitalism is this idea that “experience” is an earnings multiplier. That somehow my having worked a lot of years means I’m worth more than someone younger. Imagine if we thought of cars that way.
If we acknowledge this, though, then most people would begin to realize that this system is shaky and really cannot be sustained.
someofparts
speaking of demolishing Sullivan’s point –
http://www.angrybearblog.com/2010/10/why-correlation-between-top-marginal.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+blogspot%2FHzoh+%28Angry+Bear%29
Nick
@BGinCHI:
Have you seen how the rich live in the third world?
Mnemosyne
@DougJ is the business and economics editor for Balloon Juice.:
Because they know they don’t actually deserve it. It’s the classic narcissist’s construction: deep down inside, they feel unworthy, so they have to construct a big persona to compensate.
Same thing here. The rich know that no one deserves to make $50 million a year, so they have to rationalize it and convince themselves that they are somehow especially worthy. They need other people around them to constantly reinforce that for them. And they become enraged if anyone so much as hints that they’re making that kind of money because of their connections, not because they’re such special snowflakes.
El Cid
If Democrats would only acknowledge their continual vows to guillotine
the aristocracymulti-millionaires and billionaires, then we could move on.After all, it should be pretty clear to everyone that Wall Street hedge fund managers work hard and are thus worth 20,000 times the median yearly household income.
Joseph Nobles
OT: I have finally understood the MERS mess for mortgages, thanks to dday over at FireDogLake. Essentially, the financial institutes co-opted the government function of recording loans. MERS built a shell organization with zero employees called MERS Inc. That shell became the legal mortgagee on 60% of mortgages in the country. Internally, MERS could assign the mortgage to any lender they needed to, but since MERS Inc. was the legal mortgagee, the lender saved around $22 a transfer. And all of that worked super fine when the housing market was boom. But when it went bust so quickly, MERS was completely overwhelmed by the work (they only have 60 employees themselves).
They privatized mortgage registration. Thanks, financial institutions!
MikeBoyScout
Low Net Worth Individuals (LNWI) are persecuting our John Galts!
To the barricades!
different church-lady
@DougJ is the business and economics editor for Balloon Juice.: I understand the questions are rhetorical, but I guess the answer is that apparently there’s some kind of linkage to being a ruthless capitalist and having a fragile ego.
At this point I think whining may be the country’s biggest export.
PeakVT
Why do the rich want to live in a Colonial empire?
Because their relative wealth would be greater.
BGinCHI
@Nick: Yes, and that’s what I’m saying. It’s a completely Pyrrhic way to be wealthy. You scorch the earth and then have to live there. I realize they can just stay inside the compound, but Jesus, don’t they at least want to get out sometimes?
I thought the idea that “you shouldn’t shit where you eat” was pretty obvious.
Jose Padilla
I have a client. She’s a single mom with two kids. She works five twelve-hour shifts a week at a dry cleaners (7-7). She also works all the Saturday shifts she can get. She also works two hours a night Mon-Wed-Fri cleaning the house of an elderly woman. My client works 66-78 hours a week makes about $42,000 a year with no health care benefits. Somehow, I don’t think this is the kind of person Mr. Sullivan has in mind.
Martin
I would like to see the nations farmers, you know the guys who actually go out in the fields every day, go galt.
Then let’s have a conversation on how the upper classes are so necessary and so individually productive that they can’t face a progressive tax rate. Let’s see who really keeps this country functioning.
And when the farmers go back to work, let’s have all cashiers go galt. Then the truck drivers. I’m pretty sure each of them will bring this country to a screeching halt much faster than the investment bankers would.
Obama should give Mike Rowe a cabinet position.
BGinCHI
@Jose Padilla: Exciting Christmas gift idea: Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged, with slipcover.
You could give her fish, or teach her to be a selfish fisherwoman. You decide.
different church-lady
@Mnemosyne: Wait, wait… it’s not that nobody deserves to earn $50 mil a year — let’s just put that whole argument aside for a second…
I think the really offensive part is when someone earning $50 million a year wants you to somehow believe that they deserve it because they worked 1000 times harder than someone earning $50 thousand a year. Like a unit of money automatically equals a unit of effort.
It’s crazy. It’s bullshit. It’s lazy thinking. And people want to base policy on it.
BGinCHI
@Martin: Great idea for a TV show on Comedy Central.
They send Mike Rowe out to do the job of an investment banker or some other financial genius. At the end he’s full, well-rested, a little tipsy, then he says his signature line: “that’s great work if you can get it.”
Cris
Why the fuck does it matter how hard they worked? Let’s say that the CEO who makes 250 times the salary of his lowest-paid workers really does work 250 times as hard. So what? He has the means to pay more taxes. He pays more taxes. The end.
Tonybrown74
Bearing in mind that Rush actually SAID that he wanted Obama to fail …
Cat
Andrew Sullivan is British. Just because he speaks English doesn’t mean the words he uses have the meaning you expect them to. They are filled with the cultural meanings of British society.
When he says “acknowledge” he’s really saying, the lower class need to respect the upper classes as their betters. You can disagree with the upper class, but only by acknowledging they are right in order to show proper deference to them.
I would assume everywhere he says “acknowledge” is in a situation where the people who need “acknowledging” are rich upper class members of society.
This is the British way.
Montysano
@Martin:
Excellent point. This is why the immigration issue is such a maddeningly phony debate. If every undocumented worker were magically gone tomorrow, this country would struggle to function.
Cat
@Belafon (formerly anonevent):
If cars became more productive as they aged we would think of cars this way.
I am easily 2x more productive then I was 15 years ago when I was making about half of what I make now. Which given inflation is probably now where near 2x as much, but oh well.
I’m not really sure if you meant what you think you meant.
Kryptik
@Jose Padilla:
Obviously, she’s not working hard enough otherwise she’d have a summer home in the Hamptons, like all decent hard working folk do.
Seriously, it’s gone from admiration of wealth to the fetishization of it. The deification of the dollar. The double warping of the Golden Rule: ‘Do unto others before they do unto you’ and ‘Whoever has the gold makes the rules’. You see it in saying that the poor get too many damn breaks and are ‘lucky duckies’ for being afforded the privilege of not paying income tax on their meager earnings, while tantruming that the top 1% deserve more breaks, or else they’ll take society down over everyone’s heads.
What’s disturbing about it all is how Americans are both totally oblivious to this and yet embrace it wholeheartedly. It’s like accepted gospel that the only reason people are poor or are on welfare or unemployment is because they’re lazy mooches, feeding off the teat of the virtuous ‘producers’ from which all good things in this country come from, and how dare you question them.
R-Jud
@Cat:
It’s the Tory way. Thanks.
Michael
Our Fake Meritocracy did a good job for years of locking minorities and poor white trash out of the upper rungs of finance, manufacturing and politics. Nowadays, though, the inheritors of the inheritors can’t seem to juggle enough to spread the goodies around.
Anecdotally, I’m seeing some trends among prone-to-wingnutty Gen Jones and GenX types that don’t bode well. Among the sort of niche positions in insurance sales, law, accountancy and the like, the sort of careers that would have led to a comfortable sort of coasting 30 years ago (with more than adequate resources for golf, mistresses, lazy times laying around and the like for somewhat dull white guys), the money just isn’t there. They’re now having to work hard and are failing in high numbers, and they don’t like it.
I’m sure there are negroes to blame, or something.
Cris
@Martin: That’s called a “general strike” and it actually happens. That’s what Ayn Rand was getting at: she saw all these laborers demanding some dignity and demonstrating that the machines of industry can’t function without them, and got all huffy about it. “Well, you think you’re so important, nobody appreciates how important the boss is! Do they! What if the boss went on strike, huh?”
So real laborers can’t “go Galt.” Laborers go on strike, and they put their livelihoods on the line to do it. Going Galt is the fantasy of the upper class who think going on strike is some kind of fun vacation.
ChrisS
@Montysano:
When the working class goes Galt, it’s an affront to capitalism (e.g., labor unions).
El Cid
Funny enough, quite a number of the super-ultra-rich robber barons of the 1920s and 1930s helped design and back New Deal programs, because they preferred stability and long-term development of the country over chaos and risk and the likelihood that the economy’s ongoing weaknesses could harm their goals of remaining rich and successful forever.
Cat
@R-Jud:
Funny, I notice almost all of the party leaders for Labour and the LibDems are public school grads.
How many MP’s went to a comprehensive?
Britain still have a huge issue with classism.
Glenndacious Greenwaldian (formerly tim)
I ALWAYS hoped that the U.S. adventure in Iraq would be a disaster, which it certainly has proven to be.
An unqualified “success,” whatever that would look like, would only lead to more invasions and death and dismemberment down the road.
I root for every illegal, immoral war of aggression to fail, and I don’t give a fuck WHAT country it is.
El Cid
@Glenndacious Greenwaldian (formerly tim): You seem to have forgotten that THE SURGE (hallowed be its name) fixed all the problems in Iraq.
dirge
@Cris:
General strikes are usually met with police, private paramilitary or military force. That’s why you don’t see them very frequently.
ThatLeftTurnInABQ
@Cris:
Cool. I suggest they go on vacation to Ludlow, CO. Then we can do a historical re-enactment, of sorts.
superluminar
@Cat: the labour leader, Ed Miliband, went to a comprehensive, actually. But in general, your point about classism is on the ball.
grumpy realist
Going Galt is nothing more than the adult fantasy version of the toddler holding his breath until he turns blue.
What none of the people who threaten to go Galt ever want to admit: they’re really not Special Geniuses without whom the economy will fall. “Go Galt”, and I guarantee that any company/university/entourage/whatever can replace them in 10 seconds. Or less.
Cat
@superluminar:
My mistake.
Just Some Fuckhead
Mrs. Fuckhead and I have been working 40+ hour/week jobs since we were 16 years of age, 28 years total now. Prolly had one real vacation in that time. The other handful were working vacations where we started each morning on our laptops taking care of business for a few hours.
From whom do we request our 50 million dollar paydays, Sully?
The rest of you can kiss my hardworking ass slowly and with great feeling.
daveNYC
It’s not enough that they succeed, everyone else must fail. And as others have said, being part of the ‘haves’ really rocks in a third world country. In the US, it’s at least possible that someone from the ultra-rich could get in trouble and sent to jail.
Yeah, a general strike would be interesting. In the sense it’d be interesting to see all the state’s rights people demanding that the Feds step in and get the loafers back to work. Didn’t farmers try something kind of like that back during the dust bowl/depression? Think they got put down pretty quick.
DickSpudCouchPotatoDetective
There are, as you say, a lot of reasons to avoid Sullivan.
At least you picked one. And it’s a worthy one.
Now if you guys can just avoid talking about him all the fucking time. I have no idea why a bunch of really smart guys would get together and decide to write a blog about the dumbest dumb asses on the planet and what dumbass things they are saying and doing every day.
Forget the concern about the value of rich people. How about some love for the value of the smart people? Maybe a token smart person article now and then.
If the world were a real meritocracy, rich people would have no particular standing. And Andrew Sullivan would be working at McDonalds.
Cris
Let’s see, he’s 40 years old, times twenty-five grand…whoa, he’s a millionaire!
BDeevDad
WTF. The missing in this logic is that the people calling for higher taxes are not rich. Many billiionaires (with a B) have said the tax system is not right and they should be taxed at a higher rate.
Warren Buffett has acknowledged the fact that he is taxed at a lower rate than his secretary because most of his income is from capital gains and has stated publicly that this is wrong. Will Sullivan acknowledge that Warren Buffett knows more about the work ethic of the rich and what it has to do with tax policy?
John Bird
I’m just surprised that these writers don’t realize how they’re going to look to history.
My classes from elementary school to college were full of unintentionally amusing little essays by jackasses of yore explaining how the privileged of their time (imperialists, slave-holders, robber barons, the Nixon administration) got there through gumption, willpower, and their own stick-to-it-iveness.
These were easily the biggest laughs out of anything assigned; not even those who believe such myths can read an extended ass-kiss on paper and suppress their mirth.
The only people who will nod sagely and pen a concurring opinion are a tiny gaggle of idiots sans editors who have come to believe that they always have something smart to say about anything. Andrew Sullivan is perhaps the second or third example I’d offer if I had to make a list.
asiangrrlMN
@Martin: I am with you on this. I really think having actual laborers strike for a week or two at a time would be an eye-opener to all these moaner and groaners.
You get paid for your fucking productivity–and handsomely, to boot. Come on! I thought y’all were supposed to be rugged individuals and manly men and shit. What a bunch of wusses.
@different church-lady: Actually, I agree with Mnemosyne. No one deserves to make that much money a year. It’s just obscene.
Sully is an idiot who writes exceptionally well and speaks with a British accent.
Pat
Andrew should tell us how to do it too because I’m too damn busy getting my rent money together for the first. What a pompous asshole, in plain English!
Chris
Kudos for pegging the disingenuity of Sullivan insisting first that we accept the conservative frame.
And I suppose it’s just a byproduct of the right’s ’60s-based jealousy and indignation that they’re now demanding that we validate their feelings.
debbie
Part of the reason rich people have as much as they do is that they pay so little for many of the products and services they enjoy. If the burger flipper who made their lunch got a livable wage or their landscapers could earn a comfortable life for themselves, the food would cost plenty more and there’d be a lot fewer herbal topiaries. Imagine the complaints then!