Stop Listening to Rich People

[n2doc]

Just because you’re a successful businessman doesn’t mean your policy ideas make any sense.

By Matthew Yglesias

“Kristallnacht was unthinkable in 1930,” observed a remarkable Jan. 24 letter to the editor published in the Wall Street Journal; “is its descendent ‘progressive’ radicalism unthinkable now?” The sensible answer, of course, is yes. It is totally unthinkable. And yet the letter writer, Tom Perkins of the important venture capital firm Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, thinks we should take the possibility very seriously. He wrote to draw attention to “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.’ ”

The sheer level of derangement on display here is remarkable, and has prompted a fair amount of armchair psychoanalysis of the American super-elite’s odd loathing of the moderate technocratic liberalism of the Barack Obama years. A Monday non-apology in which Perkins regretted the Holocaust analogy but nonetheless insisted that "any time the majority starts to demonize a minority, no matter what it is, it’s wrong and dangerous" hardly makes things better.

But the larger issue here is simply that the letter is extraordinarily stupid. Its author, successful as he was in business, was still perfectly capable of writing an extremely stupid letter to the editor. The political and historical analysis contained in the letter is stupid. But beyond that, the idea of publishing it was stupid. Anyone with the slightest sense of public opinion would recognize that the analogy is offensive and counterproductive. There is simply no viewpoint on economics or American politics from which writing this letter was anything other than stupid. And yet Tom Perkins, a very successful businessman and co-founder of one of the most important VC firms in the world, went and wrote it anyway.

Concurrently with the publication of the Perkins letter, a fair swathe of the world’s elite was gathered in Davos, Switzerland, for a conference based on the presumption that a Tom Perkins would never write a stupid letter. The presumption of the annual World Economic Forum meeting is that leading policymakers and scholars ought to mingle with very, very, very rich businessmen (and, yes, it’s overwhelmingly men) to talk about the leading issues of the day. The idea, in other words, is that CEOs and major investors have unique and important insights on pressing public policy issues. After all, they’re so rich! How could they not be smart?

Well, ask Tom Perkins. Or ask Michael Jordan how he could be so good at playing basketball and yet so bad at owning and managing the Charlotte Bobcats.

more

http://www.slate.com/articles/business/moneybox/2014/01/tom_perkins_and_the_davos_problem_it_s_time_to_stop_listening_to_rich_people.html

[frazzled]

1. People who make a lot of money are not smarter or more worthy

I think it's time to put that notion in the American culture to rest. Rich people aren't to be demonized (I get that), but they're not to be revered either. Their opinions, even on economic matters, are not more important than the ideas of some academic economist somewhere.

I've been wanting to send that message to Charlie Rose for more than a decade. Because he really seems to think these rich businessmen have something more valuable to say than anyone else.

[mindwalker_i]

2. John Hodgemen really should weigh in on this one

The Daily Show should do a segment with him where he goes all Colbert/Fire-Hose on it.