Mr. Harris over at Ipse Dixit has an excellent analysis and disassembly of Michael Kinsley’s latest Slate piece, “Return of the Class War”. This is why I loved reading his stuff back on Themestream and why I’m happy to find him still writing. An excerpt:
Gaze, my friends, at the living, beating heart of the Left. Here, in its natural habitat (an op-ed in an elitist, left-leaning publication), is the very essence of liberalism: The care and feeding of envy. No-one is wealthy but that they were blessed by “the luck of the draw.” Capitalism in America is a massive, US$10 trillion lottery in which the lucky few get to drive Rolls-Royces while the rest of us toil and sweat to make their lives of ease and idleness possible. But they accept this dreary lot because – hey! who knows? – maybe one day they’ll get the lucky hand and be given a key to the secret inner kingdom.
The facts: 80% of American millionaires are self-made. The average American millionaire earns US$150,000/year and drives a Ford. He lives modestly and saves 15% of what he earns. But you’d never know that reading to this quasi-Marxist pabulum.
Go read every damned word.
Oh, and I happen to work for two of those 80-percenters. In 1981 they risked everything they had to build a company – the company I’ve worked for the last 17 years, and that pays me a pretty damned good salary. I don’t begrudge them their money at all. They busted their asses for it, and I helped them get where they are.
And if I want to take the risk they did, perhaps in ten or fifteen years I too can have the kind of income they draw now. This is America – land of opportunity, not the land of handouts.