Let Them Eat Cake
Matt Yglesias points to a great article by Louis Uchitelle in the NYTimes about our new Gilded Age tycoons and how they "earned it." I agree with Matt on the key quotes:
The Question of TalentOther very wealthy men in the new Gilded Age talk of themselves as having a flair for business not unlike Derek Jeter’s “unique talent” for baseball, as Leo J. Hindery Jr. put it. “I think there are people, including myself at certain times in my career,” Mr. Hindery said, “who because of their uniqueness warrant whatever the market will bear.”
He counts himself as a talented entrepreneur, having assembled from scratch a cable television sports network, the YES Network, that he sold in 1999 for $200 million. “Jeter makes an unbelievable amount of money,” said Mr. Hindery, who now manages a private equity fund, “but you look at him and you say, ‘Wow, I cannot find another ballplayer with that same set of skills.’ ”
A handful of critics among the new elite, or close to it, are scornful of such self-appraisal. “I don’t see a relationship between the extremes of income now and the performance of the economy,” Paul A. Volcker, a former Federal Reserve Board chairman, said in an interview, challenging the contentions of the very rich that they are, more than others, the driving force of a robust economy.
(Emphasis supplied.) Hindery seems to believe he benefitted not at all from anything the government and society provided him, from infrastructure, to legal recourse, to customers who could afford what he was selling. All hail the great Hindery! Let the rest eat cake. More.
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