Posted by
Duane Bolick on Monday, March 30, 2009 9:43:59 PM
So I was reading a blog today. The premise of this blog is that the authors collect humorous instant message transcripts from mostly young "professional" business people, working in such fields as investment banking, and various other well-paid finance jobs. These IM transcripts mostly describe the aftermath of these "professionals' " epic sessions of binge drinking, drug abuse, and just plain stupidity and irresponsibility. They mostly read something like this:
Hedge Fund Manager: OMG, i snorted how much blow last night? and then crashed my Bimmer into *what*? OMG LOLZZ!!1!
Junior Investment Banker: duderz, it was a homeless guy, plus you probly got AIDS from that hooker!
Hedge Fund Manager: im still drunk, and its 11:30am and im at work LOL! howd i get home>?
Junior Investment Banker: u drove home - EPIC WIN, FOR GREAT JUSTICE! im on like my 8th martini now!
Seriously, you might think I'm exaggerating, but I'm not, at all. I just took the liberty of combining the subject matter of a few of the blog posts into one. OK, so these examples are probably not representative of all the fine young men and women that work on the Street (just the ones educated at fine liberal-dominated ivy-league schools). But it got me mad as hell! I was thinking, "These people are in charge of how much money? And they (at least some of them) act like this? I mean, how can these scum possibly deserve their exorbitant salaries?!?" But then I caught myself - It's not my place (nor is it the government's, or anyone else's except the owner of a business) to decide how much salary a person "deserves." Any firm that hires too many puffed-up B-school morons at inflated salaries, will eventually lose out to leaner, more responsible competitors.
Even if I agreed with the typical lib argument that Wall Street salaries are too high because they all implicitly collude to keep them artificially elevated, eventually the industry as a whole would collapse, potentially fomenting the rise of a new breed of companies that would act more like a service-based company ought to: responsible good stewards of value they did not (and could not) create instead of self-styled "masters of the universe" that they imagine themselves to be.
And that's when the true implications of Democrat support for bailouts for these arbitrarily-chosen "too-big-to-fail" industries really hit me. Sure, it's about control (it always is), but not control of what the bailed-out companies do with the money, though Obama and Congress are certainly trying to do that in a spectacularly abusive and dangerous fashion. See, by bailing out corporations (and entire segments of the market) that were either too stupid, greedy, or bloated to succeed on their own, Democrats have managed to engender resentment. I'm even pissed off! I mean, that is (er- was) the beauty of capitalism - you don't have to get mad, or experience even the teeniest bit of lib outrage, because "karma" always wins, and resources always flow to their most valued uses.
But through this bailout sideshow, which is being done to ostensibly "save the capitalist system from its own excesses," Obama and friends are actually making a big, fat investment in lots of bad will towards corporations and the free market. In other words, value that was created in a free market is being used to fund class-based resentment, which is one of the dialectical pillars of Marxism. What supreme irony, and masterful, Machiavellian, and ultimately horrible politics on the part of the Democrats.