Always Fun To Read

Victor Davis Hanson on things...

But two observations: why do privileged, entrenched white elites in the NY-DC axis always give soap-box lectures about the beauty of diversity while never (?) stepping aside themselves from their jobs to jump-start the up and coming careers of the other? (For 21 years I watched tenured senior white male professors lecture their departments on affirmative action, then hire by race and gender, and turn away young white male candidates by rote, who usually were far stronger applicants than these diversity prophets ever had been, who were mostly hired by old boy networks in the 1960s and 1970s.)

I think we surely could use more diversity at the New Republic, Vanity Fair, the New York Times, the Nation, Time, Newsweek (its managing editors are mostly white guys), etc. in editing, publishing, and advertising. And why are we to assume that a non-white citizen won’t intermarry out of their race, or won’t get tired of paying 50% of his income in taxes to the federal and state government for redistribution schemes that make things worse rather than better? What we have here is a lot of easy pronouncement and very little actual diversity in practice. Ms. Kennedy seems the emblem of all this for our times: Is the price for privilege going up to Harlem once in your life to have lunch with Al Sharpton—and, then, presto, you’re a woman of the people (rather than say, having five kids in Wasilla?) Surely, she should have been out lobbying for some very hard-working African-American or female New York state or federal legislators who all paid their dues, and, to be considered for a Senate seat, simply need a boost to overcome the old money-status-insider firewall.

Another prior post which rings true:

The message in all of these cases is now becoming unmistakable: if you are hyper-wealthy, gamble with someone else’s money, and lose big-time, then the government will cover your losses. Or better yet, work for a quasi-government agency where the bonuses are yours, while the losses belong to the public. If you build the wrong car, and bet wrongly on the future price on gas, then your successful gambles make you rich, and in times of miscalculation your government covers your losses. And if you buy a house beyond your means, or decide it makes no sense to pay off the mortgage, then someone or something, not you, failed to honor your debt.

But what happens if you are not enormously rich and not rather poor—and, worse still, made the ethical, but old-fashioned decision to pay your debts and not default on what you owe others?