More on class

Leaving aside its overwrought style, the 2nd installment of the NYT series on class is a good one. It turns out that the rich live longer. So now we have not just a wealth test for office, but also a wealth test for life. Peachy. Remember all that crap about there being rationing if we adopted national health insurance? Well it turns out the we have rationing anyway, except that it's based on the size of your wallet. We should all be ashamed.

Elsewhere, Matt Yglesias and Ezra Klein buy into the bad argument that social stratification is okay as long as there is social mobility. The problem with this position is that it just accepts the "winner take all" society in which those at the very top of a profession or organization accrue all of the awards. There's a great Monty Python routine that demonstrates what's wrong here: when an educated man pompously asserts that Alexander the Great conquered the known world, the uneducated man asks "didn't he even have a cook?"

No accomplishment, however grand occurs in a vacuum. Any member which contributes success deserves commensurate rewards. There is another word describing a situation in which some reap the rewards from another's labor: exploitation. The extreme form of exploitation is called slavery. Perhaps you've heard of it.

So when the U.S. economy is growing, but wages are falling, employment is stagnant, and incomes are flat, while the top 10% gets all of the economic return, I don't call that okay. Even if the rich started out poor, it's still just slavery by any other name, and continues smell to high heaven.