The loser’s heap

The Tribune threw a real zinger at us on Tuesday, where an Op-Ed feature (“America gets richer, but many still left behind”) moaned and whined about the fact that some people are rich, and some–oh, surprise!–aren’t.

The piece, penned by Baltimore Sun columnist Michael Olesker, shows that anyone with a glaring ignorance of economics should probably not write about it. When I read it I laughed so hard that coffee came out of my nose, which is remarkable given that I wasn’t even drinking coffee at the time.

Olesker features five whining women, who are, frankly, abject losers. They snivel and whine and lament how the free market economy has basically screwed them over. Olesker, who is obviously a card carrying member of the socialist media elite, calls–natch–for his beloved Socialist Party, known as the U.S. Democratic party, to Right All Economic Wrongs.

Here’s a choice quote from one of the five featured losers: “Here I am, not an educated person,” said Maryland Clevenger in the piece, as an introduction to her plight. Well, that’s just tough, isn’t it, Ms. Clevenger?
The future belongs to the educated people–the ones who invent and improve the computers we work on, develop the software that runs the modern world, invest the medicines that cure us when we’re sick, engineer the cars and airplanes that transport us…the modern world has been built by engineers and entrepreneurs, most of them, in some way, educated.

Where were you, Ms. Clevenger, while my pals and I were busting our brains in school, staying up all night studying, toiling away for years whilst eating peanut butter sandwiches and beans as starving students? I guess I didn’t see you there. And now you want a claim, an entitlement, to the fruits of my labor? Sorry, sweetheart, I don’t acknowledge your claim. If you were watching TV and drinking malt liquor while the rest of us were studying, I guess that makes you one thing: A loser.

Comrade Olesker then provides the Big Ugly Contrast by mentioning Dick Cheney’s multi- multi-million dollar take from Halliburton, where Cheney held the helm before taking the GOP’s veepship. Well, good for Mr. Cheney.
If Halliburton paid him big bucks, I’m sure he earned it. Halliburton, and the oil industry as a whole, do a lot for my life. They put gas in my car, electricity in the wall sockets, and fuel for airplanes I fly around in.

A free market will always have rich people, and poor people. The sneaky little secret that the socialists have is that socialist economies also have rich people and poor people–they just have a whole lot more poor people than free markets do.

The argument the socialists basically make is this: “The world has poor people, therefore, we need socialism.” That’s not exactly profound economic analysis if you ask me, but emotions, not reason, are what the socialists play to.

What the American socialists strive for–under the guise of “fairness” and “security”–is the system that has provided so much misery in the USSR and red China. You want to highlight human suffering? Your average Chinese would gladly, I’m sure, trade places with our uneducated Ms. Clevenger.

So I offer this suggestion. Ms. Clevenger, if the United States is so economically rotten, then why don’t you move to China? I’ll donate a thousand dollars towards your airfare, and I’ll raise the funds–in this very paper—to cover the rest of the cost.