Lunchtime Must-Read: Steve M. on the Class War Dialogue

Steve M.: Paul Krugman has responded to an article by National Review’s Kevin Williamson about poverty in Appalachia “‘Williamsons piece… has a moral: the big problem, it argues, is the way government aid creates dependency. It’s the Paul Ryan notion of the safety net as a ‘hammock’ that makes life too easy for the poor…. The underlying story of Appalachia is in fact one of declining opportunity…’

Williamson thinks the proper response to that is self-righteous smugness, with a dose of class warfare….

Professor Krugman and those who share his orientation see the bottom half, and maybe even the bottom 80 percent, of citizens as passive participants in economic life, not people who do things but people to whom things are done, the direct object in Lenin’s summary of politics: ‘Who? Whom?’ And from the point of view of the policymaking class — not just the progressive perches at Princeton but the policymaking class in general — it is easy to see the great majority of the American public as something like dogs exhibiting various degrees of ruliness while waiting for table scraps…

Or what, Kevin? What are people in coal country supposed to do if their job searches don’t result in… jobs, despite (perhaps) years of work experience and (perhaps) reschooling and retraining after the old jobs dried up, not to mention a hell of a lot of pavement-pounding?… Plenty are voting with their feet by getting the hell out…. As for the rest, many of whom might not be able to afford to leave (no cash, underwater homes) — what are they supposed to do? Become new-media entrepreneurs? Load up the truck and head to Silicon Valley for some venture capital?

This is the sort of right-wing arrogance that led Michelle Malkin, back in 2012, to say with a sneer, “Romney types, of course, are the ones who sign the front of the paycheck, and the Obama types are the one who have spent their entire lives signing the back of them”: the right simply believes that it’s disgraceful to be an ordinary worker in the job market, subject to its ups and downs. If you’re not a capitalist, you’re scum…. You simply can’t have an economy in which every single person is a sole proprietor. It’s a sign of right-wingers’ insane devotion to the cult of capitalist that they can’t grasp this, can’t grasp that we are not all absolute masters of our own fate…. If you’re arguing, that is, that benefits are the only reason people don’t have jobs–then that should have been just as true in 2006, say, as it is now, becuse just as many lazer takers should have been getting all those horrible benefits, just ’cause they like living that way. Is the decrease in labor-force participation since Wall Street crashed the economy really just a coincidence? Scummy liberal elitist minds want to know.