wealth comes from working hard part deux

Earlier I was annoyed with conservative naievte about wealth

Hilzoy is on a similar meme regarding the "my money" crew 

 If you want to say that whatever the free market in its wisdom dictates that people are paid is fair, then the fair wage for people at AIG, Citi, and any other firm that would not have survived without government assistance is zero. If you want to use some other metric, then Julia Roberts et al are irrelevant. But you do not get to appeal to the marvels of the market to justify your exorbitant salary when times are good without accepting its conclusions when it implies that the fair value for your work is nothing.

And I don't even know what to say about this:

"There is rage at Obama for pushing to raise taxes ("The government wants me to be a slave!" says one hedge-fund analyst)"

If raising the marginal tax rate to 39.6% counts as "slavery", then I suppose that the fact that top marginal tax rates during the Truman, Eisenhower, and Kennedy administrations were over 90% is a Holocaust. Or, you know, maybe not.

Seriously: I recognize that it's tough when the world you've known disappears. It's less tough when that means that you have to figure out how to survive on a six-figure salary than it is when your house gets foreclosed on, but still. That said, the degree of self-delusion on display in this article is just astonishing.

They don't get the fact that it is abnormal when people right out of college or business school can command more money than most people will ever see in their lifetimes. They don't get the fact that the firms for which they worked produced an economic catastrophe that has reduced people all over the world to genuine poverty (as opposed to living on $75,000 in New York.) They don't get the fact that the compensation at those firms had a lot to do with that catastrophe. They don't get the fact that because of their greed and stupidity, we had to rescue those firms -- which means that their lifestyles are being supported by truckdrivers and pharmacists and primary school teachers across the country, many of whom would love to try to scrape by on $75,000 a year.

And they really don't seem to get what's wrong with this:

""I'm not giving to charity this year!" one hedge-fund analyst shouts into the phone, when I ask about Obama's planned tax increases. "When people ask me for money, I tell them, 'If you want me to give you money, send a letter to my senator asking for my taxes to be lowered.' I feel so much less generous right now. If I have to adopt twenty poor families, I want a thank-you note and an update on their lives. At least Sally Struthers gives you an update.""

How fortunate for that analyst that most of us don't feel the same way. Writing three hundred million thank you notes would take an awfully long time.

Posted via web from jimnichols's posterous