Here’s pretty much the sum total of what I have to say about the “Donald Sterling is a racist” brouhaha

The New Neo Posted on by

I’m not going to waste time listening to the tape of a conversation between the 81-year-old billionaire owner of the Clippers and his 20-something girlfriend that has everyone in an uproar about his racism.

It’s a private conversation, for goodness sake. At least it was, before the girlfriend [euphemism] recorded it and had it publicized. From the summaries I’ve read, it seems that Sterling’s racism is some blend that involves feeling sexually threatened by the GF going out with black men and flaunting it by publishing photos of herself with the guys.

Well, now Sterling’s got a lot more than that to worry about.

In sum: I am not interested in exposing anyone’s private thoughtcrime racism, sexism, anything-ism you can name—even if the “ism” is against a group of which I’m a member. What am I interested in? Discriminatory acts, including membership in an organization devoted to the promotion of racist policies. Behavior, that is, not speech or mere thought. People can be racist or sexist or even neoneoconist in their secret hearts of hearts and I won’t make a fuss, as long as they don’t do it in the street and scare the horses.

Do I like racism or approve of it? No. Do I want to associate with Donald Sterling? No, no, a thousand times no. I was much happier before I even heard of the loathsome guy and his paramour.

But—and this is the most important part—I think people are entitled to think the way they want, and to express those thoughts in private without fear of being recorded and having the results blasted all over the news. I’m funny that way.

And most people used to think the same thing. At least I think they did. That’s why we have little things called wiretapping laws:

California’s wiretapping law is a “two-party consent” law. California makes it a crime to record or eavesdrop on any confidential communication, including a private conversation or telephone call, without the consent of all parties to the conversation. See Cal. Penal Code § 632. The statute applies to “confidential communications” — i.e., conversations in which one of the parties has an objectively reasonable expectation that no one is listening in or overhearing the conversation. See Flanagan v. Flanagan, 41 P.3d 575, 576-77, 578-82 (Cal. 2002). A California appellate court has ruled that this statute applies to the use of hidden video cameras to record conversations as well. See California v. Gibbons, 215 Cal. App. 3d 1204 (Cal Ct. App. 1989).

If you are recording someone without their knowledge in a public or semi-public place like a street or restaurant, the person whom you’re recording may or may not have “an objectively reasonable expectation that no one is listening in or overhearing the conversation,” and the reasonableness of the expectation would depend on the particular factual circumstances. Therefore, you cannot necessarily assume that you are in the clear simply because you are in a public place.

If you are operating in California, you should always get the consent of all parties before recording any conversation that common sense tells you might be “private” or “confidential.” In addition to subjecting you to criminal prosecution, violating the California wiretapping law can expose you to a civil lawsuit for damages by an injured party. See Cal. Penal Code § 637.2.

Are most people even aware of these laws? Do most people understand their importance? Do most people think that outing racists trumps their right to privacy? I suspect as much, but I shudder to think so.

[ADDENDUM: And then there’s this:

Sterling’s wife is embroiled in a bitter lawsuit against V. Stiviano, who she alleges in the suit, “engages in conduct designed to target, befriend, seduce, and then entice, cajole, borrow from, cheat, and/or receive as gifts transfers of wealth from wealthy older men whom she targets for such purpose. Plaintiff is informed and believes and theron alleges that One such target was D. Sterling.”

The lawsuit, filed on by Rochelle H. Sterling on March 7 of this year, lists the defendant as V. Stiviano, aka Vanessa Maria Perez, aka Monica Gallegos, aka Maria Monica Perez Gallegos, aka Maria Valdez.

The suit claims Sterling bought Stiviano a 2012 Ferrari, two Bentleys and a 2013 Range Rover, with a total exceeding $500,000…

The Clippers, in a statement Saturday, said, “We do know that the woman on the tape ”” who we believed released it to TMZ Sports ”” is the defendant in a lawsuit brought by the Sterling family, alleging that she embezzeled more than $1.8 million, who told Mr. Sterling that she would get even.”

I’d say she’s succeeded.]

Spring’s coming!

The New Neo Posted on by

Yes, I know that technically spring’s been here for quite a while. But northern climes don’t get to see it so quickly.

In 1913, about a hundred years ago, Robert Frost wrote about the transition of the seasons in one of his earlier poems. It still has some archaic language of the type he jettisoned not long after (“whate’er”; “o’er”). But it’s so beautiful:

TO THE THAWING WIND

Come with rain. O loud Southwester!
Bring the singer, bring the nester;
Give the buried flower a dream;
make the settled snowbank steam;
Find the brown beneath the white;
But whate’er you do tonight,
bath my window, make it flow,
Melt it as the ice will go;
Melt the glass and leave the sticks
Like a hermit’s crucifix;
Burst into my narrow stall;
Swing the picture on the wall;
Run the rattling pages o’er;
Scatter poems on the floor;
Turn the poet out of door.

Here’s a Frostian companion piece (1915), for the coming of late autumn and its segue into winter:

NOW CLOSE THE WINDOWS

Now close the windows and hush all the fields:
If the trees must, let them silently toss;
No bird is singing now, and if there is,
Be it my loss.

It will be long ere the marshes resume,
It will be long ere the earliest bird:
So close the windows and not hear the wind,
But see all wind-stirred.

But let’s not worry about that now. It’s April!

Andrew McCarthy on Obama and Holder’s drug pardons

The New Neo Posted on by

McCarthy strongly criticizes Obama and Holder here. It’s worth reading the whole thing; too bad most Americans won’t read even a single sentence of it. Here’s an excerpt:

…[I]n making a mockery of his core constitutional duty to execute the laws faithfully, the broad law-enforcement discretion the Constitution vests in the executive branch has been President Obama’s preferred sleight of hand…Thus is “prosecutorial discretion” the subterfuge for usurping congressional law-making power ”” the maze of unilateral waivers, amendments, and whole-cloth weaving that marks Obama’s enforcement of the “Affordable” Care Act, the immigration laws, and other federal statutes.

Alas, the next item on the transformational-change agenda is undoing prior administrations’ faithful execution of the narcotics laws. The forward-looking prosecutorial-discretion doctrine is unavailing to address the past. That is where the pardon power comes in…

President Obama and Attorney General Eric Holder, will use the executive’s pardon power to rewrite the narcotics statutes. This is a gross abuse. The pardon power exists to mitigate injustice in individual cases. The president, to the contrary, proposes to use it to target laws he disagrees with ”” laws whose constitutionality is beyond dispute but to which he objects on policy grounds. Which is to say: laws that it is his solemn constitutional duty to execute faithfully, not undermine.

As usual, the administration’s story is rife with fraud. Holder carefully talks about “non-violent” drug “offenders.” Obama riffs about “kids or individual users” supposedly “lock[ed] up . . . for long stretches of jail time.” You are left to imagine poor addicts who never hurt anyone but themselves, languishing for decades in some super-max prison. Yet federal drug enforcement targets felony drug dealers, not simple possession of drugs ”” the latter is left to the states. Mere users of marijuana and crack are not wasting away in federal penitentiaries. Moreover, an offender sentenced under a mandatory-minimum provision has necessarily committed a significant narcotics felony; the felony distribution of minor amounts of narcotics is not subject to a mandatory minimum, and judges maintain discretion to sentence those offenders to little or no jail time. Obama and Holder are talking about freeing what could amount to thousands of serious criminals…

A lawless president does more than violate his oath and demonstrate his unfitness. He forfeits trust. You say you want immigration reformed? You say you want drug policy rethought? Opinions on these matters vary widely, but one thing is for certain: It makes no sense to legislate on a subject that hinges on effective law enforcement unless you can trust that the law you pass will be the law. That means you have to be able to trust the president. With this president, it means waiting for the next president.

Obama and Holder’s actions should be of bipartisan concern. It is outrageous that they are not.

The comments section of McCarthy’s article is interesting to read, as well. A lot of the comments are from Obama’s supporters, praising him and excoriating McCarthy for ignoring the fact that presidents have broad pardon power. They do, but as McCarthy states in his essay:

The pardon power exists to mitigate injustice in individual cases. The president, to the contrary, proposes to use it to target laws he disagrees with ”” laws whose constitutionality is beyond dispute but to which he objects on policy grounds. Which is to say: laws that it is his solemn constitutional duty to execute faithfully, not undermine.

It’s true that the Constitution does not explicitly limit the sort of thing Obama/Holder are doing here. But that could be because it may have been considered obvious that getting around constitutional laws by pardoning broad classes of people who violate a certain law would in itself be a violation, perhaps even worthy of impeachment.

If you want to read about the legal status of presidential pardons, see this. It seems fairly clear to me that almost all previous presidential pardons (and the entire process that has grown up to expedite them) have applied to individuals or to groups of people engaged in a particular incident (such as, for example, Washington’s pardon of the leaders of the Whiskey Rebellion, as opposed to pardoning anyone participating in acts of rebellion). There is one glaring exception, however: Jefferson’s pardon of editors violating the extremely controversial Alien and Sedition Acts.

It’s instructive to go back and look at what Jefferson did, and what people have had to say about it since. The Alien and Sedition Acts were extremely notorious even in their own day for seeming to violate the principles of free speech and freedom of the press. Unlike the far more pedestrian narcotics laws Obama and Holder are affecting by their acts of pardon, the Alien and Sedition Laws had never been subject to Supreme Court judicial review, since the right to do so had not yet been established yet by Marbury vs. Madison. But this was the situation:

The Democratic-Republicans made the Alien and Sedition Acts an important issue in the 1800 election. Thomas Jefferson, upon assuming the Presidency, pardoned those still serving sentences under the Sedition Act, though he also used the acts to prosecute several of his own critics before the acts expired…While government authorities prepared lists of aliens for deportation, many aliens fled the country during the debate over the Alien and Sedition Acts, and Adams never signed a deportation order.

The Alien and Sedition Acts were never appealed to the Supreme Court, whose right of judicial review was not established until Marbury v. Madison in 1803. Subsequent mentions in Supreme Court opinions beginning in the mid-20th century have assumed that the Sedition Act would today be found unconstitutional.

Jefferson and James Madison also secretly drafted the Kentucky and Virginia Resolutions denouncing the federal legislation, though many other state legislatures strongly opposed these resolutions. Though the resolutions followed Madison’s “interposition” approach, Jefferson advocated nullification and at one point drafted a threat for Kentucky to secede. Jefferson’s biographer Dumas Malone argued that this might have gotten Jefferson impeached for treason, had his actions become known at the time. In writing the Kentucky Resolutions, Jefferson warned that, “unless arrested at the threshold,” the Alien and Sedition Acts would “necessarily drive these states into revolution and blood.” Historian Ron Chernow says of this “he wasn’t calling for peaceful protests or civil disobedience: he was calling for outright rebellion, if needed, against the federal government of which he was vice president.” Jefferson “thus set forth a radical doctrine of states’ rights that effectively undermined the constitution.” Chernow argues that neither Jefferson nor Madison sensed that they had sponsored measures as inimical as the Alien and Sedition Acts themselves. Historian Garry Wills argued “Their nullification effort, if others had picked it up, would have been a greater threat to freedom than the misguided [alien and sedition] laws, which were soon rendered feckless by ridicule and electoral pressure.” The theoretical damage of the Kentucky and Virginia resolutions was “deep and lasting, and was a recipe for disunion”. George Washington was so appalled by them that he told Patrick Henry that if “systematically and pertinaciously pursued”, they would “dissolve the union or produce coercion”. The influence of Jefferson’s doctrine of states’ rights reverberated right up to the Civil War and beyond.

These are far from trivial questions, although the states’ rights issue does not come up in the present situation re Obama, Holder, and the drug pardons. However, it is clear that pardoning a class of criminals is an exceedingly unusual act even under the presidents’ broad pardon powers, and that Obama and Holder’s announcement should arouse tremendous outrage and concern.

Of course, that’s true of an awful lot of what they’ve done. But it’s only the right that seems to care.

The war on e-cigarettes…

The New Neo Posted on by

…reminds me of the war on little schoolkids making gun gestures with their hands.

Instead of worrying about the thing itself, people are worrying about a simulacrum of the thing.

Why would people who are against smoking because of its unhealthful and unpleasant effects be against something that markedly and dramatically reduces those effects both for the smoker and those around him/her? E-cigarettes are more effective in the difficult process of quitting smoking than other methods are, and they are cheaper.

Is the campaign against them in part to protect the drug industry’s corner on the stop-smoking market? That’s probably at least part of the reason. Still another, though, is that the anti-smoking contingent has in recent years taken on a quasi-religious crusading and fanatical aspect. Everything about cigarettes is evil, evil, evil, and anything resembling a cigarette is to be stomped out.

Will these, sophisticated treat of my cigarette-smoke-wreathed (my mother was a heavy smoker till I was about 9) youth, be next on the hit list?:

candycigs

Once I wrote that last sentence and found that photo and added it to the post, I began to wonder if I wasn’t in fact behind the times. Have candy cigarettes already been banned? It would seem that way:

Candy cigarettes have officially been banned by the Food and Drug Administration.

The ban is a part of the Family Smoking Prevention and Control Act. Officials have been arguing for years to eliminate candy cigarettes because of the likelihood that children would eventually move on to the real thing.

A recent poll revealed that 22 percent of current or one-time smokers ate candy cigarettes during their childhood. On the contrary, just 14 percent of non-smokers used the fake cigarettes.

Flavored cigarettes were banned a year ago when the original law was put into act. Now all of the fake smokes have been banned.

However, according to Wiki, that is incorrect; the law only applies to flavored cigarettes, not the candy industry. Other countries have gone so far as to ban them, but the US hasn’t followed suit yet.

For the record: I’m a nonsmoker and hate being around cigarettes. But I’m very very pro e-cigarettes, and I loved candy cigarettes as a child. But I certainly knew they were candy, and they did nothing to increase the attractiveness of cigarettes themselves, which I basically found repulsive.

Burning fetuses

The New Neo Posted on by

Echoes of “Soylent Green” and “A Modest Proposal“:

The British Columbia Health Ministry has admitted that the remains of babies destroyed by abortion in B.C. facilities are ending up in a waste-to-power facility in the United States, providing electricity for residents of Oregon.

The province’s Health Ministry said in an email to the B.C. Catholic that “biomedical waste” shipped to the U.S. to be incinerated includes “human tissue, such as surgically removed cancerous tissue, amputated limbs, and fetal tissue.”

“The ministry understands that some is transferred to Oregon. There it is incinerated in a waste-to-energy plant,” the email stated.

The ministry said that contractors handling the province’s “biomedical waste” follow “health and safety protocols, as well as federal, provincial, and local regulations.”

Ghastly. But not illogical. If fetuses are considered not-human enough to be aborted, why should they be wasted? If they’re disposed of by burning anyway, why not a useful burning?

Well, I can think of plenty of reasons. The first is that I would guess there’s no informed consent here, either of the fetus or even of the mother or parents who have decided to abort. The second is that there are some practices that are offensive on the face, and this is one of them. Whether religion or common decency or respect for potential human life is the reason, I would say that most people would and should object to this practice, whether they support abortion or not.

I would go even further and say that we shouldn’t be burning cancerous tissue or amputated limbs for fuel, either. It is all human, partly-human, potentially human, whatever you want to call it, and as such should be treated with more gravity and respect than that. Of course, that probably means the tissue would be burned unceremoniously and without making use of the power thus generated, but so be it. I think I’d prefer internment, although I would imagine that method has its own problems.

[NOTE: If you’re wondering what is currently done in the US with aborted fetuses and other human tissue such as amputated limbs, read this if you have a strong stomach.]

Destructive Generation

The New Neo Posted on by

I’m reading the book Destructive Generation: Second Thoughts About the Sixties by David Horowitz and Peter Collier. It’s a chilling document, especially because—unlike in 1989, when the book was first written—it’s become more and more clear that the left’s long Gramscian march through our institutions has been largely successful.

The book’s first chapter—the story of Fay Stender, with which I was previously unfamiliar—is a tale of such sadness it’s almost unbearable. Stender was an idealistic leftist lawyer who defended, and had affairs with, black prisoners such as Huey Newton and George Jackson, and was later shot by another black con after her supposed “betrayal” of Jackson.

Stender’s life trajectory wasn’t just sad, of course. It was offensive and outrageous and anger-provoking, and not just for what was done to her but for her own role in it. But it was also sad. It was sad that Stender was so naive in the first place as to dedicate her life to defending a group of socipathic con men who happened to talk a good line of racial victimization, sad that she deceived herself so greatly in her perverted idealism. It was sad that, when she finally realized who and what they really were, it was too late to save herself (or others) from their revenge although she tried her best. Sad (although ultimately good, if it’s truth you’re after) that she lost her illusions even before her former buddies managed to get her, and sad that, prior to their destroying her physically, she had realized her life’s work was a sham and a betrayal of the principles she had thought she was defending. Sad and ironic that, at the trial of the man who had shot her five times and left her in horrific unremitting pain and paralyzed from the waist down as well as handicapped in the use of her arms, his defense (unsuccessful, at least) was based on the sorts of arguments she had formerly used to defend other black activist criminals.

You might say that Stender got what she deserved, but I see her as a changer and I see her story as tragic despite (or perhaps because of?) her own role in her destruction and the destruction of others.

Oakland in the 1960s and 1970s was the epicenter of white radical leftism’s embrace of black criminals. The trial of Stender’s shooter—where most of the radical lawyers who had previously defended people like her would-be murderer were now rooting for the prosecution—was a sort of watershed. Having read Horowitz and Collier’s account, I now think of it as similar, at least on a local level, to the shock waves sent through the American left by Khrushchev’s revelations about Stalin’s crimes. Those on the left had to make a decision about Communism itself, and a lot of people quit the party as a result. The ones who stayed were the hard core who were able to compromise with any evil for the Cause. I think a similar thing happened to some of Stender’s colleages; many left the fold, and the ones who stayed were the ones to whom 2+2 made 5.

Stender killed herself at the age of 48, about a year after she’d been shot. Friends say she did it because she was overwhelmed by pain and her handicaps, but I believe that equally unbearable to her may have been her realization about the uses to which she’d put her life, and the depth of her regret about the choices she made.

Stender was no shrinking violet in the heyday of her activist years. She romanticized the black prisoners she lawyered and loved, and felt more comfortable with them than with more conventional society. Her tale is a cautionary one for our times as well; the phenomenon has hardly died out with the 60s:

John Irwin, a former prisoner at Soledad who had served his time and after his release obtained a degree in sociology and became a leader of the Prisoners Union, was called into the Soledad Brothers case…Fay wanted him to listen to tape recordings made of the prisoner witnesses who would testify against [George] Jackson and suggest ways of discrediting them. During his time at the Soledad Brothers Defense Committee offices, Irwin was taken aback by the ease with which Fay and her associates accepted a sentimental and, to his way of thinking, benighted view of prisoners simply as victims of social circumstances, and of prison simply as an early warning system of the fascist state toward which all American social institutions were heading. “I don’t think Fay ever understood the commitment to criminality that many of the persons she dealt with had. Fay really had a strong belief that the prisoners were going to be in the vanguard of the social revolution.” Irwin was disturbed by the romantic acceptance of violent solutions and by what he was as a kind of sexual romanticism: “It was mostly woman who were doing the organizing. They had each picked their favorite Soledad Brother and were kind of oo-ing and ah-ing over them, like teenagers with movie stars. I couldn’t believe it.”

Stender lived long enough to understand that “commitment to criminality,” up close and very very personal. Whether or not she changed in the political sense of rejecting leftism itself I don’t know. Perhaps not, but perhaps if she’d lived a while longer she would have come to that conclusion, too (as did Horowitz himself). As it was, though, she made a symbolic gesture that is very telling: not long before she killed herself, she burned everything she’d written in connection with her work, including the manuscript of the book she had edited (and had cleansed of its more inflammatory and incriminating passages) for George Jackson, Soledad Brother.

That book is still for sale at Amazon, of course, praised by the usual suspects:

“The power of George Jackson’s personal story remains painfully relevant to our nation today, with its persisten racism, its hellish prisons, its unjust judicial system, and the poles of wealth and poverty that are at the root of all that. I hope the younger generation, black and white, will read Soledad Brother.” ””Howard Zinn, author, A People’s History of the United States

The left never rests, does it?

[NOTE: Romanticizing sociopathic criminals seems to be a hazard for some women, although it’s not always as political as it was with Stender.

By the way, although I was a liberal for the entirety of my 20th-century existence, I never support the idea that racial discrimination either explained or justified criminality. Stender’s cause was not mine.]

Student loan forgiveness: liberal win-win

The New Neo Posted on by

Sometimes there’s so much out there it’s hard to keep up.

For instance, although I’d heard of the Pay As You Earn program, the details had previously passed under my radar screen. But my oh my, the set-up’s clever:

But the immediate taxpayer S.O.S. concerns Mr. Obama’s Pay As You Earn program. We’ve warned for years about the risks of this program as Mr. Obama has worked to expand the number of eligible borrowers and sweeten its terms.

Pay As You Earn allows students under certain circumstances to borrow an unlimited amount and then cap monthly payments at 10% of their discretionary income. If they choose productive work in the private economy, the loans are forgiven after 20 years. But if they choose to work in government or for a nonprofit, Uncle Sugar forgives their loans after 10 years.

For aspiring community organizers who go to college and then grad school before moving into a job that the government defines as public service, the forgiven debt can be $150,000 or more, courtesy of the taxpayer. And unlike with some other federal programs, when the government forgives the debt of one of the exalted class of nonprofit or government workers, the do-gooder doesn’t have to report it as income to the IRS. Who wouldn’t want to pick up $150,000 tax-free?

What’s so clever about it for Obama and the Democrats? It’s probably pretty obvious, but I’ll state it anyway: it simultaneously fills the coffers of the left’s cadre of propagandists known as the universities and assures a ready supply of recruits for the left’s foot soldiers out in the working world, those employed by government and nonprofits.

And the taxpayer finances what basically amounts to a forced contribution to the Democratic Party. Sweet.

Bundy’s remarks on race, welfare, and slavery

The New Neo Posted on by

Cliven Bundy’s remarks about race, welfare, and slavery have drawn a lot of fire, and the right is attempting to back away from them.

First, take a look at what he said:

“I want to tell you one more thing I know about the Negro,” he said. Mr. Bundy recalled driving past a public-housing project in North Las Vegas, “and in front of that government house the door was usually open and the older people and the kids ”” and there is always at least a half a dozen people sitting on the porch ”” they didn’t have nothing to do. They didn’t have nothing for their kids to do. They didn’t have nothing for their young girls to do.

“And because they were basically on government subsidy, so now what do they do?” he asked. “They abort their young children, they put their young men in jail, because they never learned how to pick cotton. And I’ve often wondered, are they better off as slaves, picking cotton and having a family life and doing things, or are they better off under government subsidy? They didn’t get no more freedom. They got less freedom.”

There’s a kernel of truth there—that the welfare system has been a goodly part of the reason that people who receive welfare can sometimes end up being harmed by it in terms of killing initiative, undermining the family, and in general fostering dependence. The racist part of what Bundy said is not that outdated word “Negro” (although I’m sure some take offense at that), but the idea that this an especially black phenomenon. In fact, it’s something that happens with welfare as a whole, and although more blacks are on welfare proportionate to their incidence in the population, the culture of welfare is hardly limited to or special to blacks.

The last portion of Bundy’s statement is especially offensive not just to blacks but to the cause of the liberty he professes to support. Even though he couches it as a question (“I’ve often wondered”), the idea that slavery may have been better for black people (or anyone else) than welfare demonstrates an odd lack of appreciation on his part for one of the main—and probably the biggest—reason that slavery was a repulsive institution: the ownership of one human being by another is an especially profound violation of the liberty inherent in each human being, far deeper than anything engendered by welfare.

None of this has anything to do with the merits of Bundy’s legal case, the pros and cons of which were discussed here. Nor does Bundy speak generally for conservatives, libertarians, the Republican Party, or ranchers. However, you can be sure the left will try to impute his remarks to the right no matter how hard and fast the right tries to run away from them. They fit the false stereotypes the left has long tried to push about the Tea Party and the right as a whole.

All those objective moderates who love Piketty’s book…

The New Neo Posted on by

…are revealing themselves to be the leftists that they actually are.

I said as much in my Piketty post when I wrote:

In case you’re wondering, Piketty’s book has been hailed almost universally on the left””and by “left” I mean almost everyone except the right.

If that was a little too subtle, I want to emphasize a similar thought as expressed here by David Harsanyi:

…[H]ow does a book that evokes Marx and talks about tweaking the Soviet experiment find so much love from people who consider themselves rational, evidence-driven moderates?

Put it this way: It’s unlikely that Democrats would have praised a book like this 20 years ago ”“ or even 10. Nowadays, Jack Lew ”“ better known as the Treasury Secretary of the United States of America – takes time to chit chat with the author…

Like many progressives, Piketty doesn’t really believe most people deserve their wealth anyway, so confiscating it presents no real moral dilemma. He also argues that we can measure a person’s productivity and the value of a worker (namely, low-skilled laborers), while at the same time he argues that other groups of workers (namely, the kind of people he doesn’t admire) are bequeathed undeserved “arbitrary” salaries. What tangible benefit does a stockbroker or a Kulak or an explanatory journalist offer society, after all?…

The thing is, some of us still believe that capitalism fosters meritocratic values. Or I should say, we believe that free markets are the best game in town. Not that long ago, this was a nearly universal position. A lot of people used to believe that even the disruptions of capitalism ”” the “caprices of technology” as Piketty dismisses them”” that rattle “social order” also happen to generate mobility, dynamism and growth. Today this probably qualifies as Ayn Rand-style extremism.

Then again, I haven’t read Ayn Rand since college (or maybe it was high school) but if I still believed she was the most prophetic writer of her generation, I might feel compelled to defend her ideas. But Piketty’s utopian notions and authoritarian inclinations ”” ones that I’m pretty sure most Americans (and probably most Democrats) would still find off-putting ”” do not seem to rattle the left-wing press one bit. While Piketty’s economic data might be worth studying and debating, his political ideas are unworthy of discussion.

Despite the extremism of his positions, Piketty has already become a folk hero to inequality alarmists everywhere. So if his popularity tells us anything, it’s that many liberal “thought leaders” have taken a far more radical position on economic policy than we’re giving them credit for.

I’d like to add a caution to one thing Harsanyi says, though. He writes that he’s pretty sure that “most Americans (and probably most Democrats) would still find” Piketty’s “utopian notions and authoritarian inclinations” “off-putting.” Maybe so, but that’s certainly less true than it used to be, which is part of the reason that these liberal pundits don’t seem to have much problem coming out with their praise of Piketty.

I can’t find any polls asking people whether the rich should be taxed at a rate of 80%; my guess is that Harsanyi is right that most people would not support it. But the majority favors higher taxes on the rich, and it’s not hard to imagine that the definition of “higher” could increase significantly over time.

Will Piketty’s views ever become mainstream? Not sure, but they will if the press has anything to say about it.