Wow, I have to admit that I didn’t expect to see this out of the former Enron advisor:
Normal people take it in stride; even if they’re angry and bitter over political setbacks, they don’t cry persecution, compare their critics to Nazis and insist that the world revolves around their hurt feelings. But the rich are different from you and me.
And yes, that’s partly because they have more money, and the power that goes with it. They can and all too often do surround themselves with courtiers who tell them what they want to hear and never, ever, tell them they’re being foolish. They’re accustomed to being treated with deference, not just by the people they hire but by politicians who want their campaign contributions. And so they are shocked to discover that money can’t buy everything, can’t insulate them from all adversity.
I also suspect that today’s Masters of the Universe are insecure about the nature of their success. We’re not talking captains of industry here, men who make stuff. We are, instead, talking about wheeler-dealers, men who push money around and get rich by skimming some off the top as it sloshes by. They may boast that they are job creators, the people who make the economy work, but are they really adding value? Many of us doubt it — and so, I suspect, do some of the wealthy themselves, a form of self-doubt that causes them to lash out even more furiously at their critics.
Nice call-out to F. Scott Fitzgerald there on the part of the quasi-Nobel winner too. But Krugman fails to notice that there is an amount of truth to Perkins’s complaint about the coming Kristallnacht of the so-called One Percent, especially given that a disproportionate amount of the parasitical One Percent are Jewish.
It’s not paranoia when someone really is out to get you. And self-doubt is more than justified when you know damn well that you eminently deserve to have people out to get you. The financial skimmers of Wall Street not only don’t make the economy work, they have destroyed the wealthiest economy history has ever known through the massive malinvestments their massive credit bubble has created. And they have made matters worse by coopting the federal government into making good their losses at the expense of the American people.
When the final crash comes, I expect a considerable portion of the One Percent to be wiped out by an angry and well-armed populace. And no one should shed a tear for them, because they eminently deserve their such bitter desserts. The wolves of Wall Street who preyed upon the helpless for decades will become the hunted.