David Frum Calls out Charles Murray's Argument About The Lazy, Degenerate Poor

Frum is perhaps the most sane Conservative of our time. This is a masterfully written review of Murray's newest book, Coming Apart: The State of White America, 1960–2010, which essentially posits that poor people are scum and lazy degenerates and that is why they are having a harder time economically than their elders did: http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2012/02/06/charles-murray-book-review.html .

In an interview with the New York Times, Murray is more specific—but no more precise—in his analysis:

The ’60s were a disaster in terms of social policy. The elites put in place a whole set of reforms which I think fundamentally changed the signals and the incentives facing low-income people and encouraged a variety of trends that soon became self-reinforcing.

The '60s. Of course. But which reforms are the ones that Murray has in mind? He does not say, and I think I can understand why he does not say: because once you spell out the implied case here, it collapses of its own obvious ludicrousness.

Let me try my hand:

You are a white man aged 30 without a college degree. Your grandfather returned from World War II, got a cheap mortgage courtesy of the GI bill, married his sweetheart and went to work in a factory job that paid him something like $50,000 in today's money plus health benefits and pension. Your father started at that same factory in 1972. He was laid off in 1981, and has never had anything like as good a job ever since. He's working now at a big-box store, making $40,000 a year, and waiting for his Medicare to kick in.

Now look at you. Yes, unemployment is high right now. But if you keep pounding the pavements, you'll eventually find a job that pays $28,000 a year. That's not poverty! Yet you seem to waste a lot of time playing video games, watching porn, and sleeping in. You aren't married, and you don't go to church. I blame Frances Fox Piven.

Indeed. Evidently our moral turpitude has created our failing economic prospects.

Also too: Murray is responsible for this racist piece of shit: The Bell Curve. Fucker.

This Man Speaketh Sense

Do tell:



Argue with that.

Rich dude speaks sense

This guy is not talking like a Galtian asshole: Raise Taxes on Rich to Reward True Job Creators.

I’m a very rich person. As an entrepreneur and venture capitalist, I’ve started or helped get off the ground dozens of companies in industries including manufacturing, retail, medical services, the Internet and software. I founded the Internet media company aQuantive Inc., which was acquired by Microsoft Corp. (MSFT) in 2007 for $6.4 billion. I was also the first non-family investor in Amazon.com Inc. (AMZN)

Even so, I’ve never been a “job creator.” I can start a business based on a great idea, and initially hire dozens or hundreds of people. But if no one can afford to buy what I have to sell, my business will soon fail and all those jobs will evaporate.

Great googly-moogly! It's as if the Randian poison is not the ultra-contagious virus we thought it might be!

Some are oblivious to reality

If you actually can't see the correlation between what Occupy Wall Street is doing and the easily identifiable inequalities inherent in our system pictured above, I officially abandon hope for you. Cripes, its not that hard to stay informed. Look at a graph

Actual economist says "job creators" destroy jobs too!

From an NPR interview with professor Justin Wolfers from the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania:

WOLFERS: Small businesses, firms that are just starting out, a bunch of them succeed, and a bunch of them fail. If we only count the success, which would be the wrong thing to do, we'd say they create an enormous number of jobs. But, you know, how difficult it is to start a successful small business. And so sure, they're doing a lot of hiring in total. But they're also doing a lot of firing as well.

BLOCK: Interesting, too, that a lot of small businesses are so small that it's essentially one person. It's maybe an independent corporation, or someone who's self-employed could be a small business?

WOLFERS: Yeah. And so this is actually one of the parts where the rhetoric of small business, I think, really leads us astray. If you actually look at the data, what we mean by small businesses, what they actually are, they're things like real estate agents or my hairdresser. They're lawyers; they're doctors. You talk to these folks, do they have any interest in innovating or bringing new products to market or any of the things we think of as being the engine of economic growth? The answer is no. My dry cleaner likes to take my clothes and then give them to me four days later. Most small businesses don't even have ambitions of being the engines of economic growth, or the engines of jobs.

Gee, I thought that the all powerful John Galt like Job Creators™ could do no wrong and were the engine of the economy and that we should all bow down before them like the groveling serfs we really should be.

Or... maybe there is nothing inherently righteous in running a business. Oh, yeah. Business is about making money, not creating jobs.