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Date: Sun, 22 Sep 2002 22:01:22 -0400

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At 11:15 AM -0400 on 9/22/02, Geege Schuman wrote:


> Most of them seem to have Ivy League educations, or are Ivy League
> dropouts suggesting to me that they weren't exactly poor to start
> with.

Actually, if I remember correctly from discussion of the list's
composition in Forbes about five or six years ago, the *best* way to
get on the Forbes 400 is to have *no* college at all. Can you say
"Bootstraps", boys and girls? I knew you could...

[Given that an undergraduate liberal arts degree from a state school,
like, say, mine, :-), is nothing but stuff they should have taught
you in a government-run "high" school, you'll probably get more of
*those* on the Forbes 400 as well as time goes on. If we ever get
around to having a good old fashioned government-collapsing
transfer-payment depression (an economic version of this summer's
government-forest conflagration, caused by the same kind of
innumeracy that not clear-cutting enough forests did out west this
summer :-)) that should motivate more than a few erst-slackers out
there, including me, :-), to learn to actually feed themselves.]


The *next* category on the Forbes 400 list is someone with a
"terminal" professional degree, like an MBA, PhD, MD, etc., from the
best school possible.

Why? Because, as of about 1950, the *best* way to get into Harvard,
for instance, is to be *smart*, not rich. Don't take my word for it,
ask their admissions office. Look at the admissions stats over the
years for proof.

Meritocracy, American Style, was *invented* at the Ivy League after
World War II. Even Stanford got the hint, :-), and, of course,
Chicago taught them all how, right? :-). Practically *nobody* who
goes to a top-20 American institution of higher learning can actually
afford to go there these days. Unless, of course, their parents, who
couldn't afford to go there themselves, got terminal degrees in the
last 40 years or so. And their kids *still* had to get the grades,
and "biased" (by intelligence :-)), test scores, to get in.


The bizarre irony is that almost all of those people with "terminal"
degrees, until they actually *own* something and *hire* people, or
learn to *make* something for a living all day on a profit and loss
basis, persist in the practically insane belief, like life after
death, that economics is some kind of zero sum game, that dumb people
who don't work hard for it make all the money, and, if someone *is*
smart, works hard, and is rich, then they stole their wealth somehow.

BTW, none of you guys out there holding the short end of this
rhetorical stick can blame *me* for the fact that I'm using it to
beat you severely all over your collective head and shoulders. You
were, apparently, too dumb to grab the right end. *I* went to
Missouri, and *I* don't have a degree in anything actually useful,
much less a "terminal" one, which means *I*'m broker than anyone on
this list -- it's just that *you*, of all people, lots with
educations far surpassing my own, should just plain know better. The
facts speak for themselves, if you just open your eyes and *look*.
There are no epicycles, the universe does not orbit the earth, and
economics is not a zero-sum game. The cost of anything, including
ignorance and destitution, is the forgone alternative, in this case,
intelligence and effort.

[I will, however, admit to being educated *waay* past my level of
competence, and, by the way *you* discuss economics, so have you,
apparently.]



BTW, if we ever actually *had* free markets in this country,
*including* the abolition of redistributive income and death taxes,
all those smart people in the Forbes 400 would have *more* money, and
there would be *more* self-made people on that list. In addition,
most of the people who *inherited* money on the list would have
*much* less of it, not even relatively speaking. Finally, practically
all of that "new" money would have come from economic efficiency and
not "stolen" from someone else, investment bubbles or not.

That efficiency is called "progress", for those of you in The
People's Republics of Berkeley or Cambridge. It means more and better
stuff, cheaper, over time -- a terrible, petit-bourgeois concept
apparently not worthy of teaching by the educational elite, or you'd
know about it by now. In economic terms, it's also called an increase
in general welfare, and, no, Virginia, I'm not talking about
extorting money from someone who works, and giving it to someone who
doesn't in order to keep them from working and they can think of some
politician as Santa Claus come election time...


In short, then, economics is not a zero sum game, property is not
theft, the rich don't get rich off the backs of the poor, and
redistributionist labor "theory" of value happy horseshit is just
that: horseshit, happy or otherwise.

To believe otherwise, is -- quite literally, given the time Marx
wrote Capital and the Manifesto -- romantic nonsense.

Cheers,
RAH

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-- 
-----------------
R. A. Hettinga <mailto: rah@ibuc.com>
The Internet Bearer Underwriting Corporation <http://www.ibuc.com/>
44 Farquhar Street, Boston, MA 02131 USA
"... however it may deserve respect for its usefulness and antiquity,
[predicting the end of the world] has not been found agreeable to
experience." -- Edward Gibbon, 'Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire'


