… so with Paul’s two wine bottles, it’s the object that counts. Like it or not, human beings glom onto things. When it comes to questionable behavior, they find physical, discrete, countable things vivid and graspable.
Vast convoluted abstract bad behavior — Goldman Sachs pushing all that money around — eludes us, but the four hundred dollar haircut, the seven (I think. I’ll have to ask my staff.) houses, these we get.
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Although the Ryan story does have an easily detectable gamey scent, its real meaning indeed lies deeper. At Daily Kos, Laura Clawson narrates:
Hedge fund billionaires make giant contributions to elite universities and get like-minded professors hired to named chairs… Together, they influence politicians, who set the economic agenda in Congress and to a great extent in the media.
… [T]he very baldness of what’s we’re seeing in this particular case is a helpful reminder of the myriad ways money buys access. It’s not just campaign contributions or even the promise of high-paying jobs to politicians who’ve left office. Money buys experts. It buys credentials like named chairs for the experts you, as a billionaire, want to be influential. And then you and your pet expert go to a nice dinner and drink $350 bottles of wine with a high-profile member of Congress and when he cites the ideas you were pushing, he’s not citing some self-interested hedge fund guy, he’s citing a University of Chicago economics professor.
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Fifty years ago, Clark Kerr wrote The Uses of the University.
Clawson is describing the uses of the university today.