Cantor fled from protestors at the University of Pennsylvania, but gave the speech at UD‘s college, Northwestern. After the speech he was rapidly moved out via the back of the building by security guards (too many protestors out front).
As to the substance of the speech:
“We should want all people to be moving up and no one to be pulled down,” Cantor concludes. Well, yes, we should want that to happen, because wanting people to fail isn’t very nice. But unless we all live in Lake Wobegon (where the children are all “above average”) uniform upward mobility isn’t actually possible. The thing about mobility is that people have to move up and people have to move down.
Cantor’s income inequality solution is to elevate all of the bottom 99 percent in incomes up to the top 1 percent. That would shut up the Occupy Wall Street crowd for sure! A more practical solution–and one that doesn’t violate the laws of mathematics–would be to encourage mobility, by all means (the U.S. has actually fallen behind most of western Europe in this regard) but also to pay close attention to what happens to the people who don’t make it to the top. The bottom 99 percent contribute to prosperity too, and lately they haven’t had much to show for it. Cantor seems not in the slightest bit curious as to how that happened.
November 1st, 2011 at 7:47AM
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