← Previous Post: | Next Post:

 

‘I’m making money, not losing it, but I guess jealous people have decided that becoming rich and powerful from a national tragedy is suddenly evil.’

The Onion captures one of UD‘s favorite memes – she’s covered it for years on this blog – the Criticism of any Form of Financial Activity is Merely Jealousy of Someone Richer than You Are meme. It’s been fun to quote Greg Mankiw, Eric Cantor, and Lawrence Kudlow (read the whole page) on the “politics of envy” over the decades.

Last time I checked, using sensitive information to enrich yourself at the expense of hundreds of millions of other people was totally fine.

Absolutely; and you can read article after article calling for the legalization of insider trading, a move blocked by the petulant resentment of the many against America’s winners. And now Burr’s getting sued over something that should be totally legit!

Alan Jacobson, a shareholder in Wyndham Hotels and Resorts, sued Burr in federal court on Monday, alleging that the senator used private information to motivate a mass liquidation of his assets. It is illegal for senators to use nonpublic information in conducting securities exchanges.

************

There’s something so bracingly, so utterly, so fundamentally human about pleasuring yourself at the thought of screwing the unwashed, of being first in line for goodie bags at events no one else even knows are happening… In a great piece of satire – The Christmas Letter – Gregg Easterbrook captured the pleasuring perfectly. Here’s how it begins:

What a lucky break that I’m in first-class on the plane back from Istanbul, because there’s room to take out the laptop and write our annual Christmas letter. My brand-new laptop receives wireless satellite Internet from anywhere in the world. While I was at the board of directors session during the Danube cruise, I pretended to be listening to the chairman but actually was using the laptop to watch Emily’s oboe recital on live streaming video from Chad’s digital minicam! So the world really is growing smaller. And if you haven’t gotten one of these new laptops, you should. Of course, now there’s a waiting list.

Of course, now there’s a waiting list. When these rare birds are captured, we can, like Diana Henriques, interview them; but the secrecy at the heart of their pathology makes it difficult to yield much.

Now that Burr’s been unveiled, he’s calling for an ethics investigation into himself because, in the immortal words of George Costanza, “if anyone had said anything to me at all [about how] that sort of thing is frowned upon…”

Margaret Soltan, March 24, 2020 4:21AM
Posted in: just plain gross

Trackback URL for this post:
https://www.margaretsoltan.com/wp-trackback.php?p=63520

Comment on this Entry

Latest UD posts at IHE

Archives

Categories