Meet America's Woke trust fund babies: a group of self-flagellating millennials who hate that they have lived a life free of the bloody, gruesome struggles that plagued humanity for 99% of history.
The New York Times – now a parody paper that enjoys featuring insane people like this – decided to tell the stunning and brave stories of these young trust-fund socialists as a way to teach us that the free market is very bad and should be cancelled post haste.
The Times article featured intellectuals such as 25-year-old Sam Jacobs, whose grandfather was one of the founders of Qualcomm – you know, that company that makes computer chips for the majority of all mobile phones.
Jacobs says he became a socialist in college, which clearly indicates he's a free thinker, since the majority of college professors are pro-market, respect a diversity of viewpoints, and teach critical thinking.
Now that we've all had a good laugh, let's rejoin Jacobs in his lamentation of his family's "extreme plutocratic wealth."
"I want to build a world where someone like me, a young person who controls tens of millions of dollars, is impossible," said Jacobs.
Yes, this admirable young man wants to take the few exceptional places like America where a person of any age, race, or background can rise to the top and better the lives of billions in the process, and presumably replace it with the historic norm of extreme taxes and Marxist wealth redistribution to ensure everyone is equally miserable in their squalor.
Jacobs said he sees his family's wealth as "both a moral and economic failure." I have to admit that I don't know this man's family. Perhaps they do fit the perfect stereotypical mold of corrupt socialites.
Or, perhaps, instead of being robber barons, Jacobs' family is like many other flawed individuals who have made possible the exponentially insane development of the last few centuries through hard work and creativity.
Airplanes, refrigeration, disease-resistant grains, medicine, and those handy Qualcomm chips are but a fraction of the inventions that not only make modern life possible but have lifted over two billion people out of extreme poverty in the last 30 years alone.
India has also had 271+ million people cross out of poverty since 2010 (at least before the draconian lockdowns of this year). As the esteemed Dr. Jordan B. Peterson notes:
"Between the year 2000 and 2012, the level of absolute poverty in the world was cut by 50%. That was the fastest rate of improvement by a large margin in human history, it was three years faster than the most optimistic projections had suggested."
What Jacobs is ultimately lamenting is the responsibility of his inheritance. If he accepted that responsibility, he would need to put it to work, like the man in Christ's parable who was given five talents (100 years of pay for the average man) to invest and put to good use.
Instead, Jacobs and those like him obfuscate by turning up their noses at their hard-working parents and virtue-signal by pretending their charity is noble when it's really all about their egos.
After Jacobs, the Times writers drool over 30-year-old Rachel Gelman, who is about to inherit a family fortune worth millions and is equally as ashamed. Despite the fact that her family has given to Woke causes for years, Gelman says her fortune comes from [whispers] stocks... which she says "comes from underpaying and undervaluing working-class people" and is connected to "the economic legacies of Indigenous genocide and slavery."
Gelman falls prey to the same idiotic, Marxist economic theory that AOC and others continue to believe – the idea that capital is a fixed pie that can be neither created nor destroyed, only distributed differently.
The Times then quotes flaming Marxist Richard Wolff, who claims "the wealth millennials are inheriting came from a mammoth redistribution away from the working masses."
What Wolff apparently doesn't have is a 3rd-grade understanding of history or functioning eyeballs to see that the wealth of the Boomers came from a post-WWII economic boom driven by Christian ethics, hard work, and creative thinking that overwhelmingly generated more prosperity and alleviation of suffering than all of the rest of human history combined.
Such fixed-pie thinking works with the laws of thermodynamics: it does not apply to the creation of wealth. Get this through your heads: just because your neighbor has more than you does not mean he stole something from you in order to have more.
Instead of a pie, imagine capital as reproducing rabbits. When there is an "interaction" between people in the marketplace who exchange goods and services, they are empowered to do more with what they have and the talents they possess. That in turn allows them to make more interactions in a growing network that gives everyone greater access to a wider and wider variety of things.
(The market is not a pie. It is a legion of frisky rabbits.)
The best analogy in the Times' flaming dumpster of an article comes from a 32-year-old rich man-baby named Pierce Delahunt, who identifies as nongendered and is "socialist, anarchist, Marxist, communist, or all of the above." Delahunt is rich because xe/xer inherited a boatload from a former stepfather's mall empire.
"When I think about outlet malls, I think about intersectional oppression," said Delahunt.
Yes, indeed. There are many things one could appreciate about outlet malls, such as how amazing it is that you can find a cheap all-you-can-eat buffet next to a gun outlet with abundant, cheap weapons... but really, really, really far down that list are thoughts like, "Some outlet malls are probably built on indigenous land."
Of course, since Native Americans were constantly fighting and killing each other like every other people group since the fall of man, it's hard to tell which group a wise man like Delahunt would award the land to.
Delehunt also lamented that mall workers are paid low wages while simultaneously lamenting the energy used in the creation and transportation of the goods that give them their very jobs, which is an interesting take. Following that logic, we should eliminate low skill positions in order to save Mother Earth AND de-incentivize working toward better jobs by rewarding people for staying in the positions we are apparently eliminating.
Delahunt seeks to absolve his sin of having money, not by investing it in the generation of additional capital and new ideas, or in hiring workers to better empower the lives of entire communities, but by giving $10,000 each month to anti-capitalist organizations that seek to banish private property and rights, create barriers to upward mobility, and give government totalitarian control over our lives.
That seems like the moral choice!
To sum up, I think both the NYT and these trust fund socialists fit the following verse pretty darned well:
"In all toil there is profit, but mere talk tends only to poverty." - Proverbs 14:23
