Holly Wood wrote a fantastic blog article about an essay on “Economic Inequality,”penned by self-described “essayist” Paul Graham. She really nails the myopia of the Plutocrat and especially the greed and forgetfulness of the Silicon Valley elite who’s fortunes were made on the backs of a publicly-funded communications system, faceless shareholders who often took a beating in the dot-com years, and pension funds that were funded by unions — the same ones these plutocrats seek to destroy through their “sharing” economy.
Please read, think, comment and share. This is too good to miss….
I’ve been asked by a bunch of people today to comment on this essay “Economic Inequality,”penned by self-described “essayist” Paul Graham, the subject of a poem I recently wrote entitled, “Paul Graham is Asking to be Eaten.”
When my friend Danilo asked me to respond to this, I said that it’s too vapid and lacking in substance to critique. I can distill the essence of the entire argument to: “Don’t hate the player, but don’t hate the game either. Hate yourselves, stupid poors, for not getting VC funding to start a company.”
Danilo then offered to pay me $500. And I said that I would think about it.
And then the day wore on and more people wanted to know why this essay infuriated them so much.
So I said, Oh hell.
Here goes.
Paul Graham is one of those plutocrats whose thirst to be recognized as a thoughtleader among his peers is obvious. For Paul Graham, Silicon Valley Ideology is the ideology America should run on, and ergo, being a puppet of Silicon Valley Ideology, Paul Graham thinks himself a political genius.
Right. Yes. OF COURSE.
About 80% of his essay about economic inequality is a thinly veiled condemnation of poors who Paul Graham thinks are too stupid to understand why the rich are wealthy. They are stupid, he says, because they demand wealth redistribution as a means of addressing poverty rather than attacking poverty itself. Sillies!
He offers these hopeless poors a corrective, modeling himself as a legitimatewealth producer different from those dirty Wall-Street rent-seekers.