Victor Davis Hanson explains for National Review Online readers how “plutocratic populism” pays off for its practitioners.
In early October, Barack Obama went to a $32,000-a-head fundraiser at the 20-acre estate of the aptly named billionaire Richie Richman. The day before he charmed his paying audience of liberal 1 percenters, Obama had sent out an e-mail alleging that Republicans were “in the pocket of billionaires.” Does that mean that Republicans who accept cash from billionaire supporters are always in their pockets, but that when the president does likewise, he never is? And if so, on what grounds is he exempt from his own accusations?
In mid-October, Hillary Clinton gave a short lecture at the University of Nevada at Las Vegas bewailing the crushing costs of a university education. “Higher education,” Clinton thundered, “shouldn’t be a privilege for those able to afford it.”
One reason tuition and student indebtedness have soared — UNLV’s tuition is set to go up by 17 percent next year — is that universities pay exorbitant fees to multimillionaire speakers like Hillary Clinton. College foundations sprout up to raise money for perks that might not pass transparent university budgeting. Clinton — or her own foundation — reportedly charged a university foundation $225,000 for a talk lasting less than an hour. For that sum, she could have paid the tuition of over 320 cash-strapped UNLV students. Is there a Clinton Tuition Fund, to which Hillary contributes a portion of her honoraria to exempt herself from the ramifications of her own accusations? …
… Zero interest rates have caused the stock market to spike. Along with globalization, sky-high stock prices have created staggering sums of money that translate into influence and power simply unimagined even in the late 20th century. The Obama administration has ushered in the greatest surge in inequality in the last half-century. The result is that a select few have struck it rich in the stock market as never before, as trillions of dollars have been transferred from zero-interest passbook accounts belonging to the middle class to fabulous speculative stock profits for the top few.
Such vast sums allow a select elite to be completely exempt from the worries of most Americans about bad neighborhoods, high taxes, poor schools, and joblessness. It is easy to be utopian when one is never subject to the consequences of one’s own ideology. If Hillary Clinton had had to borrow thousands of dollars for her daughter’s tuition, she might resent huge college speaking fees like her own. (Imagine Stanford co-ed Chelsea Clinton with a $100,000 student loan, as a Stanford foundation paid Sarah Palin $225,000 for a brief talk on campus about the problems of crushing tuition and student debt creating inequality).
