Maggie's Farm

http://city-journal.com/2011/21_4_meritocracy.html --an essay getting some deserved attention here and there. Instapundit just linked it as 'who killed horatio alger?'. No big surprises in it --just well-presented validations of the felt atmosphere. It's pretty long --so i pulled a particularly good passage out the middle:

[open quote]

The housing bubble and the 2008 financial crisis played a major role in the moral delegitimization of markets. When new developments in Florida and Arizona, built under the pressure of astronomically high real-estate prices, sit empty, people start questioning the efficiency of market prices. When the difference between a comfortable retirement and an indigent one is determined not by hard work or by a frugal lifestyle but by lucky timing in buying or selling your house, people start questioning the fairness of the market system. The fact that the real-estate bubble was the second large bubble to pop in less than a decade further undermined trust in markets as a good indicator of where to invest resources.

But nothing upsets people like the perception that the rules don’t apply equally to everybody. When my children were small, they sometimes tried to play Monopoly. These attempts inevitably degenerated into arguments. My daughter, who is two years younger than my son, would claim that my son was cheating. My son, with the official instructions in hand, would protest his innocence. And he was right: he never invented any rule. Nevertheless, my daughter was right, too: my son was engaging in selective recollection of the rules, counting on my daughter’s ignorance and bringing up only the rules that were in his favor. Despite her youth, my daughter understood that something wasn’t fair, so she employed the only response she had available: giving up.

Her frustration was similar to what many people felt after the 2008 bailouts of the financial system. The system was certainly at risk, and some government intervention was just as certainly necessary. Yet it was false to say, as Federal Reserve chairman Ben Bernanke and Treasury secretary Henry Paulson did repeatedly, that the choice was between the Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP) as it was proposed and the financial abyss: there were feasible—and, in fact, superior—alternatives. It didn’t escape most Americans that TARP was the largest welfare program for corporations and their investors ever created in human history. That some of the crumbs went to autoworkers’ unions didn’t improve things; in fact, it made them worse, showing that the redistribution was not an accident but a premeditated pillage of defenseless taxpayers by powerful lobbies. TARP wasn’t just the triumph of Wall Street over Main Street; it was the triumph of K Street over the rest of America.

The way the bailout was conducted damaged Americans’ faith in their financial system, in their government, and in the market economy. A BBB/Gallup poll conducted in April 2008, a few months before TARP was passed, indicated that 42 percent of Americans trusted financial institutions and that 53 percent trusted U.S. companies. In a similar survey performed in December 2008 by the Chicago Booth/Kellogg School Financial Trust Index, which I direct, these figures dropped to 34 percent and 12 percent, respectively. Moreover, 80 percent of respondents felt less confident about investing in financial markets because of the bailout. Their altered feelings weren’t the consequence of any ideological bias against government involvement; on the contrary, a majority of respondents believed that the government should regulate financial markets. They objected, rather, to the specifics of what the government was doing. One reason they objected was their perception that lobbying interests had influenced the intervention: 50 percent of respondents, for instance, thought that Paulson had acted in the interest of Goldman Sachs, not the United States.

[close quote]

...and of course, vice and human nature is the light, happy, hopeful interpretation of events --the one you can have if you don't look too deeply into the mechanics and cast of characters.

--pardon my effrontery, Susan, but you sound as far from boring as a person can reasonably be.