What About the 1% in Hollywood?
It would be easier to take the Occupy Wall Street crowd more seriously if they did something like Occupy Hollywood. How many multi-millionaires live there? Quite a few, actually. But not a peep from the OWS folk to them. Even though, as John Hayward notes, they do the same sort of things that the OWS accuse the Wall Street folks of doing.
Liberals are strangely incurious about why their betters never instruct them to hate Hollywood during their class-warfare lectures. I mean never. Movie stars, singers, producers, directors, and star athletes are the millionaires you’re never told to envy. Their “fair share,” and the methods they use to avoid paying it, are not topics for discussion.
Liberals are even willing to extend this consideration to a grotesque caricature like Michael Moore, the greedy millionaire who made a fortune by making his fans look stupid, and refused to employ union labor while doing it. He walked right past union operatives to receive a warm welcome from the Wall Street protesters. He moved out of a luxurious New York City penthouse to avoid paying his “fair share” of New York taxes on his immense movie profits, celebrated the release of a movie lambasting capitalism with a posh party at another swanky penthouse, and filled in a wetland to put the finishing touches on his million-dollar Michigan estate.
Of course, most in Hollywood support the same liberal talking points that the OWS crowd is pushing. Which exposes this as a political movement, intent on pushing a socialist agenda, but under the guise of being an economic movement, concerned about spreading the wealth around. If it’s wealth that needs to be spread around, shouldn’t it also come from political allies? If you don’t care about that — if your friends can keep their money but your perceived enemies can’t — that’s just envy and covetousness, not concern.
Filed under: Culture • Economics
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We know who the 1% are in terms of earning money. But who are the top 1% in terms of spending money? Who is more powerful? Buffet who may have earned 7 billion last year? Or the members of the LA school board who spent 7 billion last year?
Not sure what you’re trying to say, but I will just note this: Earning money and spending money are, in and of themselves, not evil. For the OWS crowd, they covet the money of the “1%” and want it spent enriching the “99%”.
And the point of this post is that, some 1%ers are apparently more equal than others.