People might assume that I’m happy to see Martin Shkreli hauled off to jail. But I’m not. He’s the hedge fund wunderkind who raised the price of Daraprim from $13.50 to $750. He got a lot of attention for this clearly greedy move, but it was actually a sign of hubris because it caused another company — seeing an opportunity — to enter the market and sell the drug for $1. So there never was much indication that he was anything but a con a man. The problem is that I just don’t see how he is that different from the fools that millions of people worship on Shark Tank.

There is something very wrong with our capitalist system. I’ve noticed this again and again throughout my life. It is not brilliance — much less the ability to improve the world — that is key to business success. For many, like Mitt Romney, making money is mostly about being in the right place at the right time. But for many more, it is about being ruthless. And the distinction between legal ruthlessness and illegal ruthlessness strikes me as almost semantic. It doesn’t surprise me in the least that someone like Shkreli isn’t clear about the distinction. It is almost certainly clear that Mitt Romney did far more harm in his legal business career than Shkreli did in his career even if all the charges against him stick.

I think this is what happens when you have a society based on the idea that nothing matters but profit. Yes, I know there are courses on business ethics. But it strikes me rather the way war crimes tribunals work — namely, you only face them if you lost the war. As it is, if Martin Shkreli really is worth $100 million, he may manage to get out this legal bind. Our system is, after all, set up so that it is really hard to convict anyone who can mount a good defense.

As it is, there is only a small amount of Shkreli’s career that has landed him in jail. And it has nothing to do with him jacking up the price of Daraprim — a move that certainly caused harm and could have cost lives. But that was a move that was widely praised (or at least apologized for) in the business press. What he’s in trouble for is not all the harm that he has done, but rather for the specific harm that he’s done to members of his own class. As Michael Hiltzik noted, that’s mostly what this is all about.

I’m getting tired of all this. When Martin Shkreli burst on the scene as a price gouger, I didn’t see much of the outrage. He was doing, after all, what we generally praise business people for doing. If he had quintupled the price of the drug up to $67.5, I doubt anyone would have noticed, even though that change would have been excessive. There just seems to be a certain hypocrisy in our society. We expect them to be anti-humanists. In fact, we praise them for being so. We hold them up as demigods. So I feel no schadenfreude toward Martin Shkreli — just sadness for a badly misguided civilization.

Whenever there is a poll question about something stupid, you can depend upon a fair number of Americans holding the ridiculous position. For example, there was a recent poll that found that 29% of Americans think Obama is a Muslim. I’m generally sympathetic to the argument that these people don’t really believe this. They are rather signalling in whatever way the questions allow that they really, really, really don’t like Obama. But I’m not certain. I don’t really know what is going on in these people’s minds. Indeed, a recent article made me question the basic brain functioning of my fellow Americans. But when I dug down into it, I found it was more complicated than is being reported.

Samuel Osborne reported in The Independent, US Town Rejects Solar Panels Amid Fears They “Suck Up All the Energy From the Sun.” The town in question is Woodland, North Carolina. Strata Solar Company wanted to build a solar farm north of the town. This required that the land be re-zoned from manufacturing to agricultural. The town council rejected the plan, despite the fact that the planning board was in favor of it. But it’s worse than that. The council had previous accepted plans for three other solar farms. But at the same meeting, the council voted for a moratorium on solar farms.

What could be the cause of this reversal? Well, the people have risen up. Some of the complaints at least seem reasonable. Mary Hobbs said that the existing solar farms have killed the local economy. I don’t really see that. Woodland isn’t exactly a tourist destination. It’s probably dying for the same economic reasons that lots of other small towns are dying. But it is true that the solar farm is not like a factory; it would create few jobs. At the same time, the Strata farm would probably have been very lucrative because its location was close to an electrical substation. This kind of local investment is not likely to revitalize the community.

Other concerns were less debatable. Jane Mann argued that the vegetation near solar panels is brown because of lack of sunlight. Her husband Bobby concurred, saying that the solar farms suck up all the energy from the sun. They are also concerned about cancer deaths, which the solar farms are supposedly responsible for. But mixed in with all the crazy, there is some sense. The Manns are still primarily concerned with what is going to happen to the town because of the solar farm. As Jane Mann said, “I don’t see the profit for the town.”

That’s a good point. The site for the Strata solar farm is outside the town limits and so the town will get no tax benefit from it, “The only funding the town would get is approximately $7,000 per year for specialized training for the Woodland Fire Department in the event of an electrical malfunction at the solar plant.” Get that: the company is only going to pay to make sure that the publicly funded fire department is properly educated on how to serve the company’s interests. So regardless of how silly the concerns may be, there really is nothing to counterbalance it.

Now, I’m in favor of solar farms. This is exactly the kind of thing we should be doing. But we come back to the same problem as ever: inequality. The rich want to place their solar farms out where they don’t have to see them. They can just siphon off the profits to wherever they decide the view is nicest. And the people of Woodland get nothing very clear in exchange. It’s not surprising that they start talking about solar farms sucking.

I guess I should say something about the debate. Despite my best efforts, I did manage to listen to the whole thing. But as soon as I found out that it was focused on “national security,” I wanted to run away. This strikes me as journalistic malpractice on the part of CNN. Do we really need a forum to listen to all these candidates talk about how terrible non-Americans are and how we need to close down our borders? This is most of what we get from the candidates regardless. This is the easiest issue to demagogue and so they stick with it.

What’s more, when it comes to the situation in Syria and Iraq, they all push how “strong” and “hard” they will be. But when you get down to it, they aren’t proposing to do anything more than Obama. So they are going to continue to bomb but with more intent? Ben Carson implied that he wanted boots on the ground. Marco Rubio wants boots on the ground — Arab boots on the ground. John Kasich wants boots on the ground — some kind of Persian Gulf coalition. But I get it: the Republican Party is working itself up for war.

The reason I know this is because my father told me that he thought we needed to send ground troops into the conflict. Charles Krauthammer must think this. I know because my father also has no clue why we should send ground troops in. I questioned him about it. Does he think that ISIS is an existential threat? No. Does he think fighting ISIS over there is going to make terrorist attacks here less common? No. Does he realize that ISIS has been so successful because of our starting the Iraq War? Yes. So why do we need ground troops? At that point he folded, but this is fast becoming the new Republican orthodoxy.

But watching the debate, it was hard to escape the conclusion that Republicans think the greatest threat to the United States is Barack Obama. It’s also hard to understand why they all haven’t emigrated from the country. I mean, as Trump put it, “Our country doesn’t win anymore.” The United States does have a lot of problems, but listening to these bozos, you would think we were Zimbabwe. No one respects us; everyone gets over on us; we’re weak. And the only thing that will save us from this sorry state is a Republican president. That is, interestingly, also the one and only thing. Just elect one of them and America will be great again because it will be “strong” and “hard.”

The phrase “Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton” was repeated so often that I began to think it was a single person. And almost all of the attacks were facile. Take Ted Cruz’s opening, “The men and women on this stage, every one of us, is better prepared to keep this nation safe than is Barack Obama or Hillary Clinton.” And why is this? Based upon the discussion, there seem to be two ways that every one of them is better:

1. They won’t be politically correct.
2. They will use the magic words “radical Islamic terrorism” more often.

That seems like snark, right? But it isn’t. It all comes down to their contention that there is something ineffable about fighting terrorism. It isn’t about intelligence and bombs and troops and so on. None of that matters if you don’t really want to fight the terrorists. And the one thing that Republican voters know, it is that Obama loves the terrorists just as much as he hates America. What they want is not any particular policy. They want more belligerent rhetoric. That will make them feel safer. And they are very much willing to give up essential liberty to purchase not temporary safety but the illusion of safety. It’s worse than Benjamin Franklin said.