David Rubenstein seems like a nice enough guy. At least he did in Sunday’s 60 Minutes hagiographic segment, All American. But I was really struck by this comment, “The government doesn’t have the resources it used to have. We have gigantic budget deficits and large debt. And I think private citizens now need to pitch in.” There are so many things wrong with that statement. To begin with, what is a “gigantic budget deficit”? It is half the size it was only a few years ago. Pretty much all of it is due to the fact that the United States pays twice as much for its medical care as the rest of the developed world. As for resources: the government has as many of those as it ever did. Did some national parks sink into the ground or something?

I think we know what Rubenstein is saying here. The government does have as much tax revenue as it once had. That’s true! But it isn’t anything fundamental. There is a reason that tax revenues are low: people like Rubenstein have done everything they can to have their tax rates lowered, increase loopholes, and hide income. Almost all of his current income is capital gains that he pays no payroll tax on and a maximum tax rate of 20%. If you make the minimum wage, you pay 15.3% in payroll taxes on every dollar you make. So even under the best of circumstances, you pay almost as high a rate of federal taxes as does Mr Rubenstein. If you are in the middle class, you probably pay a higher rate.

But rather than Rubenstein working to make the tax rate more fair, he is out there working in “patriotic philanthropy.” What this seems to mean is that he uses his money to support high profile historical preservation. So not only does he get the thrill of buying an original copy of the Magna Carta, he gets the thrill of very publicly giving it to the nation. As he said in the segment, “I’m giving it to the country, in effect, as a down payment on my obligation to give back to the country.” Let me outsource my response to one of my favorite Iron Age philosophers:

Rubenstein paid $21.3 million for the document. That’s a small price to pay for all the publicity that he received for it. Let’s put it in perspective. Rubenstein is worth an estimated $3 billion. Imagine that you were worth one million dollars. His purchase would be equivalent to roughly $7,100 to you. So it is a decent used car. Also note: the Magna Carta really isn’t that important to this country. Ever read it? It basically just says that the king doesn’t have the right to kill other members of the aristocracy. It’s important, but hardly Enlightenment thinking.

Also from this glowing puff piece, we learned that Rubenstein has committed to giving half of his wealth away to worthy causes. That’s fine, but it doesn’t exactly make him different from the robber barons of old. But more to the point: so what?! His billions and Bill Gates’ billions and all these guys’ money is not going to do all the things that the government needs to do. What we need is a just tax system. But none of these bozos will get behind that. It’s much more fun to build an opera house or fix the Washington Monument so that the whole nation can stand up and cheer you.

The hard work of running a country is something that we should all do every day. But I don’t see the rich doing it. I just see them making themselves feel even better about themselves because of all the love they are buying. Truly I say to you, they have their reward in full.

My first wife got me into libertarianism. She was very clever and I followed right along with her ridiculous arguments. A good example was her argument against antitrust laws. The way she saw it, they were unnecessary. If one company wanted to undercut prices and throw everyone else out of business: great! That meant that we would all get cheaper prices. Once the company had its monopoly and then raised prices: no problem! That would open up a market opportunity for other companies to come in. This is a typically facile argument that doesn’t take into account start up costs and times. Nor does it deal with regional effects. It is, in other words, the perfect libertarian argument: it has little or nothing to do with the real world — thought through just long enough to make the libertarian case.

But even if those were not problems, who would want to live in such a world? This month, cars costs $1,000. Next month, they cost $10,000. The month after that, who knows? And what is especially problematic with this world is that libertarians are obsessed with price stability. As a result, they want the gold standard so that no bureaucrat can take John Galt’s wealth away! Price stability is important for the economy as a whole. But as long as it isn’t the government, but rather various rich capitalists who are stopping people from planning their economic futures, libertarians don’t think it is a problem.

Dean Baker just brought my attention to a similar kind of libertarian nonsense, Forbes’ Tim Worstall Is Upset the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) Bans Export Subsidies. Worstall recently wrote an article in which he claimed that we shouldn’t worry about other countries keeping their currencies artificially low and that the TPP doesn’t need to address the issue. Just like my wife used to say, they are doing us a favor by giving us goods at low prices. Shouldn’t we be glad about that? Well, it depends.

If you are rich and you don’t need a job, then it is great. The Chinese, for example, provide us with goods that are cheaper than they should be. That’s as true for the poor, however. The problem is that the poor need jobs. So there are all these products that are made in China that would be made in America if the renminbi were properly valued. This I always find really interesting. There is no doubt that Tim Worstall is in the upper middle class — but he’s probably in the upper class and may well be just flat out rich. And as I’ve discussed many times, reporters tend to see as “obvious truth” what is in fact just whatever is in their own best interests.

Baker noted that Worstall ought to be angry about its ban on export subsidies. After all, he is for allowing countries to subsidize consumers in other countries through currency manipulation. Export subsidies are just a different way to do exactly the same thing. So what gives? Well, as Baker noted in an addendum, Worstall thinks that the world is always at full employment. And that circles back to the larger issue which is that Worstall sees everything from his own social position. I’m sure that he doesn’t know many if any people who are unemployed or underemployed. It seems to me that almost everyone I know falls into one of those categories.

Again, the problem isn’t that Worstall is man of his own culture. The problem is that he considers himself a clear eyed observer — maybe even objective. If he would just admit that all he really cares about is the rich, there would be no problem. We could just discount him the same way we do simple minded libertarians. In his perfect world where everyone who wants a job can have one, it all makes sense. But we don’t live in that world. Instead, we live in a world were incompetent ideologues like Tim Worstall have good paying jobs at popular business magazines.

On Friday, I was really struck by something that Baltimore Mayor Stephanie Rawlings-Blake said, “We know that the vast majority of the men and the women in the Baltimore City Police Department serve our city with pride, with courage, with honor, and with distinction. But to those of you, who wish to engage in brutality, misconduct, racism and corruption, let me be clear, there is no place in the Baltimore City Police Department for you.” Most people have focused on the second sentence. To me it is just political boilerplate — the sort of thing that we hear from every mayor everywhere regardless of what their actual policies are. I’m interested in the first sentence.

Of course, the first sentence is no less boilerplate. It’s required in a nation where the police forces are a bunch of pussies who need to use deadly force rather risk a slight abrasion and yet still demand that the people treat them as though their jobs were very dangerous and that they performed them with great professionalism. As anyone who reads this blog knows, I don’t think highly of policing in this country. In addition to maintaining a low level of professionalism, police officers tend to have huge chips on their soldiers — demanding rather than earning respect.

A good example of this is found in the way that many people respond to my writing about the police. The blame is placed on me. Supposedly, the problem is that I don’t know just what great chaps our men in blue are. So the solution is for me to run out and learn how great they are. This is because we can’t expect the police to actually show themselves to be good guys. Despite the torrent of information indicating that there are major systemic problems with all of our police forces, I’m supposed to start a goodwill tour to ferret out the good guys. It’s nonsense.

But what Bawlings-Blake did is exactly the same thing. The police are so sensitive that we can’t even talk about the heinous acts of six police officers without starting with, “While most police spend their time rescuing kittens and feeding the poor…” Note that it is not de rigueur to start a discussion of pediophile priests with, “While most priests serve their congragations with pride, with courage, with honor, and with distinction…” And I think this is because most priests actually do. When the mayors of major cities say these same things about police, they mean it aspirationally: they hope someday that this is actually true.

But if there is anywhere that most police officers do not serve the city with pride, courage, honor, and distinction, it is Baltimore. What the officers did to Freddie Gray was not just out of control officers; it was part of systemic brutality. Read Conor Friedersdorf excellent article at The Atlantic, The Brutality of Police Culture in Baltimore. The reason that this thing is allowed to go on is because everyone gives the benefit of the doubt to the police. People like Michael Slager are just bad apples. Darren Wilson was just a pussy. Eric Garner only died because he was fat. We never do anything to change the system because, “We know that the vast majority of the men and the women in the [Whatever] City Police Department serve our city with pride, with courage, with honor, and with distinction.”

One of the best articles I ever wrote was, I Was a Middle Class Food Stamp Kid. In it, I discussed how my parents owned a 7-11 when I was a kid. There were lots of people who lived near by and they spent food stamps to pay for stuff. That helped them, and that was great. But the truth of the matter is that those food stamps helped everyone — most especially my family. I estimated that 5% of the store’s gross income came from food stamps — probably more than our entire margin. It is a sad thing that people like me tend to look down on poor people who are dependent upon SNAP benefits, even while they help us as much if not more.

On Friday, David Brooks wrote, The Nature of Poverty. As the totally clueless commentator that he is, he thinks he has a big ol’ scoop. You see, silly people like Jon Stewart complain that we aren’t doing enough about poverty in this country. But Brooks has some news for you, “Since 1980 federal antipoverty spending has exploded… in 2013 the federal government spent nearly $14,000 per poor person.” If we just gave that money to poor families, they would be middle class!

It should come as no surprise that Brooks concluded his column, “The world is waiting for a thinker who can describe poverty through the lens of social psychology.” That’s because it isn’t his conclusion. This is his unspoken postulate mascaraing as a conclusion. Where have we heard this sort of thing before, “Individuals are left without the norms that middle-class people take for granted.” Oh, that’s right: the last time David Brooks “tackled” the issue. It’s always about social dysfunction among the poor — the causation never goes the other way. Why would it? The whole point is to tax the rich as little as possible and to tell the poor to pull themselves up by their bootstraps.

But as Dean Baker was quick to point out, Brooks’ statistic was nonsense, David Brooks and the Federal Government’s $14,000 Per Year Per Poor Person. A shocking 40% of it is in the form of Medicaid. That is money that doesn’t go to the poor but rather “directly to doctors and other health care providers.” It is true that the poor get medical care, but the cost is so high because doctors make twice in America what they make in the rest of the advanced world.

So this is a situation like mine growing up in a 7-11 store. What we have here is welfare for the well off that people like David Brooks pretends is done for the poor. To him, somehow doctors’ salaries would go down if only poor children did better on the marshmallow challenge. This is just a way for rich people to justify doing nothing while pretending to care.

As for the other 60%, well, it isn’t as Brooks claimed either. That total $14,000 claim is based upon taking all of the money that we spend on programs for lower income people, and then dividing it by the much smaller number of people below the poverty line. So they don’t actually get that much money. As Baker noted, we are a stingy society, “The average family of three on TANF gets less than $500 a month. The average food stamp benefit is $133 per person.”

Paul Krugman later pointed out that the funding for these programs have all basically been flat — except for Medicaid, and it has only been going up because healthcare costs are going up, not the amount of service. He provided this helpful graph:

So people like Jon Stewart are right. And David Brooks is just a jerk.