Nothing offends the sensibilities of the New York Times more than the idea of someone getting rich.
As such, we see a continuing stream of stories like this one about Silicon Valley founders that, in theTimes’s prim and stuffy language, raise “concerns about whether these start-ups and their investors operate under a sufficient number of checks and balances.”
The Times’ idea of a proper tech startup (and I exaggerate only slightly) is one where the entrepreneur exists merely to promote diversity and provide employment for others, in that order. The company’s founders must be non-white-male, the first hire is a Director of Human Resources, bathrooms are “gender-neutral”, black or latino transgendered software engineers are fully represented, 401Ks and family leave policies are established even before a first product is shipped, and of course, no “obscene” profits are made by the founders who sacrifice years of their life, their savings, and their sanity. This latter is to be achieved by heavy capital gains taxes along with SEC regulations and antitrust laws to actually prevent founders from selling their stakes.
At any startup with a sufficient headcount there will probably be numerous instances of employees who meet, strike up a relationship, get married, and have children. It’s a beautiful thing; new lives are brought into being that would not have otherwise existed. And for every successful workplace relationship there are also unwanted invitations, crossed signals, romances that didn’t work out, and plain old harassment. That’s life. Or at least was life before the tyranny of political correctness was forced on private companies.
And tyranny is certainly the appropriate term as weaponized political correctness is much less about “fairness” (whatever that might be) than about injecting the power of the state into formerly private business and personal relationships in order to bring about an egalitarian vision totally at odds with human nature.
The simple fact is that all people are not equal. Human beings vary greatly in terms of values, motivations, ambition, talent, intelligence, imagination, honesty, and the willingness to sacrifice short term rewards to achieve long term goals. Whatever you may think of his methods, Elon Musk is far from an average human being. Nearly every New York Times article and editorial has this unstated premise: tall flowers should be cut down and the most mediocre of mediocrities elevated–a totalitarian vision not at odds with that of the Soviet state born exactly one hundred years ago this year and long since relegated to the scrap heap of human history.
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