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" Is there a more unmitigated horse&amp;#039;s ass in American public life than George Effing Will? Is there a more breathtaking coupling of tinhorn erudition and pig-ignorant arrogance? Is there anyone who is a more perfect combination of tea-cosy courage, sherry-sipping macho, and lace-hanky contempt for everyone who isn&amp;#039;t himself? Is there another human being on this planet who more richly deserves to be hung from a coat rack by his undershorts? Is there a dumber looking bow-tie? Breathes there a man with a soul so dead? These are our questions. Having abandoned for the moment his maunderings about baseball, which authentic baseball people find almost as funny as spitting tobacco juice into your teammate&amp;#039;s shoe when he isn&amp;#039;t looking, and taking a brief break from his late-career turn as a global-warming denialist, Will has moved on to bring his research assistants to bear on Elizabeth Warren. As you can imagine, he is not particularly impressed by these stirrings that seem to be stirring up discontent among the lower orders. You may recall that Warren kicked off her campaign in Massachusetts by saying this: &amp;quot;You built a factory out there? Good for you,&amp;quot; she says. &amp;quot;But I want to be clear: you moved your goods to market on the roads the rest of us paid for; you hired workers the rest of us paid to educate; you were safe in your factory because of police forces and fire forces that the rest of us paid for. You didn&amp;#039;t have to worry that marauding bands would come and seize everything at your factory, and hire someone to protect against this, because of the work the rest of us did...Now look, you built a factory and it turned into something terrific, or a great idea? God bless. Keep a big hunk of it. But part of the underlying social contract is you take a hunk of that and pay forward for the next kid who comes along.&amp;quot; In a column so twee it seems to have been originally composed on a doily with a goose quill dipped in Earl Grey, our boy seeks to correct the misperception that most Americans have that they&amp;#039;re getting screwed with their pants on. Gaze in awe, as your betters explain to you why this is so terribly wrong.... Such an agenda&amp;#039;s premise is that individualism is a chimera, that any individual&amp;#039;s achievements should be considered entirely derivative from society, so the achievements need not be treated as belonging to the individual. Society is entitled to socialize \u2014 i.e., conscript \u2014 whatever portion it considers its share. It may, as an optional act of political grace, allow the individual the remainder of what is misleadingly called the individual&amp;#039;s possession. And: In &amp;quot;The Affluent Society&amp;quot; (1958), modern liberalism&amp;#039;s symptomatic text, Galbraith, a Harvard economist, baldly asserted that corporations&amp;#039; marketing powers \u2014 basically, advertising \u2014 are so potent they can manufacture demands for whatever goods and services they want to supply. Also, too: The collectivist agenda is antithetical to America&amp;#039;s premise, which is: Government \u2014 including such public goods as roads, schools and police \u2014 is instituted to facilitate individual striving, a.k.a. the pursuit of happiness. The fact that collective choices facilitate this striving does not compel the conclusion that the collectivity (Warren&amp;#039;s &amp;quot;the rest of us&amp;quot;) is entitled to take as much as it pleases of the results of the striving. In summary, you have to be utterly dishonest, or on mushrooms, to interpret Warren&amp;#039;s remarks this way. (Guess which way I&amp;#039;m betting.) Warren is not arguing for collectivism in any meaningful way. She&amp;#039;s arguing for a functioning marketplace in which we all have a fair shot. She&amp;#039;s arguing against foreclosure fraud, and she&amp;#039;s arguing for credit card regulations that aren&amp;#039;t written in Elvish. She&amp;#039;s arguing against the &amp;quot;individual striving&amp;quot; that created, not a decent market in goods and services, but an industry that created nothing except more exotic financial instruments for the benefit of private gain, and that led to public disaster, after which government was told to bail out the crooks and then &amp;quot;get out of the way,&amp;quot; so that they could all pursue their happiness again without paying any price at all. And, yes, she&amp;#039;s arguing for a top-end tax rate like the one that prevailed when, oh, say, Ronald Reagan was president, so that people can all have decent roads to &amp;quot;facilitate our individual striving&amp;quot; between the three jobs we&amp;#039;re working thanks to the pursuit of happiness undertaken in the early 2000&amp;#039;s by those men of individual striving in the financial-services sector, after that &amp;quot;bovine&amp;quot; regulatory scheme got eased and everybody got to steal with both fists. George Effing Will is making a case for the free-speech rights of con-men. There&amp;#039;s never a coat rack around when you need one. "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.esquire.com/news-politics/politics/a11135/george-will-on-elizabeth-warren-6508146/>