{"id":6269,"date":"2011-08-30T19:49:33","date_gmt":"2011-08-30T19:49:33","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/secularright.org\/SR\/wordpress\/?p=6269"},"modified":"2011-08-30T20:19:42","modified_gmt":"2011-08-30T20:19:42","slug":"a-new-york-times-reporter-tips-his-hand","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/secularright.org\/SR\/wordpress\/a-new-york-times-reporter-tips-his-hand\/","title":{"rendered":"A New York Times reporter tips his hand"},"content":{"rendered":"

In the course of a column blasting media entrepreneur Steven Brill\u2019s new book <\/a>on the school reform movement, New York Times<\/em> reporter Michael Winerip inadvertently sets out his economic assumptions.\u00a0 A revelation of an entire world view does not get any more crystalline than this.\u00a0\u00a0 (Regarding education, Winerip almost equally tellingly criticises Brill for not showing enough respect to teachers and teachers unions.)\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n

Winerip lists several of Brill\u2019s sources\u2014the \u201cmillionaires and billionaires who attack the unions and steered the Democratic Party to their cause\u201d\u2014then adds:<\/p>\n

I expected Mr. Brill to explore why these men single out the union for blame when children fail. If a substantial part of the problem was poverty and not bad teachers, the question would be why people like them are allowed to make so much when others have so little.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Who exactly is doing the \u201callowing\u201d here?\u00a0 In Winerip\u2019s world, people earn, keep, and invest money only by the sufferance of some greater authority\u2014presumably the government, which implicitly decides how much they should be \u201callowed\u201d to make.\u00a0 What if I decide that Michael Winerip is making too \u201cmuch when others have so little\u201d?\u00a0 Winerip\u2019s income undoubtedly dwarfs that of a teen mother on welfare in Harlem.\u00a0 Why should he be \u201callowed\u201d to make so much?\u00a0 My guess is that Winerip feels that his income is at best commensurate with his labors, if not inadequate to those labors.\u00a0 Yet there have been plenty of governments in recent human history\u2014the Cultural Revolution comes immediately to mind–for whom Winerip\u2019s income and class status would be a clear sign of bourgeois decadence and injustice, requiring radical redistribution or even the destruction of all such cushy Times<\/em> positions.\u00a0<\/p>\n

There are other notable assumptions behind Winerip\u2019s passing remark.\u00a0 Winerip implies that \u201cnot allowing\u201d businessmen and investors to \u201cmake so much\u201d would actually solve the multi-generational poverty problem of the inner city or lead children there to show a greater zeal for schooling.\u00a0 Inner-city poverty, however, is rooted in behavior, not in the absence of sufficiently redistributionist tax and regulatory policies.\u00a0\u00a0 You could pump up the welfare payments by magnitudes<\/a>, and the self-defeating behaviors of bearing children out of wedlock, not studying in school or attending class, and getting involved in gang life would change very little.\u00a0<\/p>\n

This assumption that inner-city poverty is a mere question of household income rather than behavior and values is a more common and explicit feature of standard liberal rhetoric, however.\u00a0 Winerip\u2019s revelation regarding the merely \u201con loan\u201d aspect of wealth generation is the real gem of his column and worth remembering the next time the mainstream media claims that it is bias-free.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

In the course of a column blasting media entrepreneur Steven Brill\u2019s new book on the school reform movement, New York Times reporter Michael Winerip inadvertently sets out his economic assumptions.\u00a0 A revelation of an entire world view does not get … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":50,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_mi_skip_tracking":false},"categories":[1],"tags":[828,829,830],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/secularright.org\/SR\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6269"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/secularright.org\/SR\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/secularright.org\/SR\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/secularright.org\/SR\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/50"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/secularright.org\/SR\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=6269"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"https:\/\/secularright.org\/SR\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6269\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":6274,"href":"https:\/\/secularright.org\/SR\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6269\/revisions\/6274"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/secularright.org\/SR\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=6269"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/secularright.org\/SR\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=6269"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/secularright.org\/SR\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=6269"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}