¡Oh, That Eye Too Might Trickle Tradably, Like a Brooks!

Dear Dr. Bones,

Sounds a little ungrammatical, maybe, that does; but ’tain’t, not really: Eye refers to the one and only, D*O Volente, Don Davidito de Brooks y Podhòretz, well-known mid-level employee of the New York Times Company. One of the NYTC peanut-gallery peanuts says of the little laddie’s latest

Karen Garcia New Paltz, NY This column is one more attempt to keep the myth of trickle-down economics alive. It also celebrates Social Darwinism in a very genteel way. Why not just call Economy I the deregulated capitalism that it is? Why not admit that Economy I, in all its unmitigated greed, caused the biggest financial collapse in modern history? Why not come right out and say that Economy II should just get with the austerity program proclaimed by the plutocrats, instead of this nonsense about making "a bumpy transition" away from public schools and decent jobs to banana republic status? Why not just define Economy I as privatized profits at public expense?

That’s enough to make a start. Perhaps the freeyoungker’s "Two Economies" _shtyk_, blatantly ‘borrowed’ from D’Israëli Minor, should be set out in the original, though:

On the one hand, there is ((I)) the globalized tradable [*] sector — companies that have to compete with everybody everywhere. These companies, with the sword of foreign competition hanging over them, have become relentlessly dynamic and very (sometimes brutally) efficient. On the other hand, there is ((II)) a large sector of the economy that does not face this global competition — health care, education and government. Leaders in this economy try to improve productivity and use new technologies, but they are not compelled by do-or-die pressure, and their pace of change is slower.

There is more of it, but nothing significantly different from what you have heard a dozen times already, usually better grasped and more speciously expressed.

Comrade Garcia is not, I fear, one of Team America’s bestembrightest rhetoricians: a whole suite of variations on the theme "¿Hey, Davey boy, why don’t you just confess that you are a TopPercenter ratfink?" would require some fancy stylistic value added, in my judgment, to be pulled off successfully. Almost all of us know this particular señorito’s socio-economic standin’ in advance of reading what it scribbles, so it is hardly as if the comrade is conveying the results of cutting-edge research.

On the material side, the trouble with the glossatrix is that Little Davey did not say anythin’ ’bout "trickle down." Eye don’t see that it even implied anythin’. Rather the contrary, actually. Read the whole thing through, please, Dr. Bones, and then advise me whether the sound view be not that Don Davidito supposes its (or Freelord Dizzy’s, or Ch. A. Murray’s) "Two Econmies" already so separated that any significant quantity of intramural tricklin’ is ruled out. [**]

Eye should say that both the NYTC señorito an’ its e-heckleress alike aspire to practice some nifty neoscience of "qualitative economics" that does not yet, as far as Eye can detect, quite altogether exist. The traditional product, far less geistlich, ‘_espiritual_’, can safely be abandoned to the meaner intelligence of drudges like Comrade Krugman.


Happy days.
--JHM

_____
[*] That distinctly queer-lookin’ ‘trad[e]able’ is not, I presume, a genuine foreignism, only the señorito’s tin-ear way of referrin’ to stocks an’ bonds likely to be found in the portfolio of Papá or of Papá’s Classmates. On the other hand, ‘tradable’ really *is* an alien element here, one might say, insofar as Hire Finance is remote indeed from Don Davidito’s usual concerns. That explains why it does not mention--perhaps it is genuinely unaware--that nowadays Papá an’ the Tertulía Brooks-Podhòretz hold more paper issued by icky governments than by lean, mean secret-sector business corporations. A lot more, I betcha it was, before that recent happy recovery by the specuvestin’ clientele of NASDAQ and the gang.


[**] Guesswork about the background of literary effusions goes wildly astray so often that they belong in a footnote at highest. Still, Don Davidito must have read its Party Neocomrade Prof. Dr. Ch. A. Murray’s neohonourable an’ postgallant disquisition on the great gulf fixed between ‘Belmont’ an’ ‘Fishtown’.

Almost as certainly, it will have noticed the reviewers’ near universal lament that Neocomrade Murray was almost as determined to leave out the economics as to leave out all the c*l*ur. My guess, accordingly, is that little Davey decided that *it* may as well be the one to volunteer to put some economics back in. Not much economics, an’ not very good economics, for of course Davey caters to pretty much the same niche market as does the Freelord Prof. Doc. himself, a market that finds economics even dismaller than mostvolks do, possibly because the customers might think less well of themselves if they looked into banausic details. Still, there would appear to be an opportunity here.

If all that be anywhere near whight, then it makes sense that Don Davidito de B-P should simply borrow the fixity of the Murrayan gulf an’ make that an intellectual foundation upon which to erect its own lucubrations.

Ergo no trickle-down from Belmont to the Fishvillains. Q. E. D.