Joe Cardona The Miami Herald

November 13, 2010

Joe Cardona
The Miami Herald
One Herald Plaza
Miami, FL 33132-1693

RE: “Kiss the Middle Class Goodbye” – What a column! The Miami Herald returns to its roots.

Mr. Cardona,

I must tell you that after reading your column this morning I was tempted, sorely tempted, to restart my campaign to amend the First Amendment. I want it to read “Congress shall make no law prohibiting newspapers from hiring horses’ asses”. That I resisted should be self evident. I say “self evident” somewhat guardedly because you have a penchant for never letting facts, and aren’t they Damned inconvenient things, interfere with your argument.

Let’s begin with the obvious.

#1 – You put the “Robber Barons” in the “Roaring Twenties”. Alas, you’re off by more than 60 years.

I suppose you could call Papa Joe Kennedy, the anti-Semitic, Nazi loving corsair a “Robber Baron”. He stole so much that his swag is now down to his fourth generation of layabouts.

Say what you will about the original “Robber Barons” but they built things. How do you think those oil wells, steel mills, railroads, grain mills, department stores, cattle ranches, light bulbs, baseball, and breweries came about? The American invitation read that you could be free and that you could work. They came by the millions. The Maxim gun and the Titanic were products of American capital. The first library I read in was built by Andrew Carnegie. All Kennedy ever did was to employ lawyers. They were experts in tax planning and criminal defense. They had to be.

Is that what you meant when you wailed about “income inequality”?

A strong case can be made for the excesses of said “Robber Barons” giving us Samuel Gompers, the Wagner Act, George Meany, Jimmy Hoffa, ERISA, OSHA, EPA, and the purple shirted thugs of SEIU. That’s known as the Law of Unintended Consequences.

#3 – Keynes called it “animal spirits”. Johnson spoke of “growing rich beyond the dreams of avarice”.







Your premise, essentially a political one that requires no thought, none whatsoever, but does require a firm belief that the laws governing gravity can be suspended by a caring progressive Congress, is a reaffirmation of “the triumph of hope over experience”.

I know not of your economic background but try this one on for size.

Were you ever hired by someone poorer than yourself?

How’s this for a thought.

Rich people hire poor people for two reasons.

A – They want to stay rich
B – They want to get richer.

Unless you want to have decennial censuses 3 or 4 times a year you have to accept the bitter truth that the only way for poor people to get rich is for rich people to get richer.

#4 – Words have consequences.

You say that “most Americans” are without medical insurance. Perhaps you may want to back up on that.

Beyond the cognitive dissonance required of all acolytes of modern American Liberalism – por ejemplo, Bush deficits were bad; Obama deficits are good. – there is a need to frame all arguments either as Jeremiads or captandum or absurdum.

The world will end if the minimum wage
is not raised, it being better to be
unemployed at a higher hourly rate.

Why not have unemployment insurance last until you die? Once you get your first check they don’t stop until you get hit in the face with a shovelful of dirt. That’s “fair”, isn’t it?

Having pointed out the problem of “income inequality” your solution will involve making the rich poorer. Your Logic dictates that this will make the poor richer. All it will


take is making the rich pay their “fair share” of taxes. Once that happens the poor will be farting through silk

Let me stick a needle into that “balloon juice” non-idea.

Can you show me one example in History, and don’t limit yourself to this planet, where that has worked?

As the legendary Big Mike from Bayonne always says, “That’s why you never see anybody swimming TO Cuba”.







Kevin Smith