When I go to bed at night, I like to relax for a few minutes by reading some enjoyable novel. But I think I’m going to switch to reading the opinion pages of the Wall St. Journal. It’s more entertaining and even more enjoyable nowadays. For instance, in the paper of Wednesday (2/17), here’s a few snippets from a letter sent to them:

“Young Bernistas Blighting Their Own Future

“Socialism isn’t about solving underlying problems and making the necessities of life more affordable. Rather, socialism treats the symptoms of society’s economic ills by addressing who will pay for those high costs,” Andrew Glickler from Plano, Texas writes. Well, duh! Sure he’s right. Our good Mr. Glickler warns of the day “when the so-called rich and corporations take their proverbial ball and go play elsewhere.” And he comments: “Eventually, a chasm erupts within a once-cohesive country.” He’s just a little bit behind the times there, wouldn’t you say? Seems to me the chasm has already opened up.

After this enjoyable read, we can turn the page and encounter the brilliant Joseph Epstein who warns us about

Bernie and the ‘Lunatic of One Idea’

The dangers of monomania, from Freud’s belief that sex ran everything to Sanders’s ‘Wall Street’ obsession.

Now, this sounds promising! Sex and Wall St. all in one!

“Mr. Sanders’s synecdoche for his idea is Wall Street,” Epstein writes. (I looked it up, by the way – “synecdoche” means several things presented as one image or something like that.) “Everything wrong with American life can be charged up, in his telling, to a small neighborhood in lower Manhattan. Something old-fashioned there is about blaming Wall Street for all the country’s deficiencies. But, then, lunatics of one idea, basking in the pleasure of Manichaeism, like to focus all their enmity on one target. 

“For the old American Communist Party this enemy was “the bosses.” But a street with a symbolic name is even better.”

But you can see what really worries the good Mr. Epstein: “More interesting than Bernie Sanders’s threadbare idea is how it has caught on with the young. In generous readings, is it their idealism that puts the young on his side?…. Does this generation that has grown up with a greater sense of entitlement and protection than any other in history really want the revolution Mr. Sanders is selling?”

Martin Shkreli. Speaking of sense of entitlement…

Umm, sense of entitlement? I think he may be talking about Martin Shkreli, no? Or maybe even Hillary Clinton? Or the 1% that she represents? Ahh, well, anyway, it’s certainly enjoyable to see that the Epsteins and Glicklers of the world are starting to sweat over the fact that they’re losing the younger generation. Speaking of Mr. Glickler, let’s give him the last word:

He warns us of the day when, “when the so-called rich and corporations take their proverbial ball and go play elsewhere.” In other words, if they can’t continue to loot and plunder to their heart’s content here, then they’ll move their capital elsewhere. We have to admit that this is a problem that Mr. Sanders doesn’t consider, but we do have an answer: “What you, Mr. & Ms. Capitalists, are saying is that you cannot and will not allow your super profits and your destruction of the environment to be tampered with. You are saying that you can’t afford a decent life for us. So, we’re not going to worry about the niceties of trying to tax and regulate you. You make it clear you won’t stand for that. So since you and your system can’t afford us, we can’t afford you. We’re simply going to take your capital away from you and use it to the benefit of ourselves and our planet.

“What, you say? That’s robbery? That’s taking what isn’t ours? That didn’t seem to bother you so much when you kidnapped tens of thousands of people from Africa, committed genocide against the Native Americans and put little six year old children to work in your factories. You observe one law and one only: Might makes right.

“When we get the might, we’ll make it right.”

Meanwhile, I’ve got some new bedtime reading.