Ralph Nader’s new novel “Only the super-rich can save us” is a fantasy from the longtime consumer activist detailing the possible intervention of 16 billionaires in the various causes general progressivism is currently worked up about.
In discussion over this the influence of the super-rich in universities and arts organizations has come up. The super-rich, we are told, have saved these cultural institutions from the rapacious market. However the humanities departments of most private colleges have been in steady shrinkage since 1970. There is a connection:
Humanities departments and arts organizations are not centers of creation any more. In the early 70s the economic system changed to a floating currency. This rewards dealing and trading over making thing people buy. Likewise, the university had to change to reflect this.
The super-rich have only become wealthier not by working or making, but by placing capital in locations optimized for one government action or another — actions they had advance knowledge of, because they are buddies with government appointees. Art theorists, in the pay of the super-rich, developed elaborate excuses why the middle-class virtues of work were now outmoded, and cultural production followed suit.
Anybody who was dealing in fakery and scams all day would be repelled at the though of reading books, listening to music, or looking at art that actually examined reality, or reflected a world where effort led to reward. Better a chaos economy where success or failure was the result of happenstance.
By now this effort has run its course. The elites drove the humanities departments into the ground, Nader has given up all hope of convincing the middle class electorally, and they are both begging the super-rich to bail them out.
