From smashing Google Glasses to rejecting peace talks, failing to understand natural rights is leading to some very dark places
Earlier this week in fog city, a young reporter wasassaulted for wearing Google Glass. A woman ran up to him, grabbed the wearable computing device, shouted some slogans, and then smashed the gadget to the ground. The attack was the latest in a slew of Glass-triggered incidents, the device having come to represent the struggle between the Bay Area have-nots and the young, savvy, and affluent techies who, so goes the public outcry, have priced them out of the city. From targeting a Google executive’s home and demanding $3 billion to “create autonomous, anti-capitalist, and anti-racist communities throughout the Bay Area and Northern California” to staging rowdy protests against the designated buses that ferry employees from downtown San Francisco to the various Silicon Valley campuses where many of the newly gilded gentlefolk work, an anti-technology backlash is making the city’s streets unsafe for the young, the affluent, and the digitally savvy.
What’s behind these outbursts of malice? The glass-smashers and yard-invaders cry income inequality, arguing, like so many on the left these days, that America’s economic and moral woes can both be boiled down to the single fact that the gap between the nation’s wealthiest and the rest of us has increased dramatically in recent years.
There are many reasons why this cri de coeur is, at best, misguided, some of which were neatly captured in an unfairly maligned column by David Brooks. The real problem, as Brooks poignantly noted, wasn’t that a sliver of Americans were earning very big bucks; it was that too many Americans were sinking into poverty, pushed down the ladder by thorny socioeconomic issues, like lack of decent educational opportunities or teen pregnancy, that have little to do with the boom enjoyed by the few and the fortunate. Still, march into too many hallowed halls these days, from newsrooms to college classrooms, and you’ll hear little but chatter about the 1 percent. No wonder: Ideas—the real stuff that helps fix lives and create opportunities—are hard to come by and demanding to execute. Indignation is cheap and easy.
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