Part of what makes the WSJ interesting yet infuriating to liberals is how they treat billionaires as experts at everything, besides their fields of business, and, without hesitation, will publish whatever crosses a billionaire’s mind in the op-ed, in addition to the usual columnists.
The NYT, on the other hand, likes conventional, safe ideas by vetted experts, while the WSJ is open to more controversial, panglossian ideas by smart people who may not be lettered experts in the fields they are writing about.
Th WSJ frequently praises Netflix and file sharing as liberators of content from the leaky silos and DRM fortresses of the antiquated and decaying liberal entertainment establishments.
The Wall St. Journal is always on the cutting edge of economic and technological trends. Through their editorials, the overarching theme is that profits, supply-side, and productivity are more important to the economic recovery than job creation.
In a highly praised Nov 18, 2010 editorial, Warren Buffett was right to thank Bush, Paulson, Geithner and Bernanke for engineering the enormously successful bank bailout, while deservedly snubbing Obama – the wealth spreader in chief whose useless stimulus did nothing to help the economy.
On Oct 12, 2013, Scott Adams, a really smart and successful person, wrote a Wall St. Journal editorial on how to be successful.
The left is opposed to creative destruction because it may destroy useless, overpaid jobs; the GOP, including the Wall St. Journal, embraces it.
Unlike the welfare liberals, GOP and mixed-libertarians don’t live in fear of the fed, rich people, Facebook, and financial instruments.
The neoconservatives, the smartest and most pragmatic faction of the GOP, understand that there is a trade-off between security and innovation, that in a free market no one can guarantee the job security of every room temperature IQ person who hasn’t been fired yet.
Bank bailouts can coexist with a free market, because mixed-libertarians understand that in a crisis government should be endowed with the ability to allocate overwhelming force to stem the crisis that independent, smaller entities under capitalism are unable to do.
In 2008, only the government could have bailed out Wall St; otherwise things would have gotten significantly worse.
The government also exists to create pro-growth economic environments that exclusively benefit the smart and rich – people who create the most economic value.
America has become a hyper-meritocracy, and the left left futilely seeks economic crisis to make it go away.
Snapchat, Uber, Dropbox, and Facebook can thank the fed and congress for their huge valuations, along with the strong global economy and a combination of profit potential, marketshare domination and user growth.
A rising tide lifts all yachts. So what? They, the rich, deserve it. The question we need to ask ourselves is, ‘Do we want a country that rewards talent or a country that is equally poor?’
Related: The Last Question, Part 2