‘The Man is Hiding the Stash’ Fallacy
PJM’s own Richard Fernandez and Chicago Boyz econo-blogger Shannon Love coin the name of one of the left’s most common fallacies.
Love writes:
At Belmont Club, Richard Fernandez says of the Marxist Piven’s philosophy:
The problem with Piven’s theory is that events in Europe have shown those “major economic reforms” to be unsustainable, if not actually ruinous. However, she appears to believe that the European crisis is only apparent, being the result of the Man hiding the Stash. Find that stash and things become sustainable again.
I think this fallacy deserves its own name because I think this is the central economic fallacy of leftists in general. Whether we are talking about unions, public workers, redistributionists, etc., there is always the implicit idea that somewhere there is this big pile of money that the rich business people are hoarding away like a squirrel with its winter store of nuts. Leftists tell everyone that all problems can be solved if we just use the force of the state to threaten the squirrels to give up their nuts.
The problem is that rich people don’t own a lot of nuts, they own nut producing trees, i.e., rich people don’t have a stash of cash, they own assets that can, if managed properly, produce a stream of income. Worse, for the leftists, those assets usually provide jobs for the majority of the population, so you really can’t alter their use too much. If you cut the tree down to get the nuts, what are going to eat next year?
Or to put it another way, “Van Jones: Stop worrying about the deficit. The government can just take more money from rich companies.”
Related thoughts on Piven from Clarice Feldman at the American Thinker and William Tucker at the American Spectator.
Maybe that’s why the leftist politicians wake up every day with the urge to ban something. There’s got to be a pony stash here somewhere.
I’ve been calling this the “Scrooge McDuck” fallacy — the notion that rich people have great vaults full of money, in which they swim and play and generally make fools of themselves. So why not take it away — they’re not using it.
The reality, of course, is that the money is in stocks (making things) or bonds (paying for other stuff) or even in banks (providing the cash behind mortgages) and annuities (providing the profits that pay for widows and orphans of people with insurance.)
BINGO!
I had realized this some time ago, and dubbed it the Scrooge McDuck Fallacy (feel free to use). Lefties seem to believe that the Rich keep all their money locked up in big stone vaults, where it does nothing except provide an occasional swim break.
Combine that with the Zero-Sum Fallacy, and one has explained 90% of leftist economic pinheadery.
Socialism is a legalized home invasion: Sooner or later they start beating the #%$# out of you to get you to reveal where you’ve hidden those piles of loot.
I guess I got here too late to make the same excellent Scrooge McDuck point that Charlie Martin and Bohemond have made.
So let me offer up some images from my misspent youth reading comic books.
The Pile
Making it rain
The only thing most liberals have ever run, to paraphrase Marion Barry on Jesse Jackson, is their mouths.
Ever notice that leftist heads are full of cartoon images?
Scrooge McDuck never robbed or cheated anyone. He had a vault full of money that he’d earned honestly.
In contrast, it’s shady characters who are likely to have a “stash” of ill-gotten gains.
Well, the closest thing in real life we have to Scrooge McDuck is Warren Buffet, whose Berkshire Hathaway conglomerate is sitting on a big pile of cash. But he votes Democrat.
You forgot the Golden Goose. One golden egg at a time just wasn’t enough–so they killed it to get all the golden eggs hidden inside it.