The Wall Street Journal has accumulated prizes for the dumbest columns and op-eds ever, but this one, by former senator Phil Gramm and AEI's Mike Solon, transcended the boundaries of mere trinkets: "In Defense of Scrooge, Whose Thrift Blessed the World: In the 1840s, Dickens didn’t see how businessmen like his hero were already lifting mankind from poverty."
A sampling: "While the literature of the Victorian era paints a dark picture of mid-19th-century life in England, virtually every official measure of well-being shows the period from 1840-1900 to have been the beginning of a golden age for workers."
The writers chose their words carefully: the beginning — as in, the period before government intervention. The average life span of British coal miners in the cited period? 18 years. The Scrooging of laborers, however, was long-lived.
The writers could have chosen a better role model for hard-driving businesspeople than the unrehabiltated Ebenezer Scrooge. But the ideal they choose is conspicuously revealing: The literary antagonist mirrors their own proud, promotional self-styling of … Fuck the poor; it'll all turn out Okay … someday … meanwhile, we've got ours.