Our elites are so mediocre

The venality, greed, and lust in the Epstein files are the flip side of the cowardice they showed us during Covid. They sure pay themselves like kings, though. No wonder Americans are so revolted.

Every time I read about another rich guy cozying up to Jeffrey Epstein, I flash to 2020.

That may seem strange. Hear me out. You may vaguely recall I didn’t like Covid lockdowns - and said so once or twice. Some people disagreed. Journalists sure did.

But journalists lean hard left (by lean I mean fall over). The data were clear. Covid posed a moderate risk to most adults, lockdowns were doing major economic harm, and Covid couldn’t be contained anyway. We had agreed to manage respiratory virus outbreaks as medical problems, not societal threats. We just needed to follow our own advice.

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(Follow my advice and join UT! For pennies a day, support independent journalism.)

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As the spring of 2020 ground on, I waited for the people I still thought of back then as the grownups — executives running public companies, big Wall Street investors, successful tech entrepreneurs and scientists — to speak out.

After all, they were mostly political moderates. They could see the same data and run the same analyses I could. Tens of millions of Americans were being laid off. Their companies were at stake. The economy was at stake.

They had to speak. And they had cover. After all, Elon Musk, among the world’s most successful entrepreneurs, had already spoken out. So I waited for them to join him.

And waited.

But they didn’t. They never did, really.

The tech bros and the hedge funds had cynical reasons to stay quiet. The tech companies saw immediately how lockdowns increased our dependence on screens. The smartest investors stopped caring about the impact lockdowns would have jobs or ordinary Americans very quickly.

They realized the Federal Reserve would need to pour massive liquidity into the financial system to stop a depression, and that liquidity would drive an equally massive increase in asset prices. Bitcoin was trading at about $7,000 before Covid, at the end of 2019. It briefly dipped as the panic spread in March 2020, but by March 2021 was at $50,000.

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(Money money money monnnnay!)

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I said Silicon Valley and Wall Street were cynical. I didn’t say they were dumb.

But what about the executives outside those industries? The ones at hotel companies? Or retailers? Or restaurants? Or manufacturers? Or banks? Or grocery stores? Or Big Pharma? Or energy companies? Or airlines? Or consumer-goods companies? Or hospitals? What about all the medium to large companies that collectively employ tens of millions of people in what we quaintly call the real economy?

Well. The airlines and hospitals got straight cash handouts for the business they lost. The grocery stores and big retailers like Walmart realized they had an advantage, they would be allowed to stay open as essential businesses.

A lot of other companies had a rough go in the spring and summer of 2020. But their executives quickly saw the score. The economy was in the tank, sure. But executives know they don’t get fired for having bad years when the economy’s in the tank.

They might get fired if they pushed back against the public health and media consensus too loudly, though. And they’d definitely get fired if they demanded to bring their employees back to offices and even one of those employees died of Covid.

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Besides, the Fed and the massive deficit the United States ran in 2020 kept the economy from collapsing completely. Best just to muddle through.

They weren’t public health experts or virologists, after all. Why pretend to be? The ones who were smart enough to think for themselves saw they were better off just staying in their lanes, keeping their heads down, letting the frenzy run its course.

And the ones who weren’t smart enough to think for themselves… weren’t smart enough to think for themselves.

The flak Elon took for his honesty only made the rest of corporate America more wary of speaking out. Elon was unique. He was unique because he controlled Tesla and SpaceX and could make his own choices without fear of a board. And he was unique because he is a true alpha dog who says what he thinks, right or wrong.

And so he had the courage to tell the truth.

All those thousands of others at the top of corporate America, not so much.

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But of course the choices we made in 2020 have had long-term consequences.

The debt the federal government took on and the dollars the Federal Reserve created to smooth over the crisis of lockdown have caused an asset-price bubble. And that asset price bubble seems to have produced a long-term transfer of wealth from poor to rich, from the working class to Wall Street and the same corporate executives who kept ther mouths shut.

This is self-interested behavior from the elites, whether they recognize it or not. It’s not exactly the same kind of self-interested behavior they show in the Epstein files, but it’s close enough to rhyme.

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I think that’s one of many reasons the Epstein scandal just won’t go away. One does not have to think Epstein’s buddies were having sex with five-year-olds to realize that at every turn they protected themselves and him. They didn’t ask hard questions of him about his behavior, much less cut him off.

Doing the right thing didn’t even cross their minds. Not in 2020, and not when good ol’ Jeff offered them a ride on the Lolita Express.

It’s all awfully tiresome, and a lot of Americans are awfully tired of it.