The Tyranny of Clichés: How Liberals Cheat in the War of Ideas (27 page)

True enough! But when conservatives propose amending the Constitution to require a balanced budget, Leahy all but puts on a powdered wig and proclaims himself the unyielding champion of the Founders’ original intent. “I respect the wisdom of the Founders to uphold the Constitution, which has served
this Nation so well for the last 223 years. Let us not be so vain to think we know better than the Founders what the Constitution should prescribe.”
²⁹

In short, the living constitutionalists want a monopoly on what the Constitution means. It is a golden goose for progressives, an unalterably sacred text for everyone else.

^*
And if you want to explore all of this further, I recommend Bradley C. Watson,
Living Constitution, Dying Faith: Progressivism and the New Science of Jurisprudence
(Intercollegiate Studies Institute Press, 2009).

15

LET THEM EAT CAKE

F
rom the monarchs of eighteenth-century Europe, to the “robber barons” of nineteenth-century America, to the conservative leaders (political and otherwise) of today, perceived indifference to the plight of the have-nots has been denounced as a sign of cold-heartedness far and wide by those who extol the redeeming power of compassion and empathy.

A less frequent, but still quite common, indictment is that those in power are not scrooges, but arrogant fools. Their stinginess stems from a deep-rooted ignorance about how the world really works. Harry Hopkins, the head of the WPA, told a conference of mayors in 1936: “There are plenty of business men who realize that when millions are in actual need it is stupid for the top one-tenth of one per cent of the people to be getting as much income as the entire bottom 40 percent. It is as stupid as it was in the days of Louis XVI when Marie Antoinette said: ‘If they have no bread,
let them eat cake.’” That same year, Franklin Roosevelt denounced Republicans for saying to the poor, “Let them eat cake.”
¹

In 1968 Mario Puzo reviewed
The Jeweler’s Eye
by William F. Buckley. “The great thing about reading Buckley,” Puzo explained,

is that one comes to really understand why so gallant a nation as France lopped off so pretty a head as Marie Antoniette’s. “Let them eat cake” is an infuriating phrase in any language and this collection of [Buckley’s writings]… boils down to those old blue-blooded words of wisdom—with the same effect.
²

In 1971 when Spiro Agnew gave a speech defending the profit motive, Democrats denounced it as “Marie Antoinette economics.” In 2008, Pat Buchanan denounced the Republicans’ “‘Let-them-eat-cake!’ coldness” to American automakers.
³

The first problem with these, and thousands of other such indictments: Marie Antoinette never said “Let them eat cake!” Nor was she indifferent to the plight of the poor.

The legend comes from Rousseau’s
Confessions
, in which he wrote that a “[g]reat princess” had declared, “
Qu’ils mangent de la brioche
” while the people were starving. Unfortunately “
Qu’ils mangent de la brioche
” doesn’t mean “Let them eat cake!” It means, more or less, “Let them eat buns.” More specifically, it means let them eat very snooty, expensive buns. The phrase was turned into a deliberate propaganda tool to incite riots, intellectual and literal, against the monarchy.

Moreover,
Confessions
was written in 1768, two years
before
Marie Antoinette moved to France, and the line appears in Rousseau’s journal notes years before Antoinette was even born. Assuming Rousseau didn’t just make it up (which would be highly plausible, since Rousseau was hardly a stickler for the facts), some historians think he must have been referring to a comment made by Spanish queen Marie-Thérèse who, alas, would have offered the offending phrase some hundred years earlier. Indeed, several sources have her saying, “
Que ne mangent-ils de la croûte de pâté
?” (Why don’t they eat the crust of a meat pastry?). Meanwhile, other historians have fingered yet other culprits for this now timeless expression of gold-cocooned ignorance, including a thirteenth-century archbishop of
Canterbury, who employed the phrase to characterize the general indifference of the wealthy. Clearly, the question of who said “Let them eat cake!” is one of history’s greatest examples of “too good to check.”

But the dubious authorship of the phrase barely captures the deeper problem with this now timeless cliché.

First, some context: Eighteenth-century France had the bakery equivalent of the Northeast Dairy Compact. (And, the French being slow to change, still have it—though it was broadly liberalized in the 1980s.) The system required bakers to sell cheap bread and artificially low prices and, if the baker ran out of the cheap stuff, they were required to sell more expensive fare—like
brioche
—at the same price as the cheap bread. The intent of this second policy was to prevent greedy bakers from making too little bread or using cheap bread as a loss-leader for more expensive products. Since everyone
deserved
bread, the aristocrats reasoned, everyone should
have
bread. But since the royalty couldn’t be expected to spend their own money on the masses, they simply insisted that bakers carry the burden.

Economically, this wrought havoc on the all-important bread market. For many bakers, it was akin to telling car dealers that have to sell their used AMC Pacers and other low-end cars at a near-loss and, should they run out of Pacers, the dealers must then sell Porsches and BMWs at the same low price. Under such a system, dealers might keep a manageable supply of cheap cars on their lots, but you can be sure they would not keep a very large inventory of luxury cars on hand, should the supply of the cheap ones run out and they were suddenly forced to sell them at a loss in the name of justice.

To declare “
Qu’ils mangent de la brioche
,” wasn’t so stupid after all. This is in fact what the law
required
. Marie Antoinette, if she said it at all, may well have been simply demanding that the “profiteering” bakers should follow the law and feed the people the more expensive bread, or buns—even though the ultimate result would have been to crush the bakeries financially, and hence make starvation even worse. In short, the system that made a statement like “Let them eat cake!” seem like a plausible suggestion to the aristocracy was in fact
the very system that created the bread crisis in the first place
. What would someone like Marie Antoinette care about the effect regulation had on the market? She got her own bread when and
how she wanted it, and, economics be damned, the poor people should have it thus, too.

So, while “Let them eat cake” has come to symbolize how rich do-gooders think rich conservatives see the world, it actually signifies how rich do-gooders screw things up by creating “compassionate” schemes that only make things worse for the poor.

Consider housing laws. Cities with generous and compassionate laws intended to prevent homelessness invariably create
more
homelessness. In Washington, D.C., the City Council passed an ordinance in 1984, guaranteeing shelter for everyone. Within two years the number of homeless families living in government shelters rose 500 percent. One woman called D.C. authorities telling them she had just enough savings to cover the flight for her and her children and asked them to reserve her free housing for her.
⁴

Rent control laws have a similar effect. The wealthy as well as the subsidized middle class support efforts to “help” poor people afford their rent. But whenever and wherever such schemes are put in place, the amount of affordable housing shrinks and, as a consequence, rents skyrocket. Studies of rent control in places like Cambridge, Massachusetts, and Berkeley, California, find that the chief beneficiaries of such policies are concentrated among the ranks of the highly educated, not the undereducated poor.

(An even more dramatic illustration can be found in the grotesque higher education price “bubble” inflated over the last generation. It is liberal dogma that everyone should go to college and public policies have been crafted to make this utopian scheme as close to a reality as possible. As a result, tuitions have skyrocketed. According to
Mone
y magazine, “After adjusting for financial aid, the amount families pay for college has skyrocketed 439 percent since 1982.… Normal supply and demand can’t begin to explain cost increases of this magnitude.”
⁵
Economist Mark Perry found that from 1997 to 2007 home prices increased by 68 percent creating the housing bubble that crashed the economy in 2008. Meanwhile, over the same period, college tuition and fees rose by 83 percent. “In fact,” writes Perry, “college tuition and fees have never increased by less than 73 percent in any ten-year period back to the 1980s. And in the decades ending in 2009 and 2010, college tuition increased by more than 90
percent.”
⁶
Does anyone—anywhere—believe that the quality of the product has kept pace with the price rise? Anyone?)

The notion that today’s rich are the most likely to say “let them eat cake!” is a form of cultural propaganda. To be sure, there are many wealthy and politically conservative individuals who are out of touch with the hardships of poverty. But the most obvious inheritors of the cocooned arrogance and self-indulgence we associate with members of the monarchical courts of Europe are to be found not in boardrooms, but among the most celebrated liberals of American life: Hollywood celebrities.

Few CEOs surround themselves with courtiers the way your typical diva does. And none hires out a private retinue of vassals, tutors, and hangers-on more than the pampered glitterati who recreate a private court no less opulent and self-indulgent than the entourages of seventeenth-century France. If you’re lucky enough to witness one of these movable feasts in person, it becomes immediately apparent that the otherworldly opulence of the denizens of the pages of
US Weekly
and
People
magazine dwarfs that of even our greatest captains of industry.

From medieval times through the end of the Enlightenment, kings and queens draped their monarchies with sumptuary laws and rules of grammar to communicate to all, including themselves, that they were special. The only place in America where such arrangements endure is in the oxygen-enriched confines of Hollywood doyens (and those outposts of modern medievalism known as college campuses).
⁷
Jennifer Lopez bars people from photographing her elbows.
⁸
Mariah Carey has an assistant whose only job is to hand her towels. Also, wherever Mariah goes, her courtiers must first remove posters of rival “divas,” lest they offend her delicate sensibilities: Thou shalt have no divas before me!
⁹
Kim Basinger is “allergic” to the sun and requires an assistant to carry an umbrella to protect her on the off chance she might be exposed to dangerous solar radiation.
¹⁰
John Travolta is reported to have a staff of twelve assistants. When he signs up to do a film he often demands that the studio cover the costs of his entourage. For one film shot in Paris, he demanded that Mandalay Entertainment fly and house “more than a dozen assistants, trainers, makeup artists, stand-ins, security guards, massage therapists, stunt doubles and drivers.” He demanded that his personal chef be retained and he wanted approval of
the catering staff for the rest of the cast and
crew
. When he filmed
The General’s Daughter
he arrived with an entourage of “25 personal assistants, including masseurs, acupuncturists, nutritionists and fortune tellers.” According to Mike Nichols, who directed Travolta in
Primary Colors,
sitting down with the actor is “not unlike taking a meeting with Henry VIII. When John Turteltaub met with him to work out details of the movie
Phenomenon
, “There were 13 people at this meeting, all to talk about John’s feelings about the script. It was like setting up the Treaty of Versailles.”
¹¹

Sylvester Stallone—who, in fairness, supports Republicans—once refused to continue with an interview until his hotel room was painted a more “likable” peach.
¹²
Mike Myers almost quit the filming of
Wayne’s World
because he didn’t have any margarine for his bagel.
¹³
Sean Penn had an assistant swim the dangerous and polluted currents of New York’s East River just to bring him a cigarette.
¹⁴
Only members of Jennifer Lopez’s double-digit entourage are permitted to gaze into the windows of her soul. Various stars travel with full-time aromatherapists, masseuses, acupuncturists, and, one presumes, court jesters. Oprah Winfrey has a bra handler. Sylvester Stallone, Tom Cruise, and, of course, Barbra Streisand are just a handful of the folks who think they’re on the same plateau as Japanese emperors, Turkish pashas, and medieval kings.

Unlike businessmen or inventors, actors value their emotions above all things. So if you feel that poor people should have more, it must be so. The “pleasure of the king” was the law under Henry VIII and so it is with modern-day royalty who can afford their self-indulgence both financially and
culturally
. Almost no Fortune 500 CEO could stop a business deal because his bagel lacked margarine. Everyone understands this intuitively. But our intuition probably obscures the explanation. The businessman wouldn’t do such a thing not because he could not afford to, but because the culture of business does not tolerate such behavior. The culture of artistic success demands that whims be indulged, emotions set free to express themselves without the interruption of fact.