RUSH: As you recall at the end of the program yesterday we were in the midst of a discussion about the French socialist wacko economist by the name of Thomas Piketty, and who we have sound bites from today as well. Mr. Piketty’s premise is that there’s too much income inequality and that there’s too much wealth and the wealth is held in the hands of the same people forever and they don’t share it and they don’t pay people enough. All they do is just take and take and take and this leads to the end of democracy.
It’s a totally absurd premise. It’s a premise that has been tried in a remedial way to fix what people think are the gross unfairnesses and inequities of capitalism for decades and the idea that there’s some notion of equality that we can all be made to fit into, plugged into. We can all end up being the same people. We can all end up having pretty much the same stuff. And there’s only one way that can happen. And that is if we don’t have anything and our leaders have it all, and then they decide who among us gets what.
It’s frustrating, as it always is, because to me it is such common sense but it does take an open devotion to liberty and to freedom and an understanding of the consequences of individuality, rugged individualism and that freedom entails opportunity. It promises opportunity. It guarantees it, in fact, and it’s what you do with that opportunity that determines your outcome in life. And if you fail to exploit the opportunity you’re given, somehow we end up blaming the country. These people do. When the blame should fall squarely on the person who fails to seize the day.
We have a compassionate country that feels sorry for those who don’t do well and want to fix it for them and so forth. We all feel guilty. The successful end up feeling guilty and they’re made to feel guilty, “It’s not fair we’re doing so well and these people aren’t.” Well, what if they’re not trying very hard? All kinds of barriers. Everybody’s different. For example, to give you a little illustration, a mindless little story I found today in the middle of show prep, and it’s really mindless.
“Marlo Thomas Silences Power Lunch Crowd at Michael?’s.” Now you might be thinking what in the name of Sam Hill does that have to do with income inequality? I’ll tell you what it has to do with it when I read the story to you. Marlo Thomas, the wife of Phil Donahue, still married. 
They still have a majordomo. They still have a mansion up there in upstate New York or Connecticut somewhere. Vladimir Posner still has his guest room there. They sit down over, what, schnapps, think about the good old days. Trotsky and so forth.
“There are not many women formidable enough to silence power lunch spot Michael’s, but Marlo Thomas is one of those women. The petite star of ?’60s sitcom ‘That Girl’ coquettishly cajoled those in the packed restaurant to be silent as she stood up to greet a group who gathered to celebrate her new book, ‘It Ain’t Over.’ Thomas joked, raising her famous husky voice, ‘Can I get the whole restaurant to be quiet? You guys have got to keep it down. I don’t mind if you are talking over Diane Sawyer and Arianna Huffington, but I just can’t have it.’
“Thanking Sawyer and Huffington for hosting Wednesday’s event, she joked, ‘I have tried to use every girlfriend I have to sell this book, and I think it’s working.’ Her tome, which features stories of 60 women who ‘started over,’ is subtitled ‘Reinventing Your Life — and Realizing Your Dreams — Anytime, at Any Age.'”
Well, why? Why? Why are you trying to better yourselves, Marlo? Why don’t you try to settle in and be the same as everybody else? Why don’t you just settle for being the same as all the other dregs that are out there, the unfortunate dregs that are being left behind by this unfair capitalist system. Why are you exploiting this system? Why are you trying to write a new book? You’re 60 some odd years old, whatever years old you are, you’ve lived your life. Why don’t you go away, be happy, celebrate what you have and sit there and clip coupons? Isn’t that what we’re supposed to do?
Income inequality, be happy with what we have? What do you mean, Marlo, you want more? Don’t you have enough? Haven’t you done enough? Haven’t you achieved enough? Why do you need to bring these other babes into it? Why do you need to bring Arianna Huffington into it and Diane Sawyer? Don’t they have enough? What about these other 60 women, stories of 60 women who started over? Why did they start over? Why weren’t they happy with what they had? Why were they being greedy? Why weren’t they so absorbed with income inequality, realizing they had more than anybody else, why did they want more? It’s not fair, Marlo.
Marlo Thomas added: “One thing I learned from reading everybody’s story is, think big and work small ?… and don’t be afraid to fail.” Now, wait a minute, that sounds like capitalists. Don’t be afraid to fail. Take a chance. Take a risk. Don’t be afraid to do that. Claire Shipman has a book out with some other woman, Katty Kay is her name. Claire Shipman, the stay at home wife (now when she wants to) of Jay Carney, the White House spokesman. She can stay home if she wants to because they have a lot of money. You can’t, but she can. You’re not supposed to stay at home. You’re supposed to go out and work and let somebody else take care of your kids. But she can stay at home because she’s part of the elite. She can write books about how she lives, but you’re not supposed to be able to do that because you’re from the hoi polloi.
Anyway, she’s got a book called Confidence Gap. That’s the latest problem plaguing American women, the confidence gap. They just don’t have enough confidence. These rascally men, way too confident, much more confident than women. Women have got to ratchet up their confidence level up there. And they’ve got to start thinking big. Claire Shipman says we gotta do a much better job at failing. What she means is learning how to fail, because there is an education in failing.
Now, to the American left, failure is natural and everybody does it, and everybody should do it and it’s the natural order of things because nobody’s capable of anything more than failure. The people that do not fail are few and the one percent and it’s unfair and so we have to punish them. But here the elites, they want to learn from their failure and take it and make it something bigger, which is what everybody should want to do. But when you want to do it somehow you’re subverting America. When they do it, they somehow are enlarging themselves.
The guests toasting Marlo Thomas included Gail King. No mention of the Oprah. Have you seen that story, the interview with the Oprah and the stepmother and the step — whoa, I don’t have it at my beck and call, but oh man, oh man, it’s all about Stedman and Gail King and Oprah and how race is nothing but a strategy that these people use. That there isn’t any real racism out there, they just use it as a strategy to get sympathy. It’s been out about a week. I was able to partake of some of it while I was in recovery mode.
Anyway, some of the other women at this thing: Gayle King, HBO?’s Sheila Nevins, Joanna Coles, Joy Behar, Gloria Steinem, Diane von Furstenberg, Meredith Vieira and Atria’s Judith Curr.
Why? They’re Democrats. The leader of their party is out there making this big push for income equality. Why are they trying to better themselves? Why does Marlo need a new start? Why does she need a new book? Why does she need to even think about realizing dreams again? I’m sure she’s realized her dreams over and over. Now she wants to reinvent her life, realize her dreams, anytime, any age. My point, these are a bunch of hypocrites, folks. While their leader Barack Obama is out trying to convince you to give up, that the deck is stacked against you, that this country is so unfair and unjust, that the one percent, the Koch brothers, whoever they are, are taking everything and there’s nothing left for you. The only way you have a chance is to keep voting for them so you get what you need to get by. You should be happy with that.
We should all not be happy until everybody is making the same. Here you have these people that vote for this guy. They’re out there trying to get richer and richer and more powerful and more powerful every day. And they already are. So they are apparently free and clear and able to go ahead and follow the natural human order, which is self-improvement, make yourself better, improve your standard of living, improve your lot in life. They’re free to tackle that as often as they want without criticism. If they pull it off, they’re going to be celebrated. These women will be given awards for these books and these stories and so forth. And they’ll have another lunch at Michael’s to celebrate what a great meaningful book Marlo wrote. Or maybe that’s what this was.
But it burns me up. These people are a bunch of hypocrites. The people that make this country work are not the Marlo Thomas’s of the world or Arianna Huffingtons or whoever. The people who make this country work are out in parts of country that David Gregory needs a psychological analysis to be able to relate to, and they’re working hard every day and they’re trying to utilize the freedom they’ve got. They’re trying to improve their lot in life. And when they make 150 grand, somebody comes along in the Democrat Party and says you’re getting too rich and we’re going to raise your taxes and put you on our health care plan that you can’t keep your doctor anymore and so forth. They do everything they can to put obstacles in these peoples’ way and start bludgeoning them with guilt over this notion of income equality, because there’s too much income inequality.
Meanwhile, they don’t sit by and sit in squalor. They don’t just sit by and subsist with what they’ve got. They’re all trying to find out where the money is and they’re reaching into the till and they’re trying to get as much of it as they can, however they can. But somehow when everybody else does it, it’s greed or it’s selfishness, or some such thing. We’re being ruled by a bunch of hypocrites at best, and at worst it’s worse than that. But here’s just a tiny, tiny little example.
BREAK TRANSCRIPT
RUSH: It’s just a take-off on this French economist Thomas Piketty who has been embraced profoundly, happily, by some of the most common names of the left, the media and the Democrat Party. And what he wants to do is literally destroy wealth under the theory that destroying wealth is somehow going to distribute it fairly. It’s never worked.
But the point is that the people that sign on to this, the people that are all excited about it, are out there doing the exact opposite of what he says in the book. They’re out there living lives, full capitalism as best they can. They don’t vote that way. But they’re writing books. They’re trying to improve their lives, trying to start over at age 70, trying to maximize the one life they get, but you shouldn’t.