Mark Steyn, with a little of the class warfare, particularly as it applies to global warming aristos. Or should that be theocrats? I’m not really an expert in research theology.

One assumes Gar Smith is sincere in his fetishization of bucolic African poverty, with its vibrantly rampant disease and charmingly unspoilt life expectancy in the mid-forties. But when a hereditary prince starts attacking capitalism and pining for the days when a benign sovereign knew what was best for the masses, he gives the real game away. Capitalism is liberating: You’re born a peasant but you don’t have to die one.

You can work hard and get a nice place in the suburbs. If you were a 19th-century Russian peasant and you got to Ellis Island, you’d be living in a tenement on the Lower East Side, but your kids would get an education and move uptown, and your grandkids would be doctors and accountants in Westchester County. And your great-grandchild would be a Harvard-educated environmental activist demanding an end to all this electricity and indoor toilets.

Environmentalism opposes that kind of mobility. It seeks to return us to the age of kings, when the masses are restrained by a privileged elite.

…you know, I think that Al Gore would probably seriously groove to being able to hierophant out with a staff, miter, and long, flowing robes. No, not one made out of hemp: didn’t you hear? Secondhand smoke kills.

Moe Lane

*For myself, if we’re going to get all medieval from these asses, I’ve always been personally fond of John Ball‘s question:

When Adam delved and Eve span /
Who was then the gentleman?

Crossposted to Moe Lane.