Hedge fund oligarchs are the new robber barons

I've been getting Bloomberg Businessweek for the past few months, though I don't know why. I didn't subscribe. Maybe it's a perk of my membership in some bar association. It's a little rough to read about billionaires complaining about the economy. It's rougher to read about small-business owners complaining about how hard it is to hire migrant workers because H1-B, H-2A, and H-2B visas are being denied more than they used to, and how "anti-employer" the new immigration regulations are "on almost every level."

Torrey Farms has lost money for the past two years because [New York state vegetable farm owner Maureen] Torrey says she can't bring in enough workers to tend her crops.

With all due respect, Ms. Torrey, the problem isn't that you can't bring in enough workers to your farm. The problem is that you aren't willing to pay high enough wages to the un- and under-employed Americans in your region to work on your farm. Blaming it on "Washington" is disingenuous. (Not that I'm disingenuous, myself -- I know it's not realistic to pay full minimum wage to farm workers, without raising the price of onions to $15/pound.) Anyway, Torrey seems to have a grudge against CIS; her farm has been busted twice, in 1997 and 2006, for violations. So it's not just the post-9/11 immigration changes or the current administration that are making her unhappy.

But what about visas for skilled workers?

Robert Groban, an attorney with law firm Epstein­BeckerGreen in New York, says [federal immigration] agencies are under pressure due to worries that "foreign nationals are taking the place of U.S. workers," and are reacting to the political climate. IT consultant [and Indian immigrant Atul] Jain's response: "The economy will not improve just because foreign workers can't come."

Really, Mr. Jain? Because every IT professional hired at $60,000 or $100,000 will be buying groceries, paying rent or a mortgage, paying for health insurance, entertaining herself, paying taxes, and otherwise flipping that cash back into the economy from paycheck number one. And every dollar she spends continues to move around the economy by stimulating employment, from the grocery checker to the postal employee who handles her Netflix envelopes. Or the housekeeper she hires to come in and do the cleaning now that she's working full-time again and doesn't want to do housework after a hard week back at the office.

It's Reaganomic trickle-down. While I'm no fan of the conceit that cutting the capital gains tax will improve the economy by encouraging hedge fund billionaires to move people off welfare with an invisible hand, I do firmly believe that hiring Americans at fair wages will improve the economy. Working Americans pay taxes that fund foreign wars and buy things. Sometimes they even pay taxes while they buy things. They need money, and they're not averse to working a job to get money. But when the nation's money is held by a handful of oligarchs who refuse to release the money by investing in companies that hire people, the economy can't recover.

Our nation's money is being held, frozen, by the new robber barons and fat cats that used to be satirized in political cartoons during the Progressive Era and the Roaring Twenties.








We don't have these types of political cartoons nowadays because the hedge funds don't have faces. But you don't need a face to be an oligarch.