Today on the Washington Post web site Ezra Klein interviews Chrystia Freeland, author of The Plutocrats: The Rise of the New Global Super Rich and the Fall of Everyone Else. During the interview Chrystia makes an amazing claim about the super rich.

“Ed Conard, the Bain Capital guy expresses the commonly held view of the super rich that the highest and most important sphere of activity is the allocation of capital, that it is hard to do, that the people who do it well need to be rewarded and that is actually what drives the improvements in society, more than a lot of the do-goody stuff.”

I laughed out loud as I scrolled back to the top of the page to see if my eyes had deceived me. You see the title of Ezra’s interview is–“Romney is Wall Streets worst bet since the bet on subprime”

Fucking hilarious! The idea that these guys are efficient allocators of capital is belied by the title of the article. Not just one epic screw-up, but two.

Since the reelection of President Obama one of the dominant narratives has been of the wealthy living in an alternative reality. My personal favorite, is the story of the Boston’s Logan Airport running out of parking spaces for the jets of wealthy donors coming to celebrate Mittens awesome victory. “Private jets were streaming into Boston’s Logan International Airport Tuesday afternoon, officials said, as Mitt Romney’s well-heeled supporters arrived for his post-election party in the Seaport District.” And these people are the “masters of the universe?

The super rich Wall street crowd likes to think that they are so smart and talented and that they are the job creators. But what they really have been doing for the last 40 years is looting.