New York’s Frank Rich has an always hilarious and frequently accurate takedown of what Manhattanite Frank deems “Hillbilly Chic”, the new fashion for feeling the pain of the OxyContin-poppin’ white trash who supposedly put Donald Trump in the White House. As Frank shrewdly points out, if Hillary hadn’t pocketed over $21 million in speaking fees from her bicoastal billionaire buddies,1 and if she hadn’t been so scripted that she couldn’t answer the question “What’s your favorite flavor of ice cream?”, she might have won over the 100,000 or so Rust Belt votes she needed to pick up wins in Wisconsin, Michigan, Ohio, and Pennsylvania. And, as Frank also shrewdly points out, the great majority of Trump voters were simply goddamn fat-assed Republicans. So why can’t we Democrats—well, Frank doesn’t quite go there, but I think there’s definitely subtext—why can’t we Democrats just go all Ayn Rand on these hillbillies’ asses and let them kill themselves off and we’ll be done with them?
Well, I like laughing at people who don’t floss as much as the next fellow, but I like winning elections even more, and boosting the incomes of the bottom quarter still seems like a good idea to me. I’ve rambled on this point a number of times, most pointedly here, but the big point I want to make to Frank is this: Let the hillbillies come to New York! By abolishing rent control!
According to a paper by Chang-Tai Hsieh at the University of Chicago and Enrico Moretti at Berkeley, “Why Do Cities Matter? Local Growth and Aggregate Growth”, reducing geezer-friendly, and outsider-unfriendly, restrictions on housing in New York, San Francisco, and San Jose alone would boost the U.S. Gross Domestic Product by 9.5%. And if you threw in a few more tight-assed communities like DC and Boston, you’d get an even bigger bang for your buck. You New Yorkers are all for diversity, aren’t you, Frank? Give those country boys half a chance, and they’ll be glad to trade in their double wides for a high rise, and you’ll be dining on possum and ramps!2
Afterwards
My own, substantially longer, disquisition on the causes of Hillary’s defeat is here.
- This $21 mil was on top of the $14 mil she got for her book Hard Choices—a lot of moolah for a grandma with only one grandkid. ↩︎
- Ramps are a wild onion prevalent in West Virginia and other parts of Appalachia. Like garlic, ramps are rank when raw, but edible when cooked. West Virginians have ramp festivals, where they carry on in a West Virginian way. A woman who grew up in West Virginia told me that when the bad boys in her school wanted to act up, they would eat lots of raw ramps during recess. When they came back in the classroom, their breath would stink up the atmosphere so badly class would have to be canceled. ↩︎
