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Rhodes Scholars and the Business World
...But the elite hostility to business — a holdover from Europe, perhaps, where aristocrats looked down on “trade,” or an unconscious echo of Marxism — is unseemly and harmful to both general prosperity and the individuals who are influenced by it to avoid productive enterprise. It crops up in President Obama’s commencement addresses sneering at students who want to “take your diploma, walk off this stage, and chase only after the big house and the nice suits and all the other things that our money culture says you should buy” and in Michelle Obama’s urging hard-pressed women in Ohio, “Don’t go into corporate America.” It’s nice that some people, like senators’ wives, can make $300,000 a year in “the helping industry,” but it’s business that produces the wealth that allows such nonprofit generosity.

Gerson and the Obamas are disparaging the people who built America – the traders and entrepreneurs and manufacturers who gave us railroads and airplanes, housing and appliances, steam engines, electricity, telephones, computers and Starbucks. Ignored here is the work most Americans do, the work that gives us food, clothing, shelter and increasing comfort. That work deserves at least as much respect as “scholarship, teaching, writing, medicine, scientific research, law, the military and public service.”