Over the weekend, professional golfer
Phil Mickelson complained about tax increases (including state
income taxes in California) that he said had pushed his marginal
rate to 63 percent: “I’ve got to make some decisions on what to
do.” That incited a
scolding from Syracuse University professor Len Burman, who
said Mickelson should “stop whining” because he was so “lucky” to
be one of the world’s highest-earning athletes.
Well, just another cranky liberal academic, eh? We are not
surprised to learn that Burman served as a Deputy Assistant
Secretary of the Treasury in the Clinton administration, nor are we
surprised that Burman founded the Tax Policy Center at the
Brookings Institution, a liberal think-tank. What is perhaps
surprising is that Burman published his attack on Mickelson’s
“whining” at Forbes.
Forbes was once a leading advocate of free-market
economic policy and has published such famed conservative writers
as P.J. O’Rourke and Peter Brimelow. The magazine’s publisher Steve
Forbes sought the Republican presidential nomination in 1996 and
2000 on a platform advocating a flat tax. His father, the late
Malcolm Forbes, proudly named his private jet the “Capitalist
Tool.”
Yet in recent years, the online version of Forbes has
become increasingly notorious as a hive of strident left-wing
opinion. Forbes publishes environmentalist blogger Steve
Zwick, who has waged a one-man jihad against the
free-market Heartland Institute for its criticism of climate
policy. Last February,
Zwick used his Forbes blog to promote a hoax in which
a
fake document purported to show Heartland’s “secret strategy.”
Forbes also publishes Rick Ungar, who became
notorious in 2009 for a column with the headline “Send the Body to
Glenn Beck,” blaming the talk-radio host for the alleged
lynching of a Census worker (who,
as it turned out, had committed suicide).
What happened to Forbes? Two words: Lewis Dvorkin.
A former AOL executive, Dvorkin got funding from Forbes
in 2009 to start a Web site, True/Slant, that lasted a little more
than a year before it was taken over by Forbes in a deal
that brought Dvorkin into the company with the title of Chief
Product Officer. (Dvorkin’s “Copy Box”
column is a lot of jargon-crowded hype about the awesomeness of
the “product”; he recently defended
the concept of “sponsored content” in the wake of last week’s
debacle in which the
Atlantic
published an “advertorial” for Scientology.) Dvorkin’s July
2010 deal also brought under the Forbes online umbrella
several of True/Slant’s left-wing staff and contributors, including
Zwick, Ungar and, apparently, Professor Len Burman.
My friend
Jim Lakely at the Heartland Institute is dismayed that Phil
Mickelson apologized after his scolding from Burman. I’m more
dismayed that Dvorkin’s left-wing takeover at Forbes has
proven the truth of O’Sullivan’s
First Law, formulated by former National Review editor
John O’Sullivan: “All organizations that are not actually
right-wing will over time become left-wing.”
