They said you was high classed problems…

Well, that was just a lie.

According to Biden chief of staff Ron Klain endorsing the deep thought of former Obama administration CEA chairman Jason Furman, inflation, supply chain fiascos, and all the rest are the kind of problems we should be grateful to have, or to be able complain about, or something. They are “high class problems” so long as we are south of 10 percent unemployment.

Furman holds down appointments at Harvard, so we are apparently to believe that this is something more than political hackery. It is the professional judgment of a trained economist! A trained economist who holds that higher unemployment would reduce inflation, as in the golden era of Carter’s stagflation (not).

This is political hackery, but of a most revealing sort. Klain wants us to know that it could be worse! We’re getting there rapidly, so there is that.

Klain reveals deep contempt for the legitimate concerns of ordinary Americans. Spectator World editor Dominic Green — a trained historian! — puts it this way:

The smart set are explaining away the supply-chain fiasco as middle-class false consciousness. “Most of the economic problems we’re facing (inflation, supply chains, etc.) are high class problems,” says Ron Klain, Biden’s chief of staff.

That’s right, Ron: if the peasants can’t find vegetables on the shelves, let them eat the rich. Because only the rich worry about commodity prices rising faster than at any time since 2008. Only the rich notice when the price of gasoline, vegetables and baby formula rises and rises. And only the rich — or at least the expensively-educated, which tends to mean the same thing these days — are literate enough to worry about the increasingly probable knock-on effect on inflation.

It is part of the amateurishness of those who rule us that, every now and then, they let their manners slip and show the contempt in which they hold the governed. This has never gone down well in other societies in the past. It didn’t go down well under mad King George. There is no reason to think that Americans will swallow this stuff indefinitely now.

The New York Post responds to the Klain clang in the excellent editorial “‘High class problems’: Team Biden is out of touch with the misery its policies inflict.”

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