Silicon Valley Paradox

Victor Davis Hanson, writing for National Review about the irony of Silicon Valley's cutthroat capitalists merrily off-shoring production and profits while professing left-wing politics.

Does Silicon Valley also practice de facto apartheid? You might think just that if you counted up the burgeoning prep schools in the valley, charging $30,000 and more per student. The subtext message is that the kids of rich techies should not be slowed down on their own trajectory to influence and riches by the recent immigrants in their midst. Teachers’ unions, multicultural curricula in the schools, bilingualism, and a diverse student body are wonderful — as long as their own kids are somewhere else.

Silicon Valley is turning a once racially diverse San Francisco into a mostly upscale white and Asian enclave faster than any pre–Civil Rights southern town council could have done.

The point of reviewing these hypocrisies is not to suggest that the rich profit-makers of Silicon Valley are any greedier or more cutthroat than the speculators of Wall Street or the frackers of Texas, but merely that they are judged by quite different standards. (snip) One can live life as selfishly as he pleases in the concrete by sounding as communitarian as he can in the abstract.

Practicing cutthroat capitalism while professing cool communitarianism should be a paradox. But in Silicon Valley it is simply smart business.

Something every Hollywood mogul knows intuitively.