Finding Meaning in Ferguson

By Heather Mac Donald

Monday, December 01, 2014

The New York Times has now pronounced on the “meaning of the Ferguson riots.” A more perfect example of what the late Daniel Patrick Moynihan called “defining deviancy down” would be hard to find. The Times’ editorial encapsulates the elite narrative around the fatal police shooting of unarmed Michael Brown last August, and the mayhem that twice followed that shooting. Unfortunately, the editorial is also a harbinger of the poisonous anti-police ideology that will drive law-enforcement policy under the remainder of the Obama administration.

The Times cannot bring itself to say one word of condemnation against the savages who self-indulgently destroyed the livelihoods of struggling Ferguson, Mo., entrepreneurs and their employees last week. The real culprit behind the riots, in the Times’ view, is not the actual arsonists and looters but county prosecutor Robert McCulloch. McCulloch presented the shooting of 18-year-old Brown by Officer Darren Wilson to a St. Louis county grand jury; after hearing three months of testimony, the grand jury decided last Monday not to bring criminal charges against Wilson. The Times trots out the by now de rigueur and entirely ad hoc list of McCulloch’s alleged improprieties, turning the virtues of this grand jury — such as its thoroughness — into flaws. If the jurors had indicted Wilson, none of the riot apologists would have complained about the length of the process or the range of evidence presented.

To be sure, most grand-jury proceedings are pro forma and brief, because the evidence of the defendant’s guilt is so overwhelming, as Andrew McCarthy has explained. Here, however, McCulloch faced a dilemma. His own review of the case would have shown the unlikelihood of a conviction. Physical evidence discredited the initial inflammatory claims about Wilson attacking Brown and shooting him in the back, and Missouri law accords wide deference to police officers who use deadly force against a dangerous suspect. Not initiating any formal criminal inquiry against Wilson was politically impossible, however, especially since the eyewitness accounts that corroborated Wilson’s version of events would have remained unknown. (Not surprisingly, the six black witnesses who supported Wilson’s story did not go to the press or social media, unlike the witnesses who spread the early lies about Wilson’s behavior.) So McCulloch used the grand-jury proceeding as a way to get the entire dossier about the case into the public domain by bringing a broad range of evidence before the grand jury and then releasing it to the public after the proceeding ended — a legal arrangement.

The Times is silent about that evidence, of course. Blood and DNA traces demonstrated that Brown had initiated the altercation by attacking Wilson while Wilson was inside his car. Brown then tried to grab Wilson’s gun, presumably to shoot him. Such an assault on a law-enforcement officer is nearly as corrosive to the rule of law and a stable society as rioting. But to the mainstream media, it is apparently simply normal behavior not worth mentioning when a black teenager attacks a cop, just as it was apparently normal and beneath notice that Brown had strong-armed a box of cigarillos from a shopkeeper moments before Wilson accosted him for walking in the middle of the street. Amazingly, anyone who brought up that earlier videoed felony was accused of besmirching Brown’s character, even though the robbery was highly relevant to the encounter that followed (and showed that Brown did not have much character to besmirch in the first place, something his sealed juvenile records would likely have confirmed).

Even if we ignore the exculpatory evidence, it is absurd to blame the riots, as the Times does, on McCulloch’s management of the grand jury or the way he announced the verdict. There would have been rioting if the grand-jury proceeding had lasted one day, so long as it failed to indict Wilson for murder. It is unlikely that the rioters even listened to, much less carefully parsed, McCulloch’s post-verdict press conference, which the Times finds biased. It is equally absurd to imply that the grand jury’s decision not to indict resulted from unprofessional behavior on McCulloch’s part or from prejudice that somehow infected the proceedings. Not indicting officers for good-faith shootings in the course of their duty is the norm, not the exception. There have been no indictments of Missouri officers for shootings since 1991. Houston grand juries have cleared officers of shootings 288 consecutive times. The Brown verdict was par for the course and not the result of some flawed, partial process.

The Times then goes into blazing hyperbole about the reign of terror inflicted “daily” on blacks by the police in Ferguson and nationally. The Times coyly cites “news accounts” — i.e., its own– claiming that the police in Ferguson “systematically target poor and minority citizens for street and traffic stops — partly to generate fines.” The Times has no evidence of such systematic targeting, proof of which would require determining the rate at which blacks and whites violate traffic and other laws and then comparing those rates to their stop rates. Studies elsewhere have shown that blacks speed at higher rates than whites. Blacks likely also have lower rates of car registration and vehicle upkeep, for economic reasons. Moreover, if authorities are using traffic fines in order to generate revenue, they would presumably “target” the people most likely to be able to pay those fines, not the poorest residents of an area.

Even more fantastically, the Times claims that “the killing of young black men by police is a common feature of African-American life and a source of dread for black parents from coast to coast.” A “common feature”? This is pure hysteria, likely penned by Times columnist Charles Blow. The public could perhaps be forgiven for believing that “the killing of young black men by police is a common feature of African-American life,” given the media frenzy that follows every such rare police killing, compared to the silence that greets the daily homicides committed by blacks against other blacks. The press, however, should know better. According to published reports, the police kill roughly 200 blacks a year — most of them attacking the officer. In 2013, there were 6,261 black homicide victims in the U.S. The police could eliminate all fatal shootings without having any significant impact on the black homicide death rate. The killers of those black homicide victims are overwhelmingly other blacks, responsible for a death risk ten times that of whites in urban areas. In 2013, 5,375 blacks were arrested for homicide, which is greater than the number of whites and Hispanics combined (4,396), even though blacks are only 13 percent of the national population.

The Times trots out the misleading statistic published by ProPublica last month that young black males are 21 times more likely to be shot dead by police than young white males — a calculation that overlooks that young black men commit homicide at nearly ten times the rate of young white and Hispanic males combined. That astronomically higher homicide-commission rate means that police officers are going to be disproportionately in black neighborhoods to fight crime, where they will more likely encounter armed shooting suspects. If the black crime rate were the same as the white crime rate, the victims of police shootings would most certainly also be equal among the races. Asians are minorities, which, according to the Times’ ideology, should make them the target of police brutality. But they barely show up in police-shooting data because their crime rates are so low.

For the years 2005–2009, a significant portion of victims in the ProPublica study — 62 percent — were resisting arrest or assaulting an officer as Michael Brown did. The cop hatred that activists and press organs like the Times do their best to foment significantly increases the chances of such aggressive and dangerous behavior.

The Times serves up a good example of anti-cop propaganda when it confidently states that “many police officers see black men as expendable figures on the urban landscape, not quite human beings.” That will be news to the thousands of police officers who are the only people willing to put their lives on the line to protect innocent blacks from predation. Until the Times’ editors and reporters start patrolling dark stairwells in housing projects and running toward gang gunfire, their superior concern for black men will lack credibility.

Without question, plenty of officers treat civilians rudely and desperately need retraining in professional courtesy. Having trash thrown at you from roofs or being cursed at and blocked in your pursuit of suspects does not conduce to a cheerful attitude on the streets, but officers nevertheless have a duty to respect the public. The fact remains, however, that black crime drives police presence and activity in black neighborhoods.

The Ferguson episode has starkly revealed several key and sometimes contradictory elements of the elite liberal mindset. The elites are in deep denial about black underclass behavior. They seem to believe that black crime is no higher than white crime, leading to the presumption that law-enforcement activity, if unbiased, would be equally spread between white and black neighborhoods. Ezra Klein is dumbfounded that Michael Brown would have refused to move from the middle of the street or cursed at or attacked an officer. Klein has clearly not spent much time in Central Brooklyn. Yet the liberal elites have also so lowered their expectations for black behavior that they accept criminality as normal. Stealing from a store clerk or assaulting an officer is now considered beneath mention. And black rioting, too, is both understandable and, it would seem, justified when, as in Ferguson, the police are “justifiably seen as an alien, occupying force that is synonymous with state-sponsored abuse,” in the Times’ words.

Plenty of blacks reject such condescension and excuse-making. A corporate executive in Atlanta observed after the riots: “Michael Brown may have been shot by the cop, but he was killed by parents and a community that produced such a thug.” The blight in Ferguson may well be “incurable,” the executive wrote me in an e-mail, but at the very least, “we should mount a campaign to hire ALL of the White cops out of the city/county and see how THEM cow chips come to smell.” Such views almost never find their way into the mainstream media.

The Times’ most influential readers often know even less about policing and crime than its editorialists and use the paper as an authoritative source of information about such matters. This transmission belt of ignorance ineluctably spreads into policy as well as culture. We are entering an era of increased anti-police activism, led by the federal government in conjunction with anti-cop advocates like Al Sharpton. The Justice Department will inevitably impose a costly and unnecessary consent decree on the Ferguson police department and ratchet up pressure on other departments to equalize their law-enforcement activity between black and white neighborhoods, regardless of crime disparities. President Obama is spreading the dangerous lie that the criminal-justice system treats whites and blacks differently. The Ferguson authorities are already rewarding the rioters by promising new programs and incentives to diversify the town’s allegedly over-white police force. Never mind that some of the most criticized law-enforcement bodies in recent years — such as in Detroit and New Orleans — have been majority-black.

Such anti-law-enforcement activism puts the public-safety triumph of the last two decades at risk. That unprecedented crime decline was the product of data-driven, proactive policing and stricter incarceration practices, themselves under attack as well. Officers facing the risk of specious “racial profiling” charges will likely back off proactive policing.

The nation is already turning away from the orgy of hatred, destruction, and entitlement that incinerated Ferguson last week, even as protesters, wedded to the now-discredited myth of an innocent Brown’s unprovoked martyrdom, continue to indulge in sporadic violence across the country. But it is well to remember, before the riots are shelved under the “too uncomfortable to confront” category, that such mass destruction threatens civilization itself by exposing the rule of law as powerless to check hate-driven anarchy. And the only people responsible for such an inferno are the perpetrators themselves.

Why the U.N. Is More Dangerous than Ebola

By Henry I. Miller

Monday, December 01, 2014

High-level officials of the United Nations are not known for their perspicacity, competence, or scientific acumen, but the head of the World Health Organization (WHO), Margaret Chan, is a particular embarrassment. With so much attention focused on the Ebola-virus outbreak in Africa, her exaggerations and petty scolding have made her a high-profile liability.

In a speech at a regional conference in Benin last month, she warned that the Ebola outbreak “is the most severe acute public-health emergency seen in modern times” and bashed pharmaceutical companies for not developing Ebola vaccines — products that could not possibly be profitable. “A profit-driven industry does not invest in products for markets that cannot pay,” she said — a truism if there ever was one. “WHO has been trying to make this issue visible for ages. Now people can see for themselves.”

Perhaps Dr. Chan is unaware of the U.N.’s own data on the infectious and other public-health scourges that afflict the developing world, Africa in particular.

Let’s consider first how Ebola stacks up against other public-health emergencies in developing countries. As the United Nations’ own data make clear, infectious diseases, many of them preventable and treatable, remain the scourge of poorer populations. In 2008, about 250 million cases of malaria caused almost a million deaths, mostly of children younger than five. In virtually all poor, malaria-endemic countries, there is inadequate access to antimalarial medicines (especially artemisinin-based combination therapy).

The incidence of malaria could be reduced dramatically by the judicious application of the mosquito-killing chemical DDT, but the U.N. and national regulators have curtailed its availability, owing to misguided notions about its toxicity (and no small measure of political correctness). Hundreds of millions suffer from other neglected tropical diseases, including lymphatic filariasis and cholera.

Although new HIV infections worldwide declined slightly during the past decade, 2.7 million people contracted the virus in 2008, and there were 2 million HIV/AIDS-related deaths. By the end of that year, more than 4 million people in low- and middle-income countries were receiving anti-retroviral therapy, but more than 5 million who were HIV-positive remained untreated. The number of new cases of tuberculosis worldwide is increasing, and the growing emergence of multi-drug-resistant strains of the bacteria is especially worrisome.

According to U.N. statistics, about 15 percent of the world’s population lacks access to safe drinking water, and “in 2008, 2.6 billion people had no access to a hygienic toilet or latrine,” while “1.1 billion were defecating in the open.” Primitive approaches to managing sewage continue to spread infections such as schistosomiasis, trachoma, viral hepatitis, and cholera.

Ebola? The current tally of cases is about 16,000, of which roughly 35 percent have been fatal. The outbreak has been limited largely to three African countries — Liberia, Guinea, and Sierra Leone — and according to WHO, the number of weekly probable and suspected cases is on the decline in Liberia and Guinea. There are even reports in Liberia of empty beds in previously overcrowded Ebola treatment centers.

Ebola deserves attention and resources, to be sure. But Dr. Chan has demonstrated that she has difficulty setting priorities logically and cost-effectively. For example, she and Yukiya Amano, director of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), championed the diversion of public-health resources to non-cost-effective pie-in-the-sky objectives, such as the creation of expensive, high-tech radiotherapy facilities to treat cancer in Africa.

Many cancers are caused by chronic viral infection, which means a wiser use of resources would surely be to attack infectious diseases by improving access to clean water, basic sanitation, antibiotics, and vaccines rather than building radiotherapy facilities. In some technology-poor but oil-rich Middle East countries, state-of-the-art radiotherapy (and cardiopulmonary bypass) equipment has been delivered but never used, or has been damaged by electrical surges or power outages. Moreover, many poor countries do not have a single medical school, and when their citizens study abroad, they often stay there or are ill-equipped for a low-tech milieu that is so different from where they trained.

Dr. Chan’s agency and its U.N. siblings have been spectacularly wrong — and their actions inimical to public health — in other ways, such as the obstruction of critical new technologies for agriculture.

Some background is necessary. Irrigation for agriculture accounts for roughly 70 percent of the world’s fresh-water consumption, and even more in areas of intensive farming and arid or semi-arid conditions, so the introduction of plants that grow with less water would allow water to be freed up for other uses. Especially during drought conditions — which currently plague much of Europe, Africa, Australia, South America, and the United States — even a small percentage reduction in the use of water for irrigation could result in huge benefits, both economic and humanitarian. Genetically engineered, or “genetically modified” (GM), crop varieties can accomplish this and are widely recognized by agricultural scientists and policymakers as critical to meeting future water shortages.

During the past decade, however, various U.N. agencies, including Dr. Chan’s WHO, the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), and the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD), have created major regulatory obstacles to innovations in plant breeding.

Genetic engineering offers plant breeders the tools to make old crop plants do spectacular new things. In almost three dozen countries, farmers are already using genetically engineered crop varieties to produce higher yields with lower inputs and reduced impact on the environment, and greater food security in poor populations. Plant biologists have identified genes regulating water utilization that can be transferred into important crop plants. These new varieties are able to grow with smaller amounts or lower-quality water, such as water that has been recycled or that contains large amounts of natural mineral salts. Where water is unavailable for irrigation, the development of crop varieties able to grow under conditions of low moisture or temporary drought could both boost yields and lengthen the time that farmland is productive.

But research is being hampered by resistance from activists and discouraged by governmental overregulation — including by the Codex Alimentarius Commission, the FAO/WHO U.N. agency that sets international food standards — and by onerous, unscientific regulation of field trials under the Convention on Biological Diversity (the “Biodiversity Treaty”). In spite of the scientific consensus that the molecular techniques of genetic engineering are essentially an extension, or refinement, of conventional — but less precise and less predictable — techniques of genetic modification, both entities have established requirements for the products of genetic engineering that no conventionally modified product could meet.

Ironically, the U.N.’s obstructionism has taken a huge toll on a sector of genetic engineering known as “biopharming” — using genetic-engineering techniques to induce crops such as corn, tomatoes, and tobacco to produce high concentrations of high-value pharmaceuticals. Why is this ironic? Because one of the most promising drugs to treat Ebola infections, ZMapp, is obtained from genetically engineered tobacco plants that have been infected with genetically engineered plant viruses.

The U.N.’s lack of coherence and consistency is bizarre. The U.N.’s Food and Agriculture Organization calls on one hand for greater allocation of resources to agriculture and then makes those resources drastically less cost-effective by gratuitous, unscientific overregulation of the new biotechnology. The secretary-general of the U.N.’s World Meteorological Organization announces that “integrated water-resources management is the key to achieving the Millennium Development Goals of securing access to safe water, sanitation, and environmental protection,” while an alphabet soup of other U.N. agencies are making virtually impossible the development of genetically engineered plants that can grow with low-quality water or under drought conditions. The most ambitious of the U.N.’s Millennium Development Goals — “to eradicate extreme poverty and hunger” by 2015 — certainly will not be accomplished by then, or ever, without innovative technology. And that, in turn, cannot be developed in the face of U.N.-based bans and excessive regulatory barriers.

Instead of taking constructive action to redress these inconsistencies, Dr. Chan, the head of WHO, is out and about, crying “Wolf!” and bashing the pharmaceutical industry.

Yet again, the U.N. is part of the problem, instead of the solution. That is not at all surprising. The U.N. was designed to fail. It lacks any semblance of accountability and was (and is) populated by sleazy second-raters chosen for positions under a kind of nationality-based affirmative-action scheme, in which senior positions go not to the best-qualified person, but to someone from the nation or region that is next in line. Moreover, the pool of possible candidates is not a promising one, which is not unexpected. If you were a head of state or government minister, would you wish to lose your best people to the U.N., or would you prefer to keep them close, to make you look good and to benefit your country? It’s hardly surprising that the U.N. ends up with the least competent and most disaffected and dysfunctional. What is surprising is that the United States uncomplainingly contributes disproportionately to the U.N.’s budget.

H8ers Gotta H8

By Quin Hillyer

Monday, December 01, 2014

The real haters are in the media, some of them the openly left-leaning media and some of them claiming to be mainstream. But oh, how vilely they spew their hatred.

That’s the most obvious takeaway from a perusal of this year’s “Best Notable Quotables of 2014: The Twenty-Seventh Annual Awards for the Year’s Worst Reporting,” sponsored by the indispensable Media Research Center. This is my 17th straight year as one of the 40 or so volunteer judges for the awards, and each year the media’s anti-conservative vitriol seems worse than before.

They accuse us of being “haters.” They, by contrast, are rational, fair-minded, and kindly. Really, they are. Consider, for example, the gentlemanly Chris Matthews on Hardball on October 27, speaking of the Republican nominee for Senate from North Carolina: “What’s worse: Thom Tillis, or Ebola?”

Of course, for others in the media, the dread disease apparently was a cynical figment of the right-wing imagination. Here’s Andrea Mitchell reporting on MSNBC on Election Night about why Republicans were winning: “It was a scare tactic by the Republican opponents of Democratic incumbents, who tried to focus on ISIS and Ebola in the scariest, most nonfactual ways.”

Then again, maybe the world would be better off if leading conservatives themselves contracted a hideous virus. Here’s Alan Pyke, deputy economic policy editor for the far-left Think Progress blog in reaction to the Fox News Channel’s coverage of the unrest in Ferguson: “I hope Roger Ailes dies slow, painful, and soon. The evil that man has done to the American tapestry is unprecedented for an individual.”

How nice.

But that’s okay. After all, we’re killers. That’s the contention of the increasingly unhinged Matthews (again), with regard to conservative support for voter-ID laws: “Believing they can’t convert the African-American vote, they’ve decided to slaughter it. . . . This is murder in broad daylight.”

But at least our economics aren’t lethal — merely bigoted. Just ask MSNBC’s Ed Schultz, who on April 30 discerned our real motives: “I think not raising the minimum wage is a racist policy. . . . Not raising the wage, the minimum wage, is every bit as racist as comments made by Cliven Bundy and Donald Sterling. It’s just displayed in a different way.”

Speaking of displays, Sarah Palin still makes them apoplectic. Esquire once was a classy magazine. Now it employs Charles Pierce, who wrote this blog post about Palin’s speech to the Conservative Political Action Conference: “[Senator John] McCain should pay a heavy price for unleashing this ignorant, two-wheeled bilewagon [Sarah Palin] on the country’s politics. If you think she’s a legitimate political leader, you’re an idiot and a sucker, and I feel sorry for you. . . . She is the living representation of the infantilization of American politics, a poisonous Grimm Sister telling toxic fairy tales to audiences drunk on fear and hate and nonsense. . . . It was the address of a malignant child delivered to an audience of malignant children. If you applauded, you’re an idiot and I feel sorry for you.”

Compared with that, MSNBC’s Mika Brzezinski was quite kind to Palin, calling her merely “a multimillion-dollar moron selling a message.”

One should probably never take seriously a graphic novelist and cartoonist whose father, Mel Brooks, penned Springtime for Hitler, but Max Brooks on HBO with Bill Maher pretended to be a Deep Thinker delivering a sober analysis. The rise of the Tea Party “has happened before in history,” he sagely intoned. “In Germany in the ’20s and ’30s, there was this right-wing reactionary element that was so terrified of anarchy and Communism that they said, ‘You know what? There’s a group of street thugs that are real ideologues, and . . . once they get into power we can control them.’ . . . What is true is that ideologues are only loyal to ideology.”

On the other hand, there are no ideologues among liberals and the media (please excuse the redundancy), no sirree. They are broad-minded and always willing to abide opposing viewpoints. That is, they are, in a word, “tolerant.” Which of course is why Gawker’s staff writer Adam Weinstein shared this bit of policy advice:

    Man-made climate change happens. Man-made climate change kills a lot of people. It’s going to kill a lot more. We have laws on the books to punish anyone whose lies contribute to people’s deaths. It’s time to punish the climate-change liars. . . . Denialists should face jail. They should face fines. . . . I’m talking about Rush and his multimillion-dollar ilk in the disinformation business. I’m talking about Americans for Prosperity and the businesses and billionaires who back its obfuscatory propaganda. . . . Those malcontents must be punished and stopped.

In case anybody missed the point, the blog post’s headline was “Arrest Climate-Change Deniers.”

Okay, Mr. Weinstein: Come get us. Bring your shackles for us. But just remember that the caves we live in are dark and deep and that, to fend off the saber-toothed tigers, we carry awfully big clubs.

Who Boycotts Wal-Mart?

By Kevin D. Williamson

Sunday, November 30, 2014

Columbia County, Ark. — There’s no sign of it here in Magnolia, Ark., but the boycott season is upon us, and graduates of Princeton and Bryn Mawr are demanding “justice” from Wal-Mart, which is not in the justice business but in the groceries, clothes, and car-batteries business. It is easy to scoff, but I am ready to start taking the social-justice warriors’ insipid rhetoric seriously — as soon as two things happen: First, I want to hear from the Wal-Mart-protesting riffraff a definition of “justice” that is something that does not boil down to “I Get What I Want, Irrespective of Other Concerns.”

Second, I want to turn on the radio and hear Jay-Z boasting about his new Timex.

It is remarkable that Wal-Mart, a company that makes a modest profit margin (typically between 3 percent and 3.5 percent) selling ordinary people ordinary goods at low prices, is the great hate totem for the well-heeled Left, whose best-known celebrity spokesclowns would not be caught so much as downwind from a Supercenter, while at the same time, nobody is out with placards and illiterate slogans and generally risible moral posturing in front of boutiques dealing in Rolex, Prada, Hermès, et al. It’s almost as if there is a motive at work here other than that which is stated by our big-box-bashing friends on the left and their A-list human bullhorns.

What might that be?

If you want an illuminating example of the fact that there is more to the way that prices work in a free market than can be captured by the pragmatic calculations of cold-eyed util-traders, consider the luxury-goods market and its enthusiastic following among people who do not themselves consume many or any of those goods. One of the oddball aspects of rich societies such as ours is the fact that when people pile up a little bit more disposable income than they might have expected to, they develop a taste for measurably inferior goods and outdated technologies: If you have money that is a little bit obscene, you might get into classic cars, i.e., an outmoded form of transportation; if your money is super-dirty obscene, you get into horses, an even more outmoded form of transportation.

Or consider the case of fine watches: Though he — and it’s a “he” in the overwhelming majority of cases — may not be eager to admit it, a serious watch enthusiast knows that even the finest mechanical timepiece put together by magical elves on the shores of Lake Geneva is, as a timekeeping instrument, dramatically inferior to the cheapest quartz-movement watch coming out of a Chinese sweatshop and available for a few bucks at, among other outlets, Wal-Mart. (To say nothing of the cheap digital watches sold under blister-pack at downscale retailers everywhere, or the clock on your cellphone.) But even as our celebrity social-justice warriors covet those high-margin items — and get paid vast sums of money to help sell them, too — they denounce the people who deal in less rarefied goods sold at much lower profit margins.

If economic “exploitation” means making “obscene profits” — an empty cliché if ever there were one — then Wal-Mart and the oil companies ought to be the good guys; not only do they have relatively low profit margins, but they also support millions of union workers and retirees through stock profits and the payment of dividends into pension funds. By way of comparison, consider that Hermès, the luxury-goods label that is a favorite of well-heeled social-justice warriors of all sorts, makes a profit margin that is typically seven or eight times what Wal-Mart makes, even though, as rapper Lloyd Banks discovered, its $1,300 sneakers may not always be up to the task. If Wal-Mart is the epitome of evil for selling you a Timex at a 3 percent markup, then shouldn’t Rolex be extra-super evil?

Strangely enough, Jay-Z remains “a celebrity quite serious about social justice,” according to the Huffington Post, even as he offers paeans to high-end horologist Hublot; though he does, as advertised, seem to favor the platinum Rolex Day-Date II. Celebrity dope Ashton Kutcher angrily demanded: “Wal-Mart, is your profit margin so important you can’t pay your employees enough to be above the poverty line?” It is safe to bet that Rolex earned a much higher margin on the Milgauss watch that Kutcher wears, as surely as does the maker of the fairly spendy Baume & Mercier watches for which he served as a celebrity pitchman.

A few weeks ago, I was very much amused by the sight of anti-Wal-Mart protests in Manhattan — where there is no Wal-Mart, and where, if Bill de Blasio et al. have their way, there never will be. Why? Because we’re too enlightened to let our poor neighbors pay lower prices. The head-clutchingly expensive shops up on Fifth and Madison avenues? No protests. Rather, they were bustling with the same class of people behind the protests, people busily accumulating — or at least making like Holly Golightly in the window at Tiffany’s.

Here in Columbia County, Ark., a not-especially-prosperous locale behind the Pine Curtain where the median household income is about half the national average and where a few twists and turns down county roads find you in a world of shacks and chained-up dogs out of a Snuffy Smith cartoon, nobody is boycotting the local Wal-Mart. In fact, the locals seem rather fond of this purported outpost of economic exploitation and wicked capitalist blah-blah-blah. And it is not difficult to understand why: It is an important part of local commerce in a community that is hungry for enterprise.

People buy Rolex watches for reasons other than their timekeeping excellence, just as people buy Ferraris and horses for reasons other than going to the store to pick up a gallon of milk and a loaf of bread. Economists talk about “Veblen goods,” which are more valued because of their high prices rather than in spite of them, coveted not for their conventional utility but for their exclusivity. Owning a Rolls-Royce isn’t about the car — it’s about you. Which is why you see magazines such as The Robb Report — one of those glossies full of “bland advertisements for being wealthy,” as the novelist William Gibson put it — for sale in places such as Wal-Mart, where the typical customer is not actually in the market for a yacht or Kiton overcoat. If you’ve ever seen the heartbreaking sight of a young woman stopping a Wal-Mart checker three-fourths of the way through ringing up her purchases — because she does not have enough money to pay for what’s left in her cart — then you can be pretty sure that what’s going in her sack is more or less the opposite of Veblen goods.

Ironically, the anti-Wal-Mart crusaders want to make life worse for people who are literally counting pennies as they shop for necessities. Study after study has shown that Wal-Mart has meaningfully reduced prices: 3.1 percent overall, by one estimate — with a whopping 9.1 percent cut to the price of groceries. That comes to about $2,300 a year per household, savings that accrue overwhelmingly to people of modest incomes, not to celebrity activists and Ivy League social-justice crusaders.

Ultimately, these campaigns are exercises in tribal affiliation. The Rolex tribe, and those who aspire to be aligned with it, signal their status by sneering at the Timex tribe — or by condescending to it as they purport to act on its behalf, as though poor people were too stupid to know where to find the best deal on a can of beans. Or call it the Trader Joe’s tribe vs. the Wal-Mart tribe, the Prius tribe vs. the F-150 tribe.

We see this everywhere: In Ferguson, self-righteous and self-appointed spokesmen for the marginalized point to the fact that the criminal-justice system generally produces far worse outcomes to the poor and the non-white than it does to the well-off and white. This is, generally speaking, true. And though the dynamics are equally complicated, the same thing is true of the government schools, which do a pretty good job for rich white kids in the suburbs while functioning as day prisons and incubators of dysfunction for poor minority kids, especially in big cities. But the social-justice warriors in Ferguson will fight on bloody stumps to prevent reform of the government-school cartels, the endless failures of which do far more to harm the lives of the economically and socially vulnerable than any police department does. Why? The teachers are part of the tribe, and the cops are part of a rival tribe, which is why nobody ever bought a Rolex out of the royalties of a song titled “F**k the Milwaukee Public Schools.”

On the one hand, we have Wal-Mart, which makes a modest profit margin by helping to feed and clothe people who typically do not have a lot of spare money. On the other hand, we have a grotesque exercise in snobbery — snobbery frequently compounded by stupidity. The view from Fifth Avenue is rather different from the view from Columbia County.