The American plutocracy’s habit of portraying itself as an oppressed minority has become a source of ongoing amusement, and Chrystia Freeland has the latest chapter of this comedy in the New Yorker. She presents a series of quotations and anecdotes that will be barf-inducing to anyone who hasn’t had their head pickled in Ayn Rand aphorisms. I particularly enjoyed the guy who compared Barack Obama’s treatment of the rich to the oppression of black Americans, and the guy who compared Wall Street supporters of the President to battered wives.

But the most illuminating and distinctive part of the essay is the way it highlights this curious argument about the “self-taxation” of the rich: