[ASPENTIMES] Until Aspen’s mob shouted it down it, valet parking service was planned this winter at the base of the Aspen Mountain gondola. No longer.Local politicos saw an opportunity to bash business, which they always find profitable, and to accumulate some political capital ‐ which is apparently the only kind of capital that is permissible to accumulate these days.
Take our mayor, a former tennis instructor. He whined: "I question the equitability and ethic of" the valet parking service.
Others politicians jumped in. With an analysis equaling her syntax, one councilwoman complained, "It had a huge insulting factor to locals. It was like separating the rich from the poor, and here you are going skiing and those rich people have something they can afford that you can’t."
Well, we certainly want to avoid a "huge insulting factor to locals" especially if "here you are going skiing." And it’s the government’s job to do that, whatever "that" is.
Emotions like envy being so useful to politicians, another councilwoman who was not armed with a pitchfork but could have been, grumbled, "I wish it was someplace else that it wasn’t quite in your face. It’s this equity thing."
Ah, this equity thing. That’s evidently shorthand for the "problem" of constituents feeling butthurt when they see people with more money. Constituents with hurt butts can mean only one of two things ‐ leaning back on their skis in descending Corkscrew or something inequitable and unethical.
I’m surprised that they didn’t find a way to say it’s racist too. And maybe Russian to boot, or at least Ukrainian. Is there perhaps an Electoral College angle? How about the Emoluments Clause?
Never mind that the spendy rich folks are spending their money on the very people who are whining about it. The whiners would prefer that the rich folks didn’t show up in Aspen at all, and just mailed their money in. That would be much more equitable and ethical.
But what do rich folks know about equity and ethics anyway? They’re all crooks, dammit it, because they stole their money from the rest of us. Except the Clintons, of course, because they’re Democrats.