You know, as much as I hate Thomas Friedman’s fictitious cab drivers who says what he wants, Ben Stein’s use of real people close to him in order to make a point is worse.

He uses them to depict the “real America”, much as Friedman does, only they are at least as Stein depicts them, are simply malevolent human beings, and he does not understand that this.

Case in point is his high school friend, who seems to be engaging in a form of arms length prostitution:

NOT long ago, a woman in California called me for advice. She is divorced, with two children, and has a series of interlocking financial problems.

She lives in a lovely home in a stylish inland enclave. It has an interest-only mortgage of about $2.2 million that requires a payment of $12,000 a month, very roughly. It was last appraised at $2.7 million, but who knows if it’s now worth anything remotely close to that price.

The woman, whom I’ve known since she was a teenager, has no job or other remunerative employment. She has a former husband, an entrepreneur whose business has suffered recently. He pays her $20,000 a month, of which roughly half is alimony and half child support. The alimony is scheduled to stop this summer.

She has a wealthy beau who pays her credit card bills and other incidentals, but she is thinking of telling him she is through with him. She has no savings and has refinanced her home repeatedly, always adding to indebtedness and then putting the money into a shop she owns that has never come close to earning a dime. Now she is up all night worrying about money. “Terrified,” as she put it. She wanted me to tell her what to do.

He calls her a “sweet woman,” but she is anything but this.

She is a user of other people, and a stupid one, because, while she has achieved success with her use of other people, she has not planned in any way for her future.

She is a parasite, and a particularly nasty one.

So, Mr. Stein thinks that she is the “real America”, and is thus indicative of how we all have gone wrong….When she was getting nearly $¼ of a million a year for having had sex with, and born children for, a wealthy “entrepreneur.”

It’s a toxic mix of entitlement and evil, and he thinks that she is a sweet woman.

Of course, then he brings up his son:

…… And all of this is compounded again because my handsome son, age 21, a student, has just married a lovely young woman, 20. You may have seen on television the pudgy, aging face of their sole means of support.

…

To not be able to eat at any restaurant he feels like eating at is just not on his wavelength. Of course, that’s my fault. (I have learned that everything bad that happens anywhere is my fault.) And I hope to be able to leave him well enough provided for to ease his eventual transition into some form of self-sufficiency.

(emphasis mine)

So first, he knows a, “sweet woman,” who thinks nothing of relying on alimony to maintain an inflated lifestyle, and now he admits that he has raised a son with no concept of limits in terms of money because it is, “just not on his wavelength”.

The rich feel that they are entitled because for the past 28 years, America has said that wealth is an artifact of virtue, and these is the people that Ben Stein thinks is America.