Gene Nichol: Income Inequality is Bad, Except for Mine

Today’s American Spectator, a national conservative publication, features an article on UNC Poverty Center head Gene Nichol. The article spotlights how, like his predecessor John Edwards (but to a lessor degree), Nichol lives a lavish lifestyle while lecturing the rest of us about income inequality.

Here’s a slice of the article:

Nichol, a wealth redistributionist philosophically, shares Edwards’s worldview if not his riches — at least not to the same degree. However, the former University of Colorado law dean does enjoy significant resources thanks to his own salary, his wife’s, and his real estate investments. As the Civitas Institute has reported in the past (from public information it obtained), Nichol receives a salary of at least $200,000 annually and his wife, Glenn George, is paid $407,410 per year as chief of staff for the UNC Health Care System and the UNC School of Medicine.

The welcoming arms and university vault were thrown wide open in 2008 for the Nicholses after Gene ended his embarrassing turn at William and Mary, where trustees sacked him after he removed a cross from Wren Chapel and he allowed a sex workers’ art show on campus, among other things. But don’t feel sorry for Gene, as he has accumulated a significant amount of treasure after years as dean of University of Colorado’s law school, his first go-round as UNC law’s dean, almost four years at Virginia’s “Public Ivy,” and now his UNC return.

How much treasure? Enough that he and his family can live comfortably in a Chapel Hill home with a tax value of more than $1 million. And when the Nicholses tire of the stress and bustle of North Carolina’s Triangle area, they can escape to their bungalow on the beach at Emerald Isle, valued by Carteret County at more than $512,000. In the summer months when they don’t want to hang out at the coast, they rent their four-bedroom retreat for nearly $2,000 per week.

All this “hardship” has (mis)informed Gene Nichols’s rants about economic inequality caused by free markets, frequently published by the News & Observer of Raleigh, North Carolina’s influential state capitol newspaper.

Yep, not only does Nichol have the nerve to scold the rest of us about income inequality and lack of concern for the downtrodden from the comfort of his million dollar Chapel Hill estate, he also is a capitalist landowner exploiting vacationing working class citizens for profit! I’m sure his Keynesian comrades at Chapel Hill would be appalled at this man for exercising “oppressive power of the capitalist to exploit the scarcity-value of capital.”

I imagine the proceeds from selling his beach house would help fund a nice homeless shelter or soup kitchen for the poor, but that would mean Nichol actually cared about those in need. Instead, Nichol opts to enrich himself at taxpayer expense while taking the painless path of just paying lip service to reducing poverty.

The only poverty Nichol is concerned about reducing is his own.