Who the %$@# are you?

T. Boone Pickens honored IU last week with a lengthier version of the commercial he so graciously broadcast to the entire country recently, leading me once again to ask myself: “Why do I care what a billionaire ex-oil executive senior citizen thinks about anything?”

Oh wait, I don’t.

Beyond the fact that he’s very, very rich, there is absolutely nothing remarkable about this man that should compel the other 300 million of us to give him one iota of attention.

He has absolutely no public policy experience, unless you count lobbying against slaughtering ponies and donating more than $1.5 million to the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth (that went well!) as serious contributions to public policy debates.

So why do Americans bother to listen to a man who has absolutely no more relevance to any public debate than you or me or Joe the Plumber?

We listen because Americans are dense, and are easily distracted by a nice looking guy in a shiny suit, regardless of how crackpot his ideas or how thinly-veiled his personal ambition might be.

In the marketplace of public ideas, the rich should not be handed a gold-plated bullhorn with which to trumpet their own opinions; it goes against the fundamentals of democracy.

Everyone’s opinions and viewpoints should be given equal weight, and the debate should hinge not on the size of the speaker’s pocketbook but on the merits of their ideas and philosophies.

Unfortunately we live in America, so people will continue to mistake any nearly-dead Texan white men with names as ridiculous as T. Boone Pickens as someone worth paying attention to as long as his net worth is higher than theirs.