John Ray argues that wealthy people and cultural elites who are leftists do so because they think they "get a pass" from the rules they're advocating for other people. He points to examples like a British Minister of Health who railed against private hospitals but used them exclusively for her own services. Here in the US, we have examples like Al Gore who decried the idea that poor folk, given vouchers, might abandon the public schools, but sends his own to private schools.

(He has an interesting paper on the topic, but I can't seem to relocate it.)

Don Luskin brings us one more example which matches this pattern:

And for all of Kerry's talk about improving labor standards at home and abroad, some of the executives endorsing him are closely tied to sweat-shop operations. Kerry's list member Donna Karan has faced a class action suit by Manhattan garment workers alleging "workers toiled seven days a week, 11 hours each weekday and eight to 10 hours on the weekends... and did not earn the minimum wage," according to the New York Daily News. And the liberal magazine The Nation reported that Esprit, the garment firm of Kerry's list member Susie Tompkins Buell, used sweat-shops in San Francisco that were raided by the Department of Labor.

One of Kerry's main planks was the evils of "outsourcing", yet the fashion industry is by far one of the worst offenders. They must be thinking such rules are just for "the little people", as surely as the USSR communist party members had their own luxury retail stores. It looks like they think, smugly, they'll get a pass.

And they probably will, because Kerry will either do nothing about outsourcing, or will make it even more prevalent, if he follows through on the campaign pledges on he's written on his web site.

UPDATE: While we're on the topic, here's another example (via BeldarBlog) of liberals thinking the rules they claim to support will not apply to them, only to other people:

However much Kerry supporters may gripe about SBVT, the non-partisan Center for Public Integrity — which has filed its own complaints against SBVT — has found that almost 95 percent of contributions to 527 groups this year have gone to Democratic-leaning organizations. Democrats can complain about SBVT, but it may be a can of worms they opened themselves with their aggressive efforts to navigate around the spirit of the very campaign finance law they championed.

To a hardcore liberal (and Democrats are increasingly becoming hardcore liberals), the law is simply another dishonest tool with which to bludgeon their opponent. That's why they love a "living, breathing" Constition -- it gives them unrelated powers to use it for whatever purpose they deem necessary today, and then backpedal should such judgements ever be found to apply to them.