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Cory Booker's recent comments on how terrible and unfair it is to criticize private equity firms for doing their job - making money for themselves by gutting companies - irritated me.  I understand that if New Jersey politicians want to run for statewide office, they need to make nice with the financial titans.

However, while Mayor Booker seems to think that investment managers - no matter how badly they harm the global economy - should be above reproach, public school teachers are not.  Indeed, so infested are our ranks with lousy educators that we have a crisis!  Mayor Booker is a big supporter of performance bonuses, too.  Bonuses have been so successful in investment and banking pursuits that they're just what education needs to be destroyed beyond repair and turned over to the private market to increase student achievement.

There's such an obvious disconnect here that I do myself blame Mayor Booker's teachers: someone should've pointed out the huge gaps in logic he betrays here.  JP Morgan Chase handed out lavish bonuses in exchange for four billion dollars in losses.  Private equity firms ensure their bottom line by cutting workforces and salaries at the companies they buy.  Given Mayor Booker's comments, I have to assume that this kind of cutthroat behavior that says your loss is my gain is what he wants teachers to pass on to their students.

So we'll stop encouraging sharing, empathy, and problem solving.  Students will battle for the last orange, and push each other down on the yard to get to the playground first.  They will get Unsatisfactory marks for respecting themselves and others unless they cheat, and no one wins unless everyone else loses.

If that's not the world Mayor Booker wants, he should stop acting like it is.