Sorry to be a spoilsport, but this reads very much like a column by George Will called Who wants to be a billionaire? Not so fast — I meant a billionaire in 1916.
Excerpt:
Boudreaux says that if you had Rockefeller’s riches back then, you could have had a palatial home on New York City’s Fifth Avenue, another overlooking the Pacific, and a private island if you wished. Of course, crossing North America in your private but non-airconditioned railroad car would be time-consuming and less than pleasant. And communicating with someone on the other coast would be a time-consuming chore.If in 1916 you suffered from depression, bipolar disorder, a sexually transmitted disease or other ailments, you would have had no recourse to antibiotics or modern pharmacology. Commercial radio did not arrive until 1920, and 1916 phonographs would lacerate 2017 sensibilities, as would 1916’s silent movies. If in 1916 you wanted Thai curry, chicken vindaloo or Vietnamese pho, you could go to the phone hanging on your wall and ask the operator (direct dialling began in the 1920s) to connect you to restaurants serving those dishes. The fact that there were no such restaurants would not bother you because in 1916 you had never heard of those dishes, so you would not know what you were missing.
Mark Levin talked about this essay on his radio show on May 10, 2017.
I'm not saying it's plagiarism, but I recall that The Boston Globe's Jeff Jacoby was suspended for four months in 2000 for less when he wrote a column about the fate of the signers of the Declaration of Independence. I believe that suspension was politically motivated to remove Jacoby from the paper in the closing month of the Bush-Gore campaign, but Jacoby did not contest the suspension.
-PJ