What’s with the New York Times and its Ken Griffin fetish?

Inside of a week, the Chicago hedge-fund manager who recently dropped $238 million on a 24,000-square-foot New York City penthouse has been featured in no fewer than three news articles. The purchase set the record for most expensive home sale in the U.S., so it’s certainly newsworthy. But does it warrant a 1,700-word front-page article? And a second thousand-word story the following day? That depends on if you share the editors’ progressive agenda.

The Gray Lady informs us that Mr. Griffin is worth around $10 billion, collects expensive art, and owns other pricey properties in the U.S. and abroad. A generous philanthropist, he’s given away nearly three times as much money as he spent on his new residence. But the paper also wants us to know that he “has declined to join other billionaires in a pact to donate a majority of their wealth to charity” and that “critics” consider him “especially tone deaf” for “spending so freely at a moment when populist movements are gaining momentum around the globe.” For good measure, we’re told that the penthouse has been constructed on the site of a former rent-stabilized building. Apparently, the reader is expected to blame New York’s affordable-housing troubles on Mr. Griffin and his ilk, not idiotic rent-control regulations that discourage developers from building middle-income apartments.

Suddenly, we’re not reading real-estate porn anymore. The Times has shoehorned Mr. Griffin into yet another rant about stingy billionaires, income inequality and the supposed need for tax increases to expand the welfare state. A separate article even compares him unfavorably with a previous generation’s ultrarich, “who had a prevailing sense that too much was distasteful.” Examples include Brooke Astor, who “lived, until her death, in an apartment on Park Avenue that was not in excess of 5,000 square feet,” and David and Peggy Rockefeller, who raised six kids in an Upper East Side townhouse that measured a mere 10,000 square feet. Actually, Astor died at 105 in one of her other residences, an 11,000-square-foot manor set on almost 65 acres in suburban Westchester County. And the Rockefeller estate, which is located nearby and occupies 3,500 acres of land, makes the Astor home look modest by comparison. Locals joke that “it’s what God would have built, if he had the money.”

How Ken Griffin and other wealthy people spend money is their business. But the left’s determination to confiscate more of those dollars to redistribute to people they deem worthier concerns everyone. In a free-market system, society’s most productive members tend to facilitate upward mobility for all of us, not just for themselves. And not only through their philanthropy.