By the way, your article was linked to on Mankiw’s blog.

After finding that poem mirrored here, I posted the following comment:-

Bah, humbug.

And I mean that – this cant the Whos are spouting in this shoddy pastiche is sheer humbug. At least the original didn’t descend to that but put its emotional stance plainly, without hypocrisy.

The Grinch did not come to the nuisance, he fled it (to the cave), only to have it follow him as a new generation arose; a new generation that is plain lying when it – younger by far than him – claims to have been there first. Nor is it a true and fair claim that the Whos’ nuisance reduced the cost of his cave to him, since he homesteaded it, and not nowise, not nohow, did their nuisance reduce any payment he made for it – since he never bought it but wrought it. To top it all, their humbug has achieved bullshit baffling brains, and has deceived the Grinch and defrauded him into submitting to their oppressive social pressure that has deprived him of the quiet enjoyment of his own property – very different in this pastiche from the original, in which the Whos made a fair representation of their situation and he fairly responded to it with a true assessment of the situation as he came to see it.

This canting humbug of a poem is no defence of property at all but of socialism encroaching under property’s fair cloak, “an evil thing with a holy name” as the USA described Woodrow Wilson’s scheme to submit to a League of Nations.