Eat the Rich?
30th August 2012
John Derbyshire, Patron Saint of Dyspepsia, takes a look at The Rich.
In which we learn that the question is not The Rich but Which Rich?
When actual yeoman farmers ceased to be much of a constituency, elements of Jeffersonian flimflam survived in the modern Democratic Party. We hear them today: Evil bankers! Predatory lenders! Wall Street paper-shufflers!
We also hear echoes of that in the modern fetish for The Family Farm, which makes about as much sense as having a similar fetish for The Hand-Made Car — yeah, you can do that, but it will cost you ten times as much, and only The Rich will be able to afford it. (As, indeed, happens today; trying buying Healthy Organic Produce at a place line Whole Foods and see how much of your paycheck is left at the end of the week. My, I’ll go to Kroger and use my Reward card to get $3-a-pound sirloin.)
You can be rich without owning an acre of land, without ever having worked or created anything, just by inheriting your money.
Though it’s hard to argue this is admirable, I can’t see that it’s deplorable. What else should happen to dad’s money? The government should take it? It is highly unlikely they would make any better use of it than the average individual. Surely it is healthy for society to contain a seasoning of persons who need not answer to anyone other than the law for their actions.
Funny how many of them turn out to be raging socialists — Are you listening, AlGore? — but I suppose it’s just guilt working its way out by making us suffer for their feelings of inadequacy (which feelings, of course, don’t extend to Giving Away The Money, any more than it does with Hollywood celebrities).
Politician Rich. This is where my blood starts to boil. Did you know that Hillary Clinton is worth $31 million? That’s without ever having done anything you or I would recognize as work. (Yeah, yeah, she lawyered; but she was the governor’s wife.)
And don’t let’s get started with the Obamas, both Barack and Michelle getting well-paying jobs basically for being Token Negroes wherever they went.
August 30th, 2012 at 08:06
“We all have the necessities, and then some.” Here is where Derbyshire’s analysis leaves reality and wanders into fantasy. We do not all have ‘the necessities’, much less ‘and then some’.
The fact that most–not all–don’t starve in the West is because the government makes up through support programs for the shortfall between incomes and necessary expenses. These are the same programs that the Right rails against at every opportunity. Without them, our cities would begin to resemble Calcutta or Buenos Aires, with tarpaper shacks blanketing the littorals and beggers crowding the streets.
“We also hear echoes of that in the modern fetish for The Family Farm” Is that the same Family Farm (or its surrogate, Family Business) the loss of which is a hammering point for reduced or eliminated estate taxes? Seems that club swings two ways…
Derbyshire omits one very important category: Financial Rich. These are the paper-shufflers, the brokers, the gamblers who work for the big investment firms and hedge funds and get multi-million dollar bonuses every year even when they lose the company money. They were the ones who drove the economy into the manure pile, and came out smelling like gardenias. They are the ones that make the Jeffersonians gnaw on their dashboards during the morning commute.