Joyriding the Gravy Train of Economic Inequality
Let us imagine a utopian country named Sovdepia, whose people love the children so much that they voluntarily agreed to redistribute all their material wealth equally to level the playing field for future generations. Let’s further imagine that a few years later we visit Sovdepia on a taxpayer-funded fact-finding mission. Upon arrival, we are surprised to see how little material equality is left, especially among the children. We find local social scientists and ask them what happened. They sadly point at the differences in the Sovdepians’ habits, virtues and vices, ambitions, health, and plain dumb luck. But the most powerful reason for inequality, they tell us with dismay, turns out to be the highest Sovdepian virtue — the unconditional love of the parents for their children and the desire to do the best for them.
The truth is, even the most hard-nosed Soviet ideologues still cheated the system when it came to their offspring. Having risked life and limb fighting for universal equality, they all ended up inventing creative workarounds to make their own children “more equal” than others. Who can blame them? They were human, even if they denied humanity to everyone else. And who can blame Barack Obama for sending his two daughters to an expensive private school? He only wants the best for his children, even if he is promoting the inferior public school system for everyone else’s.
No parent, including the politicians who are forcing economic equality on Americans, will deny their own children added privileges that come with government positions. Anything less would be heartless and uncaring, even if it would contradict their life-long battle against the “heartless and uncaring” opponents of economic equality, which they themselves will be now violating. Given that parents will always be in different positions to endow their offspring, the next generation following any hypothetical Great Redistribution of Wealth will grow up economically unequal. Only this time, in the absence of freedom and opportunities, their wealth and privileges will be largely unearned. And that will finally give the “yearning after equality” the moral validity it badly lacked before.
But until such time, while equal freedom and opportunity still exists, the only justification for the forced redistribution of wealth is class envy — an emotion based on a subjective perception of other people’s wealth regardless of how it was earned. And the relative and subjective nature of wealth makes the case for its redistribution even flimsier.
Consider the fact that the Soviet apparatchiks, smugly driving their Volgas past the average Soviet pedestrians, themselves looked pathetic next to American middle-class families, with Chevrolets in the front and swimming pools in the back of their suburban houses.
The apparatchiks liked to be called “people’s servants.” Unlike their less equal “masters,” they were allowed to travel to the West. The striking material contrast must have caused many of them to entertain a criminal thought that, were they to discard their own system of government redistribution and give people the opportunity to earn real income without government obstruction, everyone’s living standard would quadruple — including their own. But since in a free and competitive society they wouldn’t be the ones with the most power and privilege, the certainty of smaller unearned rewards outweighed for them the opportunity to earn greater rewards with honest efforts. So they continued to “serve” the people by keeping them down and staying on top.
Observing the class-envy mentality on both continents, I noticed a recurring pattern: other people’s wealth always appears larger and irritates more forcefully at a closer distance. Since envy is based on emotion rather than reason, one’s personal perception of a wealthier neighbor is more unsettling than some distant, greater wealth measured on an abstract absolute scale, which can only be perceived by reason.
The reverse side of the class-envy mentality is the notion that being better off than your neighbor is more satisfying than being wealthy by absolute standards while knowing that your neighbor still has more. The folk wisdom of my home country put this in a story: a king promised a peasant that he would grant him any wish on condition that his neighbor would get twice as much. The peasant laughed and asked the king to poke him in one eye. In another tale a man who could wish for anything wished that his neighbor’s cow were dead. And so on.
An historical comparison makes the relative nature of wealth even more obvious. While today’s poor people may seem poor compared to their middle-class neighbors, on an absolute scale they are better off than the rich people in the days of William Graham Sumner. Not only do they have better medicine, longer life expectancy, running hot and cold water, electricity, gas stoves, and indoor plumbing, they have what even the richest and the most powerful people on earth couldn’t dream of: camera cell phones, digital players, air conditioners, refrigerators, microwaves, TVs with hundreds of channels for entertainment, video games, DVD players, fast and comfortable cars with music and AC, air travel, and computers that can instantly connect them with anyone in the world.
This is a brilliant article and a perspective that I try to share with as many Americans as I can. I lived in the former Yugoslavia (1 year), Bulgaria (2.5 years) and the former Soviet Union (2 years). The further east I went (direction is arbitrary here — it marks the further into communist practice), the worse it got. Many towns in the former USSR looked as if they were experiencing the aftermath of WWIII (kinda like our Democrat strongholds like Detroit that look like Katrina-ravaged New Orleans without the hurricane).
The truly evil thing is that the upper eschelon of the left wing KNOW that this is the way it will wind up.
Thank you. (P.S. I visited Armenia and the hard-working entreprenuer ethic that I noticed among them has made them more resilient than most [e.g., their Georgian neighbors]).
Fantastic article! In the end, we are both body and soul, endowed with a divine spark. Yet we are all unique. A doctrine of forced material equality has always failed and will always fail because it denies the essential qualities of each unique human being as God designed us. Equal outcomes in material posessions can never be achieved. It would be no more foolish to require equal outcomes in art or athletics. Make Tiger Woods play with an old set of rusty golf clubs from the back of my garage. Require Yo Yo Ma to play with two broken strings, just to make it “fair”!
Doctor Barack is like a quack physician, prescribing poison to cure the patient’s illness. The more of the “prescription” that is administered, the more sickly the patient becomes. Thus even more of the “prescription” must be administered, making the patient sicker still.
Yet the quack, in his arrogance and deadly disregard for human life, keeps on distributing his phony pharmaceuticals. After all, he is the town physician, at the top of the heap in his community. His gigantic ego will not allow him to give up his favored status, or even consider the thought that his prescriptions may be the problem.
What other solution is there than to bury his mistakes, lie about the cause of death, bribe the medical board, and go in league with other quacks to make sure that you protect each other?
Better to be a Big Man Around Town in a community of sick people than an Average Joe in a healthy village.
You are wrong to think they are not trying to redistribute the spiritual wealth. How dare we hold to a high moral standard which others obviously incapable of living up to. We need to lower our standards. Not only should (for example) homosexuality be tlerated, but rather, it should be ENDORSED. Let’s not get too uptight sexually. All should have free license, and be free to wear their perversity on their sleeves in society. And so on.
The redistribution here is evident. It is evinced by the obvious sinking to the lowest common denominator where all are equally destitute of morality. It is the end to which all redistribution is always consigned.
This envy of which you write is really properly called coveting. Class-warfare is nothing but institutionalized coveting. Once they have you coveting, they urge you to steal, via “redistribution”. They don’t call it stealing, because if they did, people would wake to the awful reality.
Who would urge you to covet and to steal? The Devil comes to mind. Even if you don’t believe in Him, you understand the allegorical Devil. Ask yourself, “Where would you place Him on the political spectrum… on the Right or Left?” Check some issues. Pro-abortion? On the Left. Pro-homosexuality and gay marriage? On the Left. Bigger government and less freedom? On the Left. Redistribution, aka covet and steal? On the Left. The Devil is a Democrat.
This is why the Left never argues the right and wrong of things, because they would always lose, because they always choose wrong. So they deflect, distract, make the argument about something else. It’s why they defend such as Polanski. (It’s not rape-rape. Jeez!) It’s why they allow tax-cheats to remain in power. They’ve chosen their political ideology to supplant the proper morality. As long as you toe the Party-line, they will forgive “moral” failings. If they didn’t, they would have to face up to the gross immorality of their agenda.
The way to defeat them is to absolutely shame them in the public eye. Make it about Right and Wrong! Don’t discuss policy particulars. Always bring the discussion back to Right and Wrong. Right and Wrong. Right and Wrong. Right and wrong. They will always lose. Family values is a winner.
Marc Malone you are right!
And my response to your comments: Amen.
An excellent article.
Yet again, a superb article. Thank you so much.
Thanks again, Oleg.
Marc Malone: I wish it were so. Remember Bush Sr.’s VP, Dan Quayle, the GOP’s spear point on “family values”.
They turned it into a dirty joke.
Sorry. Disagree. Comes a time the gloves must come off, or get out.
Go Galt.
fantastic article
Oleg,
Another great article! Hope you’re planning to write a book as an expansion of the series of articles you’ve written. It should be a best seller.
Oleg, I want to give you kudos as well. Your writings here are fantastic. They’re only as dry as our apathy toward freedom. May we become extremists in defense of liberty.
The left is all about despair, envy and the eternal quest for fairness. If we followed their nostrums about how to make life more equitable, there would be no need for the elites of the left to exist. They on the left need a constant drumbeat of fear, envy and victim hood to keep them relevant. The leftist creed is responsible for more misery and death than all the right wing coups, dictatorships and juntas put together. Curious how all the noble intentions of the left result in such disastrous results. Even more curious is how the leaders of the left assume the trappings of power and privilege once they achieve control. I would hazard a guess that the price of enlightenment is to provide them with a comfortable and privileged lifestyle. We have stopped being an industrious and prosperous people in order to be seduced by the lie that we cannot be all we can be because outside forces are keeping us down. It may be that these forces are those of the left in order to keep their agenda and relevance going.
Oleg Atbashian is truely an excellent writer with much good to say. I look forward to reading much more from this insightful person.
This was a very good read again! Thank you.
Also, the ‘cultural elites’ would NEVER live next door to someone they supposedly have ‘compassion’ for. Ahem.
Class envy is ‘jealousy’…the green-eyed monster.
People want things YESTERDAY already rather than working and toiling and striving! What happened to, “If you want something badly enough, work for it and make it happen”?
Also, what some people seem to ‘forget’ is that there are people who just don’t want to work. Period. There are lazy people who are more than happy to live off the government teat forever as well as their offspring etc.
Redistribution creates a self-perpetuating cycle of able-bodied people who will never amount to anything in life because there is no impetus or drive. Going a little hungry is not such a bad thing…it DRIVES you to do something about it!
Great article; it highlights the main source of all statist ideologies (which require a scapegoat—for the USSR the West and counter-revolutionaries, for the Nazis the untermensch and anarchists, for the modern Menshevik collectivists the ‘idle rich’) I’d like to make a clarification, though: jealousy, covetousness and envy are often confused. Jealousy is wanting to keep something that is already yours, envy is wanting something someone else has, and covetousness is wanting to expropriate that something for yourself so that you deprive your neighbour out of spite. Jealousy and envy are not necessarily bad in and of themselves: they drive much of economic progress (I want my neighbour’s car, but he won’t sell it to me—so I get my own).
Thought provoking. Thanks for sharing.
thanks you OLEG
Join ACORN and/or SEIU and never have to work again, comrade! Heil “social justice”!
In the thread about Dunn, one leftist troll asked “does the right actually know what Communism/Maoism/Stalinism is?” ‘Cause we conservatives actually talk about those ideologies as if they were, gee, bad.
I notice this is a troll-free thread. Even the resident trolls don’t have the gall to tell a former citizen of the USSR that Communism is really terrific.
Oleg Atbashian, you have done excellent work here. My father was an Democrat, but a strongly anti-Communist, pro-defense one. As the son of Prague-born immigrants, believe me, he thanked God daily that he had escaped the horrors of both WWII and the Iron Curtain.
Chomp, slurp, belch. “Someday, comrade — chomp — all of you little people — gulp — will live like this. Now go away.” Gurgle, chew, sigh.
My grandfather is a veteran of the Polish Resistance. He was captured and sent to a concentration camp. After the war, he returned to Poland, which fell under Soviet occupation. There, he met my grandmother, got married, and my mother was born. Some time later, he fled Poland for Austria to find work. When he saved up enough money, he sent for his wife and daughter, and they spent a year and a half in Vienna living in a one room apartment, saving up money to immigrate to the US. They arrived in America in the midst of a recession, and it was difficult to find work. Nevertheless, my grandparents persevered, soon finding work in a flower shop in Pennsylvania. They made decent money, but not enough to send my mother to college. However, the long hours they worked had left my mother with responsibilities most teenagers didn’t have. She worked her way through college, graduating in five years with a dual degree in Finance/Accounting.
Today, my grandfather has been forced into retirement by the economy. Men like him don’t take well to retirement- they get stir crazy. He tried retirement a few years ago, got bored, and decided to go back to work, at least part time. My grandparents didn’t come to America to be spoon fed. They came yearning to work hard, breathe free, and build a better life for themselves and their daughter. And you know what? They succeeded. They got to buy a house and pay it off, watch their daughter graduate from high school and then college, and get married. They got to see the birth of their two grandsons, see us get baptized, make First Communion and then Confirmation, and see me graduate from high school. My grandmother, God rest her soul, attended my high school graduation in a wheelchair because she had wasted away from congestive heart failure to the point that she couldn’t walk or stand for more than maybe thirty minutes. She died about four months later. They returned to Poland several times, and my grandmother’s ashes are interred in the graveyard of the church she attended as a girl, the church her nephews still attend. They rejoiced at the liberation of Poland from the Communists, but it was never a serious option for them to stay in Poland; there just wasn’t anything for them there.
My grandparents were always quite generous. I blushed at the size of some of the gifts they gave me. I suppose you can do that when your house is paid off and you don’t feel like retiring.
#4 Never for Obama – Thanks for the expression of appreciation. Nice to know I had an effect.
#7 pelaut – No. It will work. One must hammer away at it. Quayle and Bush 41 did not. They… um… quailed. :p They did not stand tall. They let the Leftist media define the debate. One must be committed to the fight. Committed moderate is a self-contradiction.
Oleg, add mine to the kudos on this thread, but here’s something else:
even though you qualify that the classes in question are not inflexible, to call it “class envy” is still a misnomer. There are places where the moneyed and the ruling classes are just that, and apart from privilege of birth to enter them is very very hard. Soviet ruling classes’ children had no opportunity to even meet their plebeian coevals at any point of their school, play, mating etc. I imagine the same holds for the Miterrands et al.
“Class envy” is a proper name for those situations. With the U.S. redistributionists, where opportunity is still here for a bright and hardworking youth to become a millionaire at one of many pursuits, we have simple “money envy”. “You have a lot, that’s not fair!”. Everything they know they learned in kindergarten. Get guys with guns to take away and divide. This is not “opportunity envy” which class envy partially is.
I’m reminded of soviet grocers who came to San Francisco and toured a supermarket. Their major complaint was the “inefficiency” in stocking shelves with more than one brand, since that “impeded” distribution.
Worlds apart.
Thank you.
Red Square…..your words, your humor and your shared experiences mean more to me than you will ever know.
I’m very proud to have met you … albeit over the phone.
I believe our country has been saved with your humor and disaster postponed.
Agitprop…more powerful than most weapons of mass destruction.
What is needed is a PeopleCube bumper sticker on every car!
Here is another example of ‘unfair’…
My husband works very hard for a living and when he’s done laboring with his sweat and muscles he gets paid for that job and that’s that.
I, on the other hand can create fonts that I can sell at myfonts.com and get paid FOREVER for that font just so long as someone wants to buy that font once in a while. My labor for a single, intellectual effort can be paid for infinitely and when I die, my daughter can receive my profits well after I’m gone and so on and so on.
As my husband says, “Honey, you’re the smart one. Make some money with it.”
My husband is proud of my smarts and isn’t jealous that I’m smarter than him.
But, look who’s ahead? MY HUSBAND! He’s the hard worker and he’s come VERY far even though he works with his hands.
See?
Life is unfair but somehow it works out in the end.
So, Oleg, you got here just in time to watch America’s socialists and fascists in the so-called Democratic Party turn the U. S. into a Soviet-style socialist nation. Better start thinking about New Zealand, or perhaps Texas or Alaska, when they secede.
Sometime in the near future, Americans will be saying that they know what it’s like living in a country like that.
Oleg,
Excellent article. You’ve finally hit the nail on the head. Economic opportunity for all, not just the few.