Golden Chains: 5 Ways America’s Wealth Undermines Our Character
“Middle-class society is being strained to the breaking point not, as Marx predicted, by ever-increasing misery but by ever-increasing affluence.” — Eric Hoffer
“Adversity makes men, and prosperity makes monsters.” — Victor Hugo
It goes without saying that it’s better to be rich than poor. However, that doesn’t mean that affluence doesn’t have its own perils. People instinctively recognize this on a personal level. That’s why fabulously wealthy villains are a staple of TV and movies. It’s why we mock spoiled, rich celebrities like Meghan McCain, Paris Hilton, and Lindsay Lohan. It’s why many Americans, fairly or in most cases unfairly, tend to assume that the rich don’t understand what life is like for ordinary Americans. Of course, this bring to mind the following question: Why is it that so many Americans can recognize this when they see it in front of them with individuals, but fail to see the same things happening on a national level?
1) We’re forgetting how we got rich in the first place.
America is like a family that inherited a profitable business from a rich relative. Unfortunately, only some of the family members understand how the business works, while most of the rest just see a big cash machine that’s going to keep printing out money forever. This is not how the world works with companies or with nations.
Most Americans have no clue how exceptional the nation we live in is compared to the rest of the world. Depending on which source you use, America possesses somewhere between the 6th and 8th highest per capita income of any nation in the world. The nations ahead of us are all tiny little countries that range from under 100,000 people to a population of roughly 5.5 million. (Admittedly Canada, which benefits from trade with us and having us defend them militarily, has almost caught up). These tiny countries get by on tourism, natural resources, or small, highly educated populaces, and none of them could even come close to matching the success in a nation like ours which has almost 312 million people.
This country has been such an economic success for a number of reasons, including geographic isolation from Europe during its world wars, mineral resources, a Puritan work ethic, and lack of corruption — along with small government, low taxes, minimal regulations, a comparably small social safety net, and a pro-business atmosphere. Many of the factors enabling this country to grow so successful are eroding away, year after year, and that is sapping the vitality of our economy. Our “cash machine” slows down because so many Americans have no idea how to maintain it.
2) We’ve grown wasteful as a nation.
Not long ago, I did a HuffPostLive panel about the money the government spends on PBS. The biggest defense offered for spending 3 1/2 billion dollars over the next decade on a television station when hundreds of commercial channels exist? “It’s such a small amount of money.” On the one hand, that may be a small amount of money compared to some of the bigger expenditures we make. However, it’s also higher than the yearly gross domestic product of whole nations like Belize, Tonga, and Grenada. In other words, we’re going to spend more on Big Bird in the next decade than those entire countries will produce this year.
The scary thing is that most of us are okay with expenditures like this. Of course, when you spend a few billion here and a few billion there, it can add up in a hurry. Incidentally, that would have been a semi-funny, albeit geeky joke 20 years ago, but today, it’s not. That’s because the American people have grown so jaded about spending billions of dollars. On a smaller level, there are whole industries — cell phones, TV, automobiles — that rely on Americans disposing of perfectly good, still functional products in order to get more fashionable models. While it’s nice to have enough money to do that, it also tells you a lot about how most Americans think. They believe they have plenty of money, they expect the cash flow to continue, and they don’t see a need to hold back on spending a significant amount of money for even minor improvements.
3) We don’t have the same fire in the belly as a society.
For most of its history, America worked to prove that it was a country worthy of being considered in the same league as nations like Britain, France, and Germany. After WWII we became a superpower but we still competed with the Soviet Union. After the Evil Empire fell in 1991, we became lethargic as a nation because we were militarily and economically the strongest power on earth.
We’re so far ahead of other countries that we even fight wars with one hand tied behind our backs. Technologically, we’re not worried about another nation passing us in space. Economically, we’re not concerned about trying to keep ahead of the Chinese or the Russians. Instead of thinking about how to grow our economy, we’re spending more and more time trying to figure out how to divide the spoils we’ve already acquired — and make no mistake about it, those are two very, very different goals.
People, corporations, and countries don’t do their best work when they’re complacent. It’s competition that pushes us to go further and be better than we are. In our case, we’ve become a complacent nation, full of mostly complacent people who are happy to coast. That shows, not just in our politics but in our consumption-oriented, go-into-debt in order to shop-until-you-drop culture.
4) We have an entitlement mentality.
When you were growing up, you probably heard your mom say, “The world does not owe you a living.” Well, you’d THINK people would have heard that because a lot of Americans act like the world does owe them a living. One in seven Americans receives food stamps. Forty-seven percent pay no income taxes. Yet we’re told that people who’re successful need to pay even more of their money so that it can be given to other people by the government. It’s very telling that the people who already pay the most are being called “greedy” for not wanting to transfer more of their money over to demanding, unappreciative people who pay no income tax at all.
Getting beyond that, Americans have traditionally been some of the most individualistic, self-reliant people on earth. That’s how we managed to tame a vast, savage continent. Now, we believe it’s the government’s responsibility to handle our children’s schooling, guarantee our student loans, provide unemployment for months if we lose our jobs, and give us money for retirement and medical care when we get old. There was a time when Americans handled all of those things either by themselves or with the help of their families and churches.
Today, not only do we expect the government to take care of all those issues, we also demand to be treated at a hospital whether we have insurance or not, we think life should be better for us than for our parents and for our kids than it is for us, and many people seem to expect a job to magically appear for them in their local area just because they went to college. There’s nothing wrong with having high expectations, but there’s a world of difference between being willing to do what it takes to achieve at a high level and expecting life to be handed to you on a silver platter because you were fortunate enough to be birthed in America as opposed to some other corner of the planet.
5) We’re treating luxuries like necessities.
Have you ever had a conversation with someone about what life was like for many Americans in the Depression? I’ve heard stories about how peanut butter and soda pop were considered once-in-a-blue-moon treats, poor kids who were mocked for their long hair because their parents couldn’t get them a haircut, and families where kids had to wear worn-out, 10-year-old clothes passed down from older siblings.
Across the world, most people still live with that level of poverty. The median global per capita income is roughly $800 and more than a billion people live on less than a dollar a day.
They looked at the price of hundreds of goods in developing countries. And then with reference to national accounts, household surveys and census data, they calculated how much money you would need in each country to buy a comparable basket of essential goods that would cost you $1 in the USA.
You were under the global poverty line if you couldn’t afford that basket.
It’s still a reality of life for 13% of people in China; 47.5% in Sub-Saharan Africa; 36% in South Asia; 14% in East Asia and the Pacific; 6.5% in Latin America and the Caribbean. Almost 1.3bn people in total.
And surprisingly perhaps, people who live on $1 a day do not spend all of it on that basket of food – on staying alive. They typically spend about 40 cents on other things, says Professor Abhijit Banerjee of MIT.
Meanwhile, here in the U.S. we have people claiming they have a right to “health care” and demanding that the government help them with their mortgage. There’s ferocious opposition to cutting just about any and every government program you can imagine. Compared to much of the rest of the world, we are every bit as pampered as the movie star who demands a chauffeur-driven Limo and a giant bowl of red M&Ms just to come out of his posh trailer and work.
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Recently from John Hawkins at PJ Lifestyle:
In my city, there is a by-law against using clothes lines. Apparently, the assumption is that everyone has a clothes dryer.
I do have a dryer (thank God, I value it and my washing machine like gold), but I hang many of my delicate clothes to keep them in good condition. What are you supposed to do with your delicates?
When the government restricts such things, they are guaranteeing people will have to stay on the dole. If a poor person wanted to get off the government breast, they would have to do things that would probably be shunned in many places; line drying, raising chickens, replacing the lawnmower with a goat; many of the things that got people through hard times in the past are against code in many places, even in many small towns.
It isn’t the “government” that restricts anything, it’s your neighbors!
The idiots on the school board, on the town council, at the county planning board, at the State House, in Congress — all are your bleeding neighbors, and YOU let them do it.
Bureaurats are like the battery bunny, there are too many of them and each of them thinks he’s supposed to do something smarter than the next, so they just go and go and go.
Stop ‘em! They’re only your neighbors, and they’re brutishly stupid!
I have an acquaintance who lives in a rural area. He’s pretty much a city-slicker but moved to the country for more peace and quiet. Yet, he complains about the activities of his neighbors. What, pray-tell is the offending action? Wood-burning.
Seems he can’t stand the smell of wood burning. Now, this may be because he grew up having to stoke a woodburning stove or furnace, I don’t know but it seems very odd to me. I was born and raised in the country and happen to love the smell, especially when it’s cold, of a fire going somewhere.
Yes, he also mentioned how his neighbor is “polluting with all that smoke”.
Hm.
Guess someone needs to re-think the pre-industrial revolution and go back in history and tell all those people who used wood fireplaces, boilers and such that it’s wrong. Which…of course was everyone.
I cannot figure out why this person is so angry about the smell. Where we live, most people crank up the fire when the weather gets cold and keep it lit. Seems absolutely normal to me.
Yes. Where I live there is a large agricultural area near the city. A friend was complaining about the terrible smell once. That’s not even wood smoke that’s dirt and fertilizer. It wasn’t the admittedly awful scent found around hogs or dairys.
I live in an apartment which has a patio, and have BOTH a fully-operational clothes dryer AND hooks for removable clothes-lines out on the patio.
I line-dry my clothes and linens in order to save on utility bills, to make my semi-retirement income go further.
Your municipality doesn’t want craven, barbaric, venal, nose-picking (mustn’t forget ‘nose-picking’) low-lifes like me inside its tumble-dried clothes-pinless boundaries.
I am a full member of the IEEE, the electrical/electronics engineering Society, but because my Scottish ancestry likes to pinch pennies, I am obviously condemned to be a degenerate red-neck egg-sucking *ss-wipe, not fit to live in your NIMBY City Fathers’ glitzy showcase of eyebrow-plucking metrosexual civic pride.
Tell your city fathers that I and my parsimonious ancestors proudly moon them.
/And tell them to see Hawkins’ companion piece, in PJM today, regarding affluence and character. Tell your city fathers that my money is on the side of the bet that their character s*cks.
The #1 problem that wealth creates is free time to ponder how insufferable your life is. If you had to work dawn to dusk, then dusk to midnight, you wouldn’t have any spare time to create rights, grievances, or turn trivialities into incensed mountains of outrage.
The #1 problem in the West is too much free time.
I have to disagree, too much free time is not the problem. Although I was born and raised in the city, I came from generations of farmers, who supplemented their incomes with carpentry (that’s how my parents came to be city folk). From my aunts, uncles and grand mother I learned that life on the farm was often very difficult, most so at harvest time. Between harvest and planting there was considerable time for other activities. The first part of you post highlights activities of those who don’t actually work at all.
Most Americans, and I suspect you included, do NOT sit around griping about how much better it should be made FOR them. As an example, depending on the poll, between 55% and 70% want no part of ObamaCare. I suggest that the same percentage spend their free time, such as it is, doing positive things while thinking positive thoughts. Oh yes, they willing do for the less fortunate without thought of compensation.
I’ve never heard of peanut butter being considered a luxury good. I thought it was a much cheaper substitute for meat.
Yah. And both our candidates show the horns of the dilemma. Obama just wants to spend it all down, he thinks it all grows on trees. Romney means well, but I’m afraid I see him as an empty suit.
I guess that’s often the case, the leader is a placeholder for the real powers, but I can wish can’t I.
We really are a wonderfully rich society, not just in the US at this point but around the world. Remaining problems are almost all political dysfunction, not really a matter of money or resources at all.
It goes without saying that it is better to be rich than poor.
Very little goes without saying, ever. What’s rich? Mountains of consumer goods piled up at the end of a rainbow someone else told you to worship? Values defined by Hollywood progressives and half-witted celebs and badly educated journalists? Consumption for its own sake, an end in itself?
Time for those with any vitality to go back to the future. A modest proposal by way of example: EF Schumacher, a German-British economist died more than 35 yrs ago. His work and insights, forgotten at your peril, were soon hijacked by environmentalists and distorted beyond recognition, a great example of what happens when decent people (now often known as the far right) fall asleep at the wheel. But Schumacher’s undoctored ideas — the flipside of bigger is better and most is best — live on. Starting point: Small is Beautiful, a book now 40 yrs old. You may be surprised to note that the intelligent use of technology — the flipside of bigger is better and most expensive is best — allows more freedom, much more, than most are used to. (Also, plenty of room for a muscular foreign policy enforced by the intelligent application of force, too — to the horror of many).
Schumacher’s ideas matter more than ever, as we all adjust to a new era of limits. Done right, we can recapture the the exhilaration of the frontier, the epoch of self-sufficiency and individual freedom, via the intelligent use of appropriate technology. And values, community and decentralized power sustain it all.
Is this some magic bullet, a quick one-size-fits-all solution? Of course not. But is will help jump start some.
Our blundering elites have lost all sense of purpose, values and direction, and it shows. The just-concluded conventions were unintentionally revealing. Clint Eastwood provided the only moments of true value at either convention, and the bien-pensants on both sides winced and tried to walk.
Ef ‘em. Time for the rest of us to recall the wisdom of the broad shoulders on which we stand. And start doing things.
“RICH” is when you possess property producing income without too much hard work !
and this: The Golden Bubble which formed after WWII grew larger
and lasted longer than any other economic expansion, due to the
impetus of technology in general and the microcomputer revolution
in particular. It has left us with the unexploited capability to
raise our standard of living far enough and fast enough to get out
of this mess we are in, if we insist that govt. get out of the way.
Believe it: When the American middle class finds itself eating beans
every night and looking at $100K/yr as just enough for the necessities,
the 2nd Great Depression will be cured by the 2nd Industrial Revolution.
Drive ‘em all out to the woods. All of them, and then let them come back. Those that made it back are the ones you can work with……’>……..
Also, important to tear down all the abandoned houses so rif raf when they come out of forest with their bugs they don’t take over abandoned houses and fleas, cockroaches and BEDBUGS don’t mix with forest bugs and pandemics worse than the black death without cures take over our cities
I do my part in the 9th heaven build huts for homeless fleeing the winter forest with cameras all over to record their sins and soon we have places these forest people can go to cough up their demons which will prove religious poor houses are more useful then secular:signs on the religious poor houses : bed bug free will attract homeless so they can cough up their demons
Also new laws must be passed only home owners allowed to have guns and home owners should bring a big BIg picture of their house with two home owner friends so we make sure we take the guns out of the hands of growing number of forest people
(more latter)
I think the problem is there is not concept of anything not being the business of ‘governemnt’/home owners associations/pta’s purview. It seems like the only debate about a new law is it a ‘good thing’ or a ‘bad thing’. There is never ‘its none of my business’.
That is, if it were ‘none of my business’ if I approved of a business, or a farm, or a wild catter drilling for oil, then my ignorance would have no impact. Which is how it should be. Everyone cant be a genius and be right 100% of the time anyhow.
Kudos for even thinking of the subject, Mr. Hawkins. I wasn’t sure anyone was aware of it anymore.
You are dead-bang on target, particularly with understanding that it affects (fundamental) character.
Left/liberalism is a disease of plenty.
Excellent essay, was it also Eric Hoffer who wrote that “affluence delays maturity”? That would explain why the 2008 election was simply a version of American Idol. I suspect it also explains why a pathetic loser like Obama will, in all likelihood, get re-elected (I’m hate to state the obvious, but there is no way Romney can get the toss up states necessary). There is bright side to his re-election, with the economy in shambles, health care ruined and Islamic terrorists killing Americans for sport at least a few of the current worthless “gimme” generation will learn what the grown-ups knew all along, Obama was always a neurotic, narcissist, elitist, worthless empty suit.
Great article; #3 and #4 are the heart of the problem.
What is up with this pattern of not posting all the comments (such as my response to Bob From Virginia above? I know in my case, my comments were well within the boundaries of the rules of conduct in here. So what gives? Surely I am not the only one whose comments did not appear.