Here’s a typical bit of leftist rubbish: Wealth concentration near ‘levels last seen during the Roaring Twenties,’ study finds. Such studies, and no doubt accurate to the third decimal. But suppose we just change the heading a bit:
Wealth levels near ‘levels last seen during the Roaring Twenties,’ study finds
Take the bottom ten percent today and their standard of living is much much higher than the top ten percent was then. They eat better, have better transportation (say cars and roads), improved entertainment (and right in their own living room) and live in larger, more spacious homes with an endless increase in labour-saving gadgetry.
The level of income inequality is invisible. It requires someone to try to measure two entirely different populations in entirely different periods of time, when in neither there are statistics that will actually measure what they are trying to find. But even if you could measure income inequality, so what? There will always be rich and there will always be poor. The rich today undoubtedly have more goods and services at their command than did the rich in the 1920s. But so do the poor.
What does not change is the level of envy among a large proportion of the population who are made bitter by the success of others. Envy is the worst of the seven deadly sins and there is no known cure. But the envious are everywhere and will take their revenge on the rest of us if they can.
https://fee.org/articles/on-appeasing-envy/
My definition of Socialism: When you covet your neighbour’s ox but you don’t have the guts to steal it yourself so you demand that the government steal it for you.
I get envious that Olympic level athletes, who train and are so dedicated, can run faster than me. The government should do something about it.
The “marketing” of envy was almost absent in the twenties. These days the MSM are completely driven by marketing rather than “truth” and that is really the major reason they are now so OTT leftist. MSM will not survive without a disgruntled audience and envy is THE major snowflake emotion that they can rely on.
Why does “… a person with negative net worth is not necessarily penniless.” sound so much like marketing-speak and emotional fearmongering to me?
And you really know this envy marketing is happening when you remember that the Washington Post who published that article is owned by richest man in the world, Jeff Bezos. IMHO, there’s one guy who could do with some wealth redistribution.
I think its a deflection from the contemporary issue is how much does the top ten percent interfere with the daily lives of the rest of the population.
This. I’m using it.
My desire to have the entire Australian oligarchs Class blown from the guns in a public celebration of mob justice isn’t because they have imported mass millions of enraged military age revolutionary freedom fighters to scrub their crappers and vacuum the lawns of their decamillion dollar demesnes.
The crony socialism that corruptly enables our kleptomaniac autocrats to sign unswerving compliance with global tyranny to dynamite our power plants and replace them with chicom peoples liberation army slave labour solar panels isn’t the only reason to hang draw and quarter them.
The depraved dash our deposed despotic dictators make to the Manhattan Island glory holes of their United Nations drives some desire to defenestration.
Basically, it is the unctuous godless sneering commo contempt our upper elites have for the proles they sell out to genocide, for cents in the dollar, that makes medieval malicious mayhem the only sane response to an insane situation.
Comrades.
I suspect the author regards the opportunity cost to the wealthy of investing in commerce as wealth used solely on self-gratification providing no value to others.
I don’t want to downplay the use that socialism (and advertisers) makes of man’s propensity to envy – we are invited on all fronts to the seven deadly sins.
But nor do I want to downplay the consequences of crony-capitalism (crapitalism) which we now live under, to place more money and power into the hands of a few.
It is a time of great blessing with the many advances in engineering, medicine and technology etc., but that doesn’t mean we can be complacent about the economic system we live under. We should be fighting for small, accountable government and honest money.
Envy is wrong, but judgement upon a corrupt government system is not.
Peter Schiff went down amongst the Occupy Wall Street crowd to try and explain some of this:
Most of my compatriots are, or have been public servants. Among them all, I am regarded as the right wing capitalist because I’m in business. When confronted with the information that they are in the top ten to twenty percent income earners bracket, they usually go a bright shade of red then shift the conversation sideways. My point is that many people still carry a perception of themselves as being poor even though they are now wealthy.
GK Chesterton: It is not that Christianity has been tried and found wanting. It has been found too difficult and not tried.
Re John Constantine’s post – Wow.
It is almost like the ruling class are pushing all the left-wing stuff as a clever and disingenuous defense of their own lofty position. Perhaps a controlled burn. If they really got what they say they want (revolution), they would be gone.