Posted on 08/01/2011 11:06:59 AM PDT by Kaslin
Insecure business moguls like Warren Buffet occasionally spout anti-affluence nonsense like the rich “…should be paying a lot more in taxes.” If Buffet won’t defend the rich, I will. I love rich people. I wish them well and I hope they get richer.
I specifically love rich people who live in a capitalistic society like America. The richer they become, the richer, healthier and happier everyone else becomes. Unlike rich rulers in a monarchy or, worse yet, wealthy dictators, American capitalists are the average person’s best friend and entrepreneurial inspiration.
Wealthy Americans do not rule over other Americans. The Constitution does not grant them special privileges or royal titles. Unlike Queen Victoria, who tried to tap into a fund for low-income families to heat Buckingham Palace, rich Americans don’t receive public funds to heat their mansions.
Let’s say you bump into your old college roommate at a baseball game and you ask him how he’s been. He says, “I’m doing well. I started my own tech firm. I’ve hired a little over 500 hundred people. Oh, and remember how I was always so frugal? Well, I broke down and bought a Lamborghini. I’ve always wanted one. I figure I’ve earned it.”
Unless you’re Michael Moore, you wouldn’t hate his guts. You wouldn’t jealously snap, “Well, I’m glad you’re having fun making piles of money and splurging on yourself.” You would be happy that he pursued his passion, worked hard, took risks and is now helping hundreds of families put food on their tables.
When new innovators rise to achieve wealth and when the already-rich get richer, it’s a sign that the economy is thriving and public policies are business-friendly. The markets are healthy. Inflation, interest rates and taxes are typically low.
Most mainstream journalists do not understand wealth. For example, TIME Magazine columnist Bill Saporito says, “The wealthiest 5% earn 21.7% of the nation’s income but spend proportionately less of it than average folk. That’s logical and also explains why the former save more than the latter and thus become wealthier.”
But money has to come from somewhere. You don’t just stumble upon a billion dollars. You create a billion dollars by taking risks, persevering and working hard.
Even if you inherit all of your money, someone worked hard at some point to create it. For example, if Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg’s future children or relatives inherit his wealth and become rich, their luck does not negate the work and innovation it took for Zuckerberg to build his wealth.
Simply saving money does not magically yield more money, as Saporito infers. No one increases their wealth by hoarding it under a pillow. At the end of the day, wealthy people—whether they are self-made or heirs—must take some level of risk by investing their money if they wish to become wealthier.
When wealthy Americans are confident in the economy, they invest more aggressively, they expand their businesses faster, they lend more generously and they spend their wealth more freely. This behavior produces innovative technologies, loans and jobs so that millions of other people have access to homes, cars, vacations, higher education and high-tech toys.
This summer, affluent parents flying their children to week-long summer camps in private jets took heat from the mainstream media for supposedly over-indulging their children—while the rest of the country struggled with unemployment, foreclosures and rising food prices.
In reality, when a wealthy person drops a few grand on a “luxury” like a round-trip private plane rental, they enrich ordinary Americans by supporting their businesses. An Augusta State Airport manager, Dale Kilmer, told the New York Times: “We have 50 to 60 jets up here in just that one day (when campers flew in).” Ordinarily, the airport caters to just a handful of private planes per day.
We hurt ourselves by envying, over-taxing and slandering the rich. Anti-wealth public policies will only persuade independently wealthy Americans to shut down their businesses, stop hiring and retire early to their hammocks in the tropics. On the other hand, if we “love” the rich, we will receive the love back in the form of ample jobs, loans, innovations and investments.
Let’s love the rich—and the aspiring rich—by implementing pro-business tax reform that motivates them to take risks, invest and create jobs. For, as Justin Timberlake sings:
“What goes around, goes around, goes around
Comes all the way back around”
This article by the redoubtable Jack Wheeler of the Freedom Research Foundation explains brilliantly how liberalism/leftism runs on a culture of envy and how envy and the fear of envy has bedeviled human society from the very beginning and explains (a lot better than geographic determinist, Jared Diamond—”Guns, Germs and Steel” guy) why Western Civilization became paramount and why some cultures remain mired in poverty and dysfunction, unchanged for millenia.
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...”The fundamental reason why certain cultures remain static and never evolve (e.g., present-day villages in Egypt and India that have stayed pretty much the same for millennia) is the overwhelming extent to which the lives of the people within them are dominated by envy and envy avoidance: as anthropologists call it, the envy barrier.
For the Mambwe in Zambia, for example, “successful men are regarded as sinister, supernatural and dangerous.” In Mexican villages, “fear of other people’s envy determines every detail of life, every proposed action.”
Members of a Hispanic “ghetto” in a community in Colorado “equate success with betrayal of the group; whoever works his way up socially and economically is regarded as a ‘man who has sold himself to the Anglos,’ someone ‘who climbs on the backs of his own people.’ “
It is an ultimate irony of modern times that left-wing Marxist-type intellectuals consider themselves to be in the progressive vanguard of sophisticated contemporary thought — when in reality their thinking is nothing but an atavism, a regression to a primitive tribal mentality. What the Left calls “exploitation” is what anthropologists call “black magic.”
As sociologist Helmut Schoeck summarizes in his seminal work, “Envy: A Theory of Human Behavior” (and who collected the above anthropologists’ observations):
A self-pitying inclination to contemplate another’s superiority or advantages, combined with a vague belief in his being the cause of one’s own deprivation, is also to be found among educated members of our modern societies who really ought to know better. The primitive people’s belief in black magic differs little from modern ideas. Whereas the socialist believes himself robbed by the employer, just as the politician in a developing country believes himself robbed by the industrial countries, so primitive man believes himself robbed by his neighbor, the latter having succeeded by black magic in spiriting away to his own fields part of the former’s harvest.
The primitive atavism of left-wing bromides like “the rich get richer and the poor get poorer” is best illustrated by arguing that one can be healthy only at the expense of others. That in order to be in superior health, bursting with energy and vitality, one has to make someone else sick or in poor health — just as in order to be rich you have to make others poor.
The healthy are healthy because they unjustly exploited and ripped off the sick, spiriting away the sick’s fair share of health with black magic. In fact, the sick are sick because the healthy are healthy. If this is absurd, then claiming the poor are poor because they have been exploited by the rich is equally absurd.
Fear of Being Envied
Pandering to the envious, and intimidating those who are afraid of them, has been the path to power of all modern demagogues, from Lenin and Hitler to Yassir Arafat and Osama bin Laden.
The three great political pathologies of the 20th century are all religions of envy: Nazism, preaching race envy toward “rich, exploitative Jews”; Communism, preaching class envy toward the “rich, exploitative bourgeoisie”; and Moslem terrorism, preaching culture envy toward the “rich, exploitative West.”
Envy-mongering has always been and continues to be the underlying strategy of all variants of the political Left, such as the Democratic Party. What a Yanomamo woman calls “black magic” and a Marxist professor at Harvard calls “exploitation,” Tom Daschle calls “tax break for the rich.”
So here we discover the secret fear at the source of the suicidal liberal mind. It is envy that makes a Nazi, a Communist or a terrorist. It is the fear of being envied that makes a liberal and is the source of “liberal guilt.”
This is most easily seen in the children of wealthy parents. Successful businessmen, for example, who have made it on their own normally have a respect for the effort and the economic system that makes success possible.
Their children, who have not had to work for it, are easier targets for guilt-mongering by the envious. So they assume a posture of liberal compassion as an envy-deflection device: “Please don’t envy me for my father’s money — look at all the liberal causes and government social programs I advocate!”
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It’s worth a read, and it would make for a great conservative campaign speech.
“Why I Hope the Rich Get Richer”
Because nobody works for a poor man- only rich people can create jobs....
Besides, if we raise taxes on the rich—they will get angry.
They will stop sending the rain and make the sun go away, and fill our fields with devouring locusts.
The feudal lords of the middle ages had this figured out, too.
Which is why the feudal lords encouraged the church to preach to the serfs on the evils of envying their feudal lords and masters.
Warren Buffet is the same man that is leaving his entire estate to the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation so that he can avoid leaving Billions of tax dollars to the Federal Government.
People like Warren Buffet loudly proclaims that he wants "The Rich" (two-income, hard working married couples) to pay more taxes so that people like him, that are avoiding BILLIONS of dollars of Federal taxes, can fly under the radar screen of public scrutiny.
Yeah try to get hired by a poor man and then try to get paid
This thread is a keeper. Is says everything that I have been saying for years and unhinges the politics of envy.
It sure does
Good post.
No one ever calls Warren Buffet out on the fact that he says we should raise taxes on “the rich” but he really proposes to raise taxes on high earners, which are people trying to get rich.
The Constitution prohibits taking people’s wealth (without “just” compensation), so we will never have an actual tax on people who HAVE more wealth, we will only have taxes (based on the income tax amendment) on people trying to BUILD wealth.
So is it any wonder at all that the alpha male Warren Buffet who already HAS billions of dollars wants higher taxes that will make it harder for anyone to catch up to him?
He’s already in the castle, screaming “raise the drawbridge!” and somehow the media portrays him as being a selfless patriot, willing to sacrifice for the greater good.
Hired? Work?!?!? No! The whole point is that the government owes me a monthly check because - as a liberal - I care more than you, so I deserve to be subsidized! :)
And I know more than a few artistic/musical types who, though talented, have chosen obscure niches so they can look and feel more important than they are - who then cannot understand why the government is unwilling to subsidize their art “they way they do in Europe.” When presented with the argument that if their art is compelling, they should have no trouble attracting private patrons, they simply stare at you blankly.
When “rich” people fancy themselves as superior creatures and begin using their wealth and power to undermine the constitutional Republic and human life, I hate their stinking guts. I don’t care what happens to them or their wealth - I want them crushed.
How’s that for materialism’s blind love? It ain’t conservative. It is amoral libertarianism. I’m not that and it is opposite of the Free Republic founded by our ancestors.
Corollary 1 to Marco Rubio: “What we need is a lot more rich people.”
On MRI’s Liberals have a larger Anterior Cingulate Cortex, which is strongly associated with the production of envy of others with superior amounts of self-relevant resources.
See:
Kanai, R., Feilden, T., Firth, C., Rees, G. (2011). Political orientations are correlated with brain structure in young adults. Current Biology, 21 (8), 677-680.
Takahashi, H., Kato, M., Matsuura, M., Mobbs, D., Suhara, T., Okubo, Y. (2009). When your gain is my pain and your pain is my gain: neural correlates of envy and schadenfreude. Science, 323 (5916), 937-939.
There is a scientific reason for this state of affairs. Liberalism is an evolved psychology, designed to promote cheating in rule governed, competitive tests of fitness. For a competitively incompetent specimen this is a winning evolutionary strategy, especially by comparison to entering the competition honestly, and losing.
Thus this pychology will not enter a Capitalistic environment, compete honestly, and then accept the outcome. They will seek to ubversively use government to make winners into losers, and vice versa (A quote from a biography of Alinsky). It is a functional strategy, even if it does go against the pychological grain of our species.
Here’s where Liberalism began, taken from a page I’m finishing before it’s uploaded to my website. Email this to a Liberal, especially one familiar with biology, and watch their head explode.
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r/K Selection Theory
Biologists have long noted that species will tend to evolve behaviors which best aid them to best exploit their environment. Among these behavioral life history traits are reproductive strategies. Reproductive strategies are, as the name implies, the strategies individuals will use to reproduce. The most common examples are the two strategies demonstrated in r/K selection theory.
Within r/K selection theory, individuals within a species will tend to be exposed to one of two environmental extremes. Evolution, will in turn, mold their reproductive strategy to their environment, in an attempt to gain maximal survival advantage. Each of these two environments will produce a very particular psychology in the individuals exposed to them.
Under conditions of r-selection, a species will be exposed to an aggressive, externally imposed mortality, often manifesting as predation. This mortality will thin their population, while shortening the average lifespan of all the population’s members. Due to this depopulation, such a species will find the few surviving individuals will each have access to copious resources, however they will not have long to reproduce before they too are culled by mortality. As a result, the individuals who actually reproduce will do so by avoiding mortality as aggressively as possible, not wasting time in confrontation (or competition) with others, and mating as early and as often as possible, with as many different mates as possible. Such a mating strategy will entail what is referred to as “low investment” child rearing, where a father will abandon his mate and offspring immediately, and the offspring will become sexually mature as early as possible, so as to have the greatest chance of reproducing prior to death. Since it is these individuals who reproduce, their offspring will carry these traits. As time goes on, the population will gradually develop ever more extreme presentations of these traits.
This is the evolutionary foundation of the modern Liberal’s psychology. The modern Liberal seeks an environment which is as devoid of competition as possible. Whether it be the economic competitions of free market Capitalism, the Darwinian group competitions of War, or even the competitions which might arise if citizens carried arms to meet the threat of a criminal attack - Liberals oppose all forms of free competitions among men, and will use force of government to abolish them where posible. In matters of mating strategies, Liberalism carries with it an inherent embrace of promiscuity, beginning as early in one’s teen years as possible. Indeed Liberals champion ever earlier applications of Sexual Education, even despite evidence that such education increases, rather than decreases, teen pregnancy rates. And finally, Liberals exhibit an absence of concern with the careful rearing of children. From single parenting, to gay adoptions, Liberals exhibit no concern for how any particular parenting condition might affect a child’s subsequent Competitiveness. Thus out of the three aspects of the r-selected psychology, Liberal ideology exhibits all three – aversion to competition, embrace of promiscuity, and low psychological investment in child rearing.
The opposite conditions of r-selection are K-selection. Under conditions of K-selection, a population experiences little or no externally imposed mortality. Such a population will multiply freely, until it reaches the carrying capacity of it’s environment, and resources suddenly are not sufficient to support further reproduction. At that point, some component of the population will have to experience mortality, due to an inability to acquire a portion of the limited resources. Under these conditions, a fierce competition for resources will ensue, since the only way to survive will be to acquire one’s resources by out-competing peers. This competition invariably produces tremendously fast rates of evolutionary advancement. For this reason, K-selected organisms are usually more evolutionarily advanced than their r-selected counterparts, and will exhibit more complex adaptions, from increased intelligence and sentience, to increased physical capabilities. By contrast, r-selection is generally viewed as an evolutionary placeholder. In emphasizing the production of quickly produced quantity over more slowly produced quality in offspring, it will not evolve a species significantly, though it will keep it alive during the period of high mortality which faces it.
Those who pursue a K-type strategy (K-strategists) will tend to have a different reproductive strategy from the r-strategists, and this is motivated by a different psychology. K-strategists will embrace competition, as they would not otherwise be able to acquire the resources necessary to survive. When mating, the K-selected organism will attempt to carefully select the fittest mate possible, as any inferiority in their offspring will result in their offspring failing in free competition, and thus failing to pass their genes forward. The K-selected organism will also tend toward monogamy, as a means of monopolizing their highly fit mate’s highly fit genes, and preventing others from having access to them. And finally, the K-selected organism will engage in high investment child-rearing. This will consist of two monogamously bonded parents carefully raising a child with every advantage, so as to make their child as competent as possible in the competitions they will have to succeed in to survive.
Clearly, Conservatism embraces competition in every regard. From the economic competitions of Capitalism, and the disparate economic outcomes these entail, to the Darwinian competition of war, and even the competitions which occur between an armed citizen and the criminal who attacks them - Conservatives welcome the Competitive environment. In matters of mating strategy, Conservatism favors the ideal of engaging in abstinence until a monogamous marriage. And in child rearing, Conservatives favor high investment child rearing, in the form of two monogamous, heterosexual parents carefully raising a child to be as capable as possible, in a decent culture, with strong “Family Values.”
Within r/K selection theory, all populations will contain some mix of r and K selected psychologies. As an environment shifts to one extreme or the other, a population will adopt a more r or K-selected psychology, but this will only last so long as the environmental conditions which produced the shift continue. Under conditons of reduced mortality, and copious resource availability, both r and K-selected psychologies will be present, until such time as reources become limited, and a competitive, K-selected pressure takes hold.
It is impossible to deny that every aspect of political ideology revolves around the same fundamental issues of behavior that r/K selection theory revolves around. Although our species’ embrace of group competition has further molded these urges, this is the evolutionary foundation of ideology. It is where political ideology began. For that reason, no individual can ever fully understand political ideology or the forces which motivate it, absent a grasp of r/K Selection Theory.
Your post effectively gives the biological foundation for what I call the Culture of Death. It is a culture that maximizes the chances that the human species does not keep up with the survival mechanisms necessary to adapt to environmental change. its only survival skill is the ability to exploit others in a parasitic manner.
This is what is occuring, but it is not permanant, or unnatural.
By their nature, the r-selected organism reproduces quickly - much more quickly than a K-selected organism. Since we have no mortality and copious resources, the r-selected organisms in our species will reproduce faster than the K-selecteds, producing an “Idiocracy Movie” effect. Liberalim will grow. This occurs in nature in other species which suddenly find an abundance of resources are suddenly available. Organim which wouldn’t last a second under K-selection survive and reproduce.
It cannot go on forever, however. No population can grow infintely fast, forever. Sooner or later, you reach the carrying capacity of the resources available, and some organisms must die. At that point, you have reinstituted the K-selected environment, and Liberals will be culled. I suspect the coming economic collapse will produce some type of Great Depression, there won’t be enough for everybody, and Conservatives will have to choose between feeding their own, or letting gov’t take their food and give it to others, “for fairness.” Needles to say, Liberals will have a significant evolutionary disadvantage.
I think this is why all Conervatives scratch their heads, and wonder what would a liberal do in a state of nature? We know they’d be dead in a microsecond. Eventually, our species will grow too big, nature will impose an unavoidable mortality on our species, and at that point it is the Competitive Conservatives who will survive through loyalty, hard work, and competitiveness.
Liberals will inevitably lose.
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