11/7/19
With the 2020 presidential election less than a year
away, we are waist deep in the political silly season. Presently, the most salient manifestation of
the nonsense that passes for political discourse in modern day America is Democratic
front-runner Elizabeth Warren’s familiar whoop-whoop about taxing, or worse,
the rich. Such addle-brained plans would
be bad enough if delivered in a measured tone with a veneer of sensibility and genuine
concern for the future of the Republic.
However, Senator Warren amps up the general dyspepsia of such proposals
by delivering them with healthy helpings of vitriol and downright nastiness,
calling into question not only “rich” people’s patriotism but also their
morality and, one supposes, worthiness to escape a 21st Century
version of the 18th Century Terror. It
would be bad enough if she merely wanted to go after “the 1%” for their money,
but she appears to want to go after them for who they are and what they
represent in her mind.
Perhaps Senator Warren does not harbor as much hatred for
the “rich” as her rhetoric would indicate; maybe this is all politics, red meat
for those who will ultimately decide who will bear the standard of her Party next
Fall. Whether the feelings that underlie
her rhetorical and policy attacks on those she considers the maleficent rich
are genuine or born of the political necessities of the moment, one almost has
to commend her for going after the easy targets the most visible of “the rich”
have made of themselves.
Yours truly is fortunate enough to know and have known,
to use a now quaint expression, a few people of means. Most of these acquaintances of mine are
sensible, reasonable people who have worked hard, live well but act sensibly,
and deserve our respect as people of accomplishment and, Senators Warren’s and
Sanders’ presuppositions notwithstanding, genuine appreciation for whence they
came and hence a concern for those who are far less blessed, at least
financially, than they. I hasten to
add, though, that not all of the extremely well-off that I know display such traits. Some of them are, to put it succinctly,
silly. They are probably not stupid;
they wouldn’t be where they are if they were stupid. But they are, at the very least, silly. They buy silly things. They engage in silly activities. Their lives seem to be dominated by the
pursuit of the unachievable, i.e., coming out on top in a race to see who can acquire
the most stuff they don’t need in order to impress people they don’t like. It’s a pointless existence. Yours truly does not know whether these
people choose such an existence because of their inability to see its very vacuity
or because of some deep internal psychological and spiritual emptiness that
they condemn themselves to attempt to fill with the pabulum of crass and tacky
materialism. However, it is not
important that I, or anyone, other than those caught in the throes of such a Sisyphean
existence, know the reasons for such gormless behavior; yours truly is neither
a psychologist nor a spiritual seer.
As I mentioned before, I am blessed that I know enough people
with money to realize, or at least suspect, or maybe just hope, that the truly
silly among them are in the minority.
However, the average person, and the average voter, has not been blessed
with proximity to people with money.
What this voter sees is the headlines about the multiple palatial, and
rarely occupied, homes, the incessant competition to snare the record for most
money paid for a property in a particular locale, the yachts, the helicopters, the
personal submarines, the space tourism, and other baubles, trinkets, gimcracks,
and geegaws that comprise the all-consuming efforts by the maybe wealthy but
the definitely insecure to display their real or supposed wealth and, one
presumes, to rub it in the noses of those who have no such wealth. (See, for purposes of elucidation, my long
seminal 6/28/15 post WSJ: THE MAGAZINE FOR PORTENTOUS POPINJAYS AND
POLTROONS.) The average voter, or
at least the voter to whom the likes of Senators Warren and Sanders are trying
to appeal, looks at the much-trumpeted behavior of the silly rich and concludes
that all successful people are similarly idiotic and hence deserve not only to be
taxed and soaked but also to be vilified, pilloried, and exposed as enemies of
the people. The reaction of the aforementioned
voters thus becomes “Yeah, go get those rich b…ards, Lizzie! Show ‘em we mean business, Bernie!” and the
like. Mission accomplished for those
seeking the Democratic nomination.
A long running theme of my writing has been this tendency of
the rich, and/or those who simply want to appear rich, to excrete away their
money in vain attempts to attain God knows what pointless goal. Yours truly simply doesn’t understand the
things people do with their money. Why
do people, as I pointed out in the aforementioned
post, think they need $4,000 handbags, $4,500 blazers, or $12,000 side
tables designed to look like a bird’s silhouette? Why do people spend six figures on their
cars and similar amounts on their vacations?
Yes, I know I’m, er, frugal and I don’t expect people, and especially
people of vastly greater wealth than I, to derive as much joy as my wife and I do
from a simple dinner at the local Greek joint and a movie at home or maybe even
a trip to Costco or Walmart. Still, I simply don’t get the reasoning behind
the gormless expenditures that people make.
But so what? Why
is what people do with their money yours truly’s business? It isn’t.
And, in general, I pursue a live and let live policy toward much of what
people choose to do. However, in this
case, the outright asinine behavior of many who are considered wealthy does
have an impact, and quite a direct impact, on you and me. Such behavior makes people easy targets for
demagogues pursuing policy that reduce the egregious income inequality that
currently characterizes our country, but will do so only by reducing the wealth
of the rich, not by enhancing the wealth, or prospects for attaining wealth, of
those who occupy the lower economic strata of our society. Destroying capital by disincentivizing people
to create capital cannot possibly have positive ramifications for those who are
trying to attain wealth. Policies that
are now laughingly called “progressive” have never led to much economic
progress. To the extent that people’s
behavior with their wealth makes it harder to defend policies, such as low
taxes, light-handed regulation, and a minimal role for government, that are
vital to creating such wealth, such behavior hurts all of us, and hurts most of
us more than it will hurt the silly rich that make themselves such easy targets
for ridicule from the likes of Senators Warren and Sanders.
