Posted on 05/10/2005 3:49:55 AM PDT by 7thson
Recently a friend described a meeting with a nasty-tempered leftist who was from a rich family. Unfortunately, there are a lot of leftists who were born with a silver spoon in their mouth -- and, instead of being grateful, are venomous against American society.
Conversely, there are people like yours truly who were born on the other end of the economic scale and think this is a great country. No one has really explained either of these phenomena.
Maybe a painful confrontation with the facts of life early on makes it harder in later years to get all worked up over abstract issues that seem to preoccupy the left.
Once you have ever had to go hungry, it is hard to get worked up over the fact that some people can only afford pizza while others can afford caviar. Once you have ever had to walk to work from Harlem to a factory south of the Brooklyn Bridge, the difference between driving a Honda and driving a Lexus seems kind of petty as well.
Would a poverty-stricken peasant in Bangladesh find the difference between the average American's standard of living and that of a millionaire to be something to get excited about? If he had a choice between a certainty of getting the first and one chance in two of getting the second, would he take the risk to go for a million bucks? I doubt it.
The general public has never been as worked up about "income distribution" as the left has. Nor is this due to any deeper understanding on the left. On the contrary, liberals and other leftists have constantly misconceived the issue.
Differences between people in different income brackets tell you absolutely nothing about who those people are or how long they have been in those brackets. Most Americans who are in the bottom 20 percent in income at one point in their lives are in the top 20 percent at some other point.
They usually start at the bottom and work their way up, with a few blips up and down along the way. The more affluent the country becomes, the less those transient statistical differences really matter, except to those with the money, the leisure, and the inclination to adopt indignation as a way of life.
Environmentalism is another of the playgrounds of the affluent and the wealthy. "Nature" is wonderful when you can look out on it from your luxury cabin in the woods or from your upscale digs at the shore.
Roughing it in the wild is great when you know that, if something goes wrong, a helicopter can come in and lift you to safety or to a hospital, as the case may be. This is what might be called artificial nature or the illusion of nature.
Real nature can be pretty ugly, as the pioneers discovered, and as the bleached bones of their animals or themselves on the old trails can attest. Even in more recent times, anyone who has had to get up on cold mornings, all winter long, to start a fire in the fireplace to heat the house is unlikely to regard it as a romantic experience.
It's romantic if you are doing it for a little while, by choice, knowing that it is only a matter of time before you return to your home with central heating, provided by the oil that you don't want drilled for off shore or in Alaska, or by the coal that you deplore seeing mined anywhere.
Personally, it has only been within the past few years that I have been able to enjoy starting a fire in the fireplace -- in my centrally heated home -- because it reminded me too much of when I was a kid down South and a fireplace was all we had to try to keep warm in the winter.
Of all the romantic self-indulgences of the affluent and the wealthy, few are more ridiculous than their passion to "save" farmland. This country has no shortage of farmland or of food.
One of our biggest problems is over-eating and, even so, there are huge agricultural surpluses that cost the taxpayers billions of dollars every year. Yet the greenies with lots of green are pushing for laws and policies to prevent farmers from selling their land to people who want to build houses on it.
Would it be worth it to be rich if it also meant being so foolish? I doubt it.
"Once you have ever had to walk to work from Harlem to a factory south of the Brooklyn Bridge,..."
I like Sowell a lot, but I can't imagine what he means by this hyperbole. Why wouldn't you take the subway?
I mean maybe he had to do this literally once, or else he's talking about the infamous subway strike and not his own personal experience.
Try to see the forest through the trees. I wouldn't know Harlem from Anacostia but I know what he speaks about. I remember the days when I was a child and then a teenager, living in poverty. I remember my first job as a paperboy, delivering papers in the snow, rain, and all kinds of uncivil weather. Recently, I looked at my Social Security history, what I was making my first full year in the Navy. About 7 grand! I wondered how I lived back then.
What Sowell is saying is that people who started off poor and then became wealthy have a finer appreciation for the little things than those born into it and given it their entire lives.
..."there are a lot of leftists who were born with a silver spoon in their mouth -- and, instead of being grateful, are venomous against American society."
Exhibit A: "Doctor" Howard Dean. I don't believe there is a better example of this phenomenon than this phony, sanctimonious little pric*.
Exhibit A1: John Forbes Kerry. Don't need to say any more here. An odious, treasonous pomposity who has no clue about what makes America great.
I think he was too poor to afford any transit. You might be interested in reading his autobiography (for lack of a better term). It is called "A Personal Odyssey". It's been a while since I read it, but it is really interesting. It's not a typical autobiography; it isn't really chronological and while many standard autobiography topics are discussed, others you might expect to find are not discussed in detail. The book deals more with how his thinking evolved relative to his personal circumstances, somewhat like this essay. I thought it was a great read and I was quite surprised by much of what I learned about Dr. Sowell's background.
I really didn't think about being too poor to take the subway, I'll admit that!
Sure they have.
People who have their money given to them (and don't have to work for it) can never shake the feeling that they have to prove to the world that they are not ineffectual losers. The truth is, they have to prove this to themselves, but they think they have to prove it to the world.
Buying whole-hog into leftism is a cheap, risk-free, and effort-free way of accomplishing this, at least for those who can't really think for themselves and have only a limited concept of how the real world works.
Liberalism, which is just a collection of high-sounding platitudes and rampant self-regard, solves their problem in so many ways. It has spent decades promulgating the concept that it is the ideology of the smart, in fact liberals believe they are liberal because they are smart. Mentally-challenged trust funders buy into this completely. Also, because liberalism is anti-wealth, the trust-funder who esposes it instantly acquires gravitas and a patina of inscrutibility because he believes in a creed that appears contrary to his own economic interest. Of course, it isn't really; liberalism is fine with wealth already held; it's the accumulation of new wealth that liberalism seeks to thwart. But we won't mention that to the unwashed.
This, and much more on the subject, was covered by articles that appeared in National Review 25 years ago.
(steely)
Well, I'm an engineer, not a tax expert, but I do run my own business, and I've learned enough about how the system works to have become convinced that the wealthy (and especially the really wealthy) can set things up so that they pay next to no taxes. A big way this is done is by means of investments.
Years ago, when he was just beginning to get wealthy, Rush Limbaugh described in considerable detail another approach. He only did it once, never breathed a word of it again, and I happened to be listening and I absorbed as much as I could.
As I understood it, Rush said that really wealthy people set up (with the help of their attorneys and accountants) what amounts to a privately held bank. The bank holds their money. When they, or their family members, need money to buy something big like a new business or a new private jet or a new estate, whatever, they have the bank give them a loan for the amount.
If I recall correctly, Rush explained that, by sheltering their assets in a bank, they are able to take advantage of many laws and loopholes to shelter themselves from taxes, or defer the payment of those taxes for long periods.
My impression is that, as a population, many more of the very rich support liberal causes than they do conservative causes. As I alluded earlier, their are many personal, psychic, and social advantages to doing this. Many very wealthy people support Democrat politicians. This gives them a say over things like the writing of the tax code, the rules which govern charitable foundations, the rules which govern the passing of wealth along to their children and grandchildren, etc., etc.
They may be liberals, but they are also keenly aware of their self-interest. They don't like to be too public about it, and the deal the Democrats offer is that, in return for regular campaign contributions (this includes money to the Party, but also it includes things like giving Monica Lewinsky a job at Revlon when she needed to be made to keep her mouth shut, or giving money to Harvard to fund Michael Dukakis' salary while he cools his heels there until the next Democrat president has a cabinet position to fill), the wealthy liberal gets ideological cover for all the nice juicy tax avoidance and wealth building freebie legislation he cares to suggest to his favorite legislator.
No proof, just a lifetime of observation and inference.
(steely)
The handful of people I know personally – none of whom would likely call me more than an acquaintance - who have net worths in the high 10s to low 100s of millions usually made it very quickly during the mid-to-late 1990s as a result of a ownership interest in a tech related venture which went public. As such they not very representative of the American uber-rich, so my opinions on this topic are likely no better informed by personal experience than many other people's. (The only exception is one guy who has had several quite successful careers, including a recent stint as CEO of a well known (and still surviving) net-related company when it went public. He’s a “Hang the drug dealers in front of the high-school” conservative, but he also believes that “Inheritance should be limited to the cost of a Chevy and four years at a good college”, so I don’t think he would count as typical, either).
That said, while I don’t know the political breakdown of the ultra-wealthy IMO it’s quite clear that for the last 25 years it’s the conservative side that’s been effective in using money to move public opinion on questions of economics, taxation and income policies - the conservative network of foundations, fellowships and think tanks is something of which conservative are justifiably proud and liberals justifiably jealous.
As a result on many issues of concern to conservatives large parts of the Republican and Democratic parties are now in agreement (heard any Democrats defending AFDC lately?), on some others - deficit spending, for example, as a matter of behavior as opposed to rhetoric - the roles have largely reversed, and on some - of which attitudes toward concentration of wealth is one of the more obvious – the differences are if anything greater than before.
And for me, anyway trying to psychoanalyze the “personal, and psychic” motives ( as much fun as it is to do it) that I imagine might underlie such opinion is of less and less importance, what matters to me these days is the substance of the policies people want to pursue.
The handful of people I know personally – none of whom would likely call me more than an acquaintance - who have net worths in the high 10s to low 100s of millions usually made it very quickly during the mid-to-late 1990s as a result of a ownership interest in a tech related venture which went public. As such they not very representative of the American uber-rich, so my opinions on this topic are likely no better informed by personal experience than many other people's. (The only exception is one guy who has had several quite successful careers, including a recent stint as CEO of a well known (and still surviving) net-related company when it went public. He’s a “Hang the drug dealers in front of the high-school” conservative, but he also believes that “Inheritance should be limited to the cost of a Chevy and four years at a good college”, so I don’t think he would count as typical, either).
That said, while I don’t know the political breakdown of the ultra-wealthy IMO it’s quite clear that for the last 25 years it’s the conservative side that’s been effective in using money to move public opinion on questions of economics, taxation and income policies - the conservative network of foundations, fellowships and think tanks is something of which conservative are justifiably proud and liberals justifiably jealous.
As a result on many issues of concern to conservatives large parts of the Republican and Democratic parties are now in agreement (heard any Democrats defending AFDC lately?), on some others - deficit spending, for example, as a matter of behavior as opposed to rhetoric - the roles have largely reversed, and on some - of which attitudes toward concentration of wealth is one of the more obvious – the differences are if anything greater than before.
And for me, anyway trying to psychoanalyze the “personal, and psychic” motives ( as much fun as it is to do it) that I imagine might underlie such opinion is of less and less importance, what matters to me these days is the substance of the policies people want to pursue.
Duh. Because he would rather walk than spend the money for the subway. I recall my father walking a similar distance to work and back during some "lean years" because the 20 cents he would have had to pay for the streetcar made a difference.
I think this article is talking precisely about people who can't imagine why he would walk.
"I recall my father walking a similar distance to work..."
Well, actually both my brothers always walked to work. I think one even walked from Williamsburg brooklyn to Midtown, but I'm not sure and he's gone to his reward so I can't confirm it. My younger brother walked from about 20th street to the very bottom of Wall Street for years. He may still do it, but again, I'm not sure, because he really screwed up his ankle a few years ago so I'm not sure if he can still make that long walk. I will ask him though.
I always thought they were kind of nuts too, to tell you the truth.
Ya. They could have bought a $1000 tred mill if they wanted all of that exercise. ;~))
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