I was gobsmacked, and have had more than a little difficulty coming to terms with it, when my younger brother, a retired Air Force Major, retired School Administrator with an M.ed., and Church Deacon, told me a few weeks ago that he thought corporate business executives were greedy and took advantage of the working middle class to gain their undeserved wealth. He even said that he thought Socialism could work if Capitalists didn't always subvert its fair and equal intentions. He said he would still vote for Romney but now I wonder. It is possible he was just pushing my buttons to continue some old sibling rivalry, but it has disturbed me more than he will ever know.
I hear similar sentiments from people in my family. They are very envious of “rich people”, especially rich CEO’s who make millions while everyday employees make less and less.
They do not get the concept of market value compensation based on accountability, or risk, or experience, or value to the company, or scarcity of the pool of people who can be CEO. All they see is the discrepancy in compensation. All I hear is that they are exploiters, look out for each other, conspire to screw the little guy, basically that they are evil incarnate.
I’ve asked their opinion of sports stars making millions while the guy selling hot dogs at the stadium makes minimum wage or the movie star who rakes it in while the movie usher gets next to nothing. They don’t see the point in these cases, they just think business CEO’s should get shafted. They don’t see the point that there is such a thing as market value and for some people that value is exceedingly high.
They actually believe there should be a legal limit on what people are paid. Of course, they believe these people should have huge tax rates.
Soak the rich gets votes, believe me. One family member thinks taxes should be much, much higher on rich people. I’ve retorted sarcastically that of course, the government can do much better things with Bill Gates’ or Donald Trump’s money than those men can do with it. They sort of agree with me, but then backtrack by saying the government HAS to have a certain amount of money (even though they know it will not reduce the deficit or be spent efficiently). Also, they say that people can’t be allowed to amass huge fortunes like the robber barons did at the turn of the century so we don’t have an aristocracy. I counter that many of the well to do (Trump, e.g.) have won and lost fortunes many times over.
They just want to see successful people punished, pure and simple. Because they’re not rich themselves, they want to bring down the people who are.
Envy is a powerful emotion that is extremely easy to exploit. It truly does blind people to common sense.