Money, Money, Money
It's beat-up-on-the-rich time in America: a cheap alternative to paying a veterinarian's bill for the dog you just kicked violently upon checking your 401(k) statement.
This, too, will pass, along with the recession, that's to say. The sun will break through the clouds, and we'll return to being a nation of strivers, with a built-in delight in acquisition, and in enjoyment of the fruits thereof.
Meanwhile President Obama denounces "shameful" bonuses doled out to Wall Street ex-geniuses, sets a half-million-limit on executive compensation at companies taking federal handouts. Street corner conversation turns—inevitably, I would venture—to the sheer tactlessness represented by jaunts in corporate jets (Chrysler, Ford and GM executives), $1.2 million office remodels (Bank of America's John Thain), and everything Bernie Madoff said or did while running his alleged Ponzi scheme.
All the ranting and raging have their healthy side, so long as we, the people, don't take it too far—the way they did, say, in the French Revolution. (Not that the Revolution put a stop to wealth creation in France, or anywhere else!) Reminders of wealth's excesses—and of the peculiar stupidities of particular rich people—belong up front in public discourse. It would be an awful thing to forget that virtue neither comes with big money nor can be purchased at any price. All this we learn from daily living.
The thing is, we can't ever do without the rich, bitterly as we may despise them. Wealth, proportionate or disproportionate to effort and merit, is what comes of exertion. If you want to abolish wealth, abolish exertion, but you probably wouldn't want to, because then life would stop. Everything would run down. "Let us then be up and doing," Longfellow urged. He knew whereof he spoke. To be up and doing is to be inventing and creating. For invention and creation there have to be rewards. If the rewards are so great they make some spectators wrinkle their noses in disgust, so what? Let them be up and doing.
The reason capitalism displeases (bonuses, jets, etc.) is that it's such a human enterprise. Humans tend to overreach, and to preen. On the other hand, their preening can do the rest of us good if they invent or offer something that conduces to the general good: from a better mousetrap to a car than runs on electricity or a five-course dinner so filling, and fulfilling, you hate to rise from the table.
Vulgarity, wretched excess, shamelessness—it's the price a capitalistic society pays for the accomplishments of capitalists. And bloody well better go on paying if we're to maintain our reason and our liberties.
The best way to cope with the shortcomings of the highly placed and magnificent is not to guillotine such folk, it's just to ignore them as much as possible, while remembering the large number of wealthy people who do actual good with their money, using it in valuable and creative ways, instead of running their status into the ground.
In the long run, it all comes out about even. No pockets in a shroud—that sort of thing. We brought nothing into this world, and it is certain we can carry nothing out.
In the short run, the necessity is to fend off politicians who blast the rich for no worse offense than that of being rich. Regulation, confiscatory taxation—politicians can use such tools to make the rich feel, at a minimum, more uncomfortable—and everyone else feel even worse through the disappearance of incentives to work, invest, plan, grow, do something no one else ever did before.
In an odd way, rich politicians (John Kerry, Jay Rockefeller, etc.) and the aspiring rich among them (Bill Clinton, etc.), probably, in an accidental way, extend capitalism's life span. No capital, no wealth. No wealth, no campaign contributions. The end of capitalism probably isn't … just yet.
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Murchison seems to posit a basically antithetical relationship between the rich ("capitalist") classes and the political classes in the US. As if to say: There is government, and there are capitalists, and their interests conflict.
If that is his drift, he is mistaken. The super rich are thoroughly and completely in bed with government at all levels. The purpose of this intimacy is to keep as much as they can while preventing others from acquiring or, at least, while manipulating governments to confiscate from new wealth acquirers in order to further engorge the wealth and power of the established plutocracy. This is the essence of the corporate welfare state, aka fascism. Any impressions given that the established rich and governments are at odds are misdirections that serve the interests of both, while intending to fool everyone else.
I guess I was brought up wrong. "A built-in delight in acquisition" was referred to my teachers as avarice, one of the seven deadly sins. But of course, we're living in an age where pride, lust, envy, and wrath are also considered virtues and gluttony is more widely practiced than ever, though not generally praised. Only sloth is still looked down upon. If one can't be busy acquiring new toys and gadgets, one is at least supposed to "look busy".
I have nothing against the rich - their antics, like those of the Hollywood stars with whom they overlap, can be a source of entertainment and their misbehavior a plentiful store of negative example. But I don't think "vulgarity, wretched excess, shamelessness" are the price we must pay for our liberties; they're the reason we're losing our liberties. As St. Augustine put it, a vicious man is a slave with as many masters as he has vices.
Exertion my ass; truth is that those who most exert themselves generally end up the poorest. Want to be rich? Don't compose operas, don't study philosophy, don't be a physician in a rural area, don't edit paleocon magazines. No! join the right fraternity,study finanace,go to Wall Street (I used to work there)and insert yourself into the top of the food chain.
Those who "make" the big money are those who sit in office buildings and short-sell naked options on future derivatives, or some such parallel creative action. Guillotine time? You bet!
Tito, my friend, you tell it like it is. The fact is that most of the great wealth in this country is concentrated amongst people who never exerted themselves in the least. Not that my experience is all that extensive, but I have never met a person of inherited wealth who was not a fool and/or a knave. Those who did exert themselves for it, earned it by manipulating the government or defrauding the public. Back in the early days of the U.S., scoundrels like Hamilton and fools like John Adams, claimed that the masses were always plotting to seize the property of the elite and therefore a strong government was needed to curb the masses. In fact, the masses seldom attack the elite. Thye norm of history, as Taylor of Caroline pointed out, is that the rich, powerful, and well-connected prey upon the labour and property of the masses.
I second all four previous respondents, if less, uh, vehemently than Mr. Perdue--then again, I never worked on Wall Street or anything close to it. Perhaps in the latter lies the point of my impatience with Mr. Murchison, drubbing everyone else to be "inventing and creating"--Up and at 'em!! Very few possess the gifts necessary to invent and create. They will work, most of them quite hard, but they won't add to the cultural-technical treasury of mankind. I do not believe that is any reason to despise them, still less to believe that their rich fellow citizens are not, and probably should not, feel a sense of obligation toward them. A wage that enables the support of a growing family for a job that will not be outsourced seems the minimum of what the rest of us should have vis-a-vis the rich, and the huge discrepancy between reality for a steadily growing number of us and the spectacle of incompetent executives of failing megacorporations showering themselves with government handouts is galling, to say the least.
Just ignore the rich, Mr. Murchison? I shall when they stop ignoring and riding roughshod over me and my fellow nonrich Americans.
@3 Tito
You forgot to mention, and when you've destroyed the remnants of the free market, then go to work for the government so you can destroy the remnents of social order.
By the way, I really enjoyed The Fields of Asphodel! The tormented Lee finally found happiness.
@4 Dr Wilson
There is a video on youtube with two Englishmen called John Bird and John Fortune. WBAL plays the audios on a regular basis. They go into just how hard the swindlers toil while they rip us off. I won't post the link for obvious reasons but just enter the 2 names and you'll get some serious black comedy.
The poor say the rich are greedy, the rich say the rich are generous. What is greedy is when an employee is producing the same amount of product (currency) and expects to get a raise for it.
What's generous is when I and my fellow partners buy a 400 unit apartment complex to allow 400 families an affordable and clean place to live.
If you're looking at two groups of generous and greedy people, there is both generous and greedy rich people, same goes for poor and middle class folk. The only difference between rich and the poor and middle class people in America is there belief system. Rich people are no better than the poor people, the difference is we believe oppositely in the way we see money.
I believe that the majority of the world do not see rich people working hard, but if they are making the decisions as a rich person it can be as hard as physical labor. We may not be the smartest people in the world, but we are some of the emotionally intelligent people in the who world. We can control out emotions and have our instincts be corrected, so when the real estate market crashes, we do not see it as a horrendous event, we see it as a sale on printing money.
It takes a lot of guts to buy an apartment complex when the rest of the world is in hysteria and all the "experts" are yelling sell, like there is a fire in a movie theater.
I was recently accused of being greedy when I bought a house that was in pre-foreclosure the other day. Yet, the man that I bought it from thanked me for saving his credit and putting him in more affordable housing, leaving him able to keep his job and put a roof over his family's heads.
The poor say the rich are greedy ...
Actually the most greedy entities out there are the Federal, State and local governments, because they grow in both good times and bad. They never tire of viewing the taxpayers as a bottomless pit of wealth that can be tapped forever. And as long as we don't mind being treated like cattle, then we'll continue to be milked like cattle.
All throughout the 1980s the gutter press harped on about Ronald Reagan's Greed Decade and gloated when jewish stockjobbers Michael Milken and Ivan Boesky were dragged through the legal system. But there was never a peep when government charged more for its services and built expensive new office buildings. And more recently when assessments fell during the recent housing market correction, there was virtually no talk about cutting teachers' salaries or unnecessary staff -- only about the need to squeeze the cattle for more money.