Tuesday, September 20, 2005

Having = Deserving or How to Sleep at Night if You're Really Rich

I'm reading "Flat Broke With Children" by Sharon Hays. It strikes me that when we say "everyone should work," we don't mean people with trust funds or stay at home Moms (with husbands to support them). If you're a woman without a man, you should work. If you're poor, you should work.

The ethics of drug use is more of the same. Drug offenders should rot in prison but frat boys shouldn't.

And of course there's stealing. Stealing from the government is apparently OK when a Bush crony does it, but it's completely immoral when a poor person does it.

It must be nice to be a rich person. Not only do you get to wallow around in piles of money, but you can wallow guilt free. By virtue of belonging to the golden class, your good morals are beyond question.

According to Hays, in 2002, the top 1 percent of American households earned on average over a million dollars. The bottom 10 percent earned less than 10,000 dollars. If everyone earning more than a million were taxed an additional 100,000, the average income of the desperately poor could be doubled. But that would be income redistribution which is deeply wrong because people who have money deserve to have their money. They are, in fact, the deserving rich. People who don't have money...well...the fact that they don't have any shows that they are not so deserving.

1 comment:

Motel Noir said...

You forget that per the Protestant
work ethic and the doctrine of predestination, worldly wealth is the best indicia of salvation. If you accept that premise poor people are hosed anyway so who cares.