YES, FIGHT BACK AGAINST THE RICH

By Donald Kaul

I hate to say I told you so but I told you so. You could look it up.

For years, decades even, I have been railing against the lifestyles of the rich and famous, questioning the utility of their outrageous salaries and bonuses.

I mocked them for their multiple mansions, their submarine-included yachts, their private jetliners, their jewel-drenched parties.

They were not worth the money they were making, I said. While some of them were accomplished corporate executives, too many were greedy clowns who got lucky.

I argued that justice demanded at the very least that they pay considerably higher income taxes and perhaps a significant estate tax too. (Give me the choice between being taxed when I’m alive or when I’m dead and I’ll take dead every time.) What I was asking for was merely a few crumbs off the tables of the rich so that poor people could afford operations for their crippled children. (Eat your heart out, Charles Dickens.)

And what did I get for my troubles? Scorn. Vilification. Vicious personal attacks.

I was called a socialist, a communist even. I was accused of engaging in class warfare and told I was merely jealous of my betters, people smarter, more accomplished and more industrious than I.

Let me say this about that:

I am not jealous of the rich and their three or four or five mansions. That’s way too many roofs to worry about. I figure if you’re lucky, you have one nice home and when you go on vacation, you rent a room. That’s what hotels are for.

As for being jealous of their intellect, it is to snicker. Many of them owe their success to being born rich. When a truly original idea crosses their path, they recoil from it like a vampire before a cross. Many of the others are accomplished chiefly in their ability to fleece the public, bribe politicians, and plead for mercy when the bills come due. What’s to be jealous of?

As for class war, well, it’s a dirty job but someone’s got to do it. The rich of this country have been waging class war against the unrich for the past 25 years without meaningful opposition, having sold the American public on the fantasy that we’re all going to be rich someday. It’s time we fought back.

(This just in: You’re not going to be rich any time soon. Get used to it.)

Another argument against encouraging people to make mountains of money while the multitudes make do with thimblefuls (and this is one that should appeal to the religious do-gooders among you) is that it is bad for their souls. Great wealth is a temptation to criminality.

Most people are honest. Neither you nor I would think of going into a department store and shoplift. If the clerk gives us too much change, we give it back.

But suppose you walked into a store in which there were bags of $100 bills on the shelves. And there were no clerks, no security guards. And everyone else seemed to be taking bags off the shelves and walking out with them.

How honest would you be then? Wouldn’t you convince yourself that you deserved a bag of cash or two, that no one would miss it and that if you didn’t take it someone else would? More than likely.

Well, that’s pretty much the position of our corporate executives, poor things. We’ve given them a license to steal and they have used it, rationalizing all the while that they deserve the loot.

In reality, they know they don’t. Some few of have given up their bonuses in response to the abysmal performance of their companies but for the most part, they’ve taken their bonuses, their golden parachutes, their golden handshakes and run like bandits.

Because they can. There are no security guards at the door. Ronald Reagan’s welfare queen was a Salvation Army worker compared to this bunch.

To the barricades!

This column is distributed by Minuteman Media