I talk a lot about class warfare on this blog and would like to expound on that subject.
I have a family member who’s a doctor with a healthy six figure plus salary. He does not consider himself “rich”. Yet he travels worldwide, eats out whenever he feels like it, and pretty much does what ever he feels like doing.
Of course everything is relative and this could quickly devolve into a semantic discussion of exactly how much money does one need to be considered “rich”. Well, in a dialogue on this subject I informed my cousin that he was in fact “rich”.
No, no he self-assuredly told me, you need to be making $200,000 per year to be considered rich.
Where did the 200k number come from? Well, of course he read it in the Boston Globe.
Socialists studied the income charts and came up with that round number as the “rich” threshold. If you remember, a recent Presidential candidate said that he was opposed to income tax cuts for those making over 200k.
So that cutoff has apparently become an arbitrary talking point. One has to admit, we live in a great country if six-figure earning doctors aren’t considered rich and the poor and homeless are obese.
Why do people who are well off feel otherwise?
Part of it this pervasive sense of entitlement (blame the Baby Boomers and Big Government). How often have you heard anyone say,
“You know what, I am overpaid….I am lucky to have this job...”?
Never, right? Me neither.
Probably nine out of ten people earnestly feel the complete opposite...that they are overworked, underpaid, and underappreciated. Of course if they truly were “underpaid”, they’d likely have left for a job that met their “deserved” income demands. Anyone who spurns better available jobs to stay put in their “underpaid” one is an Automatic Moron who likely deserves underpayment.
Besides the fashionable entitlement mentality, class envy also drives many people to underestimate their true economic standing. If my cousin really thought he was rich, he would have a hard time blaming the rich for his gripes, both personal and global. A not so insignificant number of people really do need scapegoats, bogeymen, and punching bags to vet their frustrations on. I firmly believe that Red Sox are a therapeutic punching bag for millions of bitter New Englanders.
Devil’s Advocate: Isn’t this inability to see himself as rich just pure ignorance?
Yes, it is. But the class envy angle is important in that it’s the weak-minded substitute for knowledge. Class warfare is nothing more than LCD Propaganda (lowest common denominator) artfully constructed to stoke the flames of jealousy, inadequacy, and ignorance. My cousin was simply regurgitating propaganda with his 200k cutoff number. I told him such but there is nary a chance that he even processed what I said.
Sometimes the rigidity of the nuanced crowd can be mind boggling. They seemingly paint every issue under the sun a deep grey, yet when it comes to economics,
1) $5.15 per hour is an inhumane wage,
2) The entire workforce can be dichotomized into the proletariat and capitalist pigs,
3) A $200,000 salary arbitrarily makes someone rich.
Essentially, class warfare provides the foundation of socialism and an opiate for complainers, but it also serves as an instrument of misdirection.
You’d think with all the taxpayers’ money the government wastes, Big Media would occasionally do some stories on it. But they never do. Remember, the stories they don’t report are in fact more telling than what they print. They hide the inefficiency of the government like it's the secret recipe of Coca-Cola.
If they ever shed some sunlight on government profligacy, people might get pissed about taxation levels. Instead, they intentionally ignore the subject, so they can get their readers focused instead on who is actually paying more (which they lie about as well). But they have made the calculation that it’s easier to conduct class warfare this way. Many socialists know that lower tax rates have always increased tax revenue AND increased the proportion paid by the "rich", but this reality retards class warfare arguments. Like I said, it's pure calculated misdirection to gain 51% of the vote.
Big Media types incessantly claim that they have to stand up to powerful interests and that justifies their Perma-Negative bias. But why won’t they check Big Government spending?
(They don't exactly stand up to "powerful interests" like dictators or terrorist either now, do they?)
If I ran a news organization, I would have articles on government waste almost every single day.
Consequently, most people just accept government waste as a fact of life and that is just what the socialists want. In fact, a Big Government apologist recently told me that 50% efficiency is what government programs should strive for. I am not even going to guess what “50% efficiency” is supposed to mean, but I do remember that 50% is a failing grade, even at government schools.
The people that confiscate your money through taxation don’t want any accountability and Big Media aids and abets by whitewashing the waste.
Speaking of socialists. Here in the land of Enviro-Commi Groupthink, also known as Boston, Globe columnist Dan Shaughnessy recently penned this gem about the World Baseball Championship game,
You can have the rest of the world. I'm going with the communists.
I'm rooting for the guys who put team above self. I'm rooting for the guys who make $20 a month to play baseball and cling to a free sweat suit like it's gold, guys who play the game the way it's supposed to be played.
I'm rooting for Fidel Castro's team tonight in the World Baseball Classic championship game featuring Cuba vs. Japan.
Except for Ichiro Suzuki of Japan, all of the major league millionaires have gone back to their teams in Florida and Arizona.
That is right, he is rooting for the Commi’s!!!!!!!!!!
Wow, I am shocked. A Boston Globe writer finally admitted his belief system. Of course he does it under a veneer of sarcasm. But make no mistake about it, old men in New England blame money for the supposed decay in sports. As Commi-Shaughnessy points out, all of the depraved “millionaires” have lost and gone home.
Is there ever a context where one can morally say “I am rooting for the communists”?
What if al Qaeda had a good baseball team that hit-and-ran and hustled to first base, would he then root for the terrorists? How about the Nazi’s?
What is it something like 50 million people have been murdered or starved to death under communism?
Does Dan really want the Cubans to win and provide a talking point for communists worldwide?
The sad thing is, this article will resonate with a huge chunk of New England. First of all, despite being the most “educated” state in the nation, people up here don’t know the history of communism. Second, as I stated earlier, sports is a therapeutic punching bag up here that often cloaks ignorance as sports fanaticism.
My grandparents inveigh against how much the Red Sox players make almost on a daily basis, yet they haven't missed so much as a pitch in the last forty years. It is sheer econo-illiteracy to complain about how much the players earn while not understanding how you contribute to their wealth.
Economic illiteracy really explains so much stupidity there should be a whole field of psychology devoted to it.
It is amazing how the old, "rich" people of Boston cling to bankrupt ideas by sheer dint of inertia and newspaper propaganda.
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