Friday, February 07, 2014

Envy trumps prosperity.

We are a social species who benchmark against each other.  Is it any surprise that politicians would use our Green Eyed Monster to one eye snake us out of our money and freedoms?

Shakespeare's Othello is alive and well in Everyman. Whether it's resentment of rich Philistines or  supercilious bien pensants we all have him clinging to our back. The problem is that every time we take counsel of our envy we end up empowering the oppressive central state. And power is far, far, more unequally distributed than money.  Yet we further concentrate power in a vain attempt to 'get' the rich who short of murder,  can't be "got".

And of course concentrated power is readily convertible into great wealth.  Just ask the Clintons.  Or Putins. Or Blairs. Or Mugabes. Or the Hu Jintaos.  Or any of their tens of thousands of functionaries. Different 'traditions' regulate the 'conversion' in different cultures but the basic process hasn't changed since the first warlord galloped off the Steppes: I can help you or hurt you, the choice is yours. And if you pay I can be rich....and I'll let you live.

Democracy was supposed to change all that but it simply changed who got to play warlord: the rhetorically violent and procedurally adept replaced the physically violent and militarily adept.

Or as my doctor is wont to say:  "from below all the assholes look the same".

Matt Ridley at the link.

http://www.rationaloptimist.com/blog/do-people-mind-more-about-inequality-than-poverty.aspx

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