Philosophically, it is clear that Barack Obama and those who think like him, most of them too ignorant or too disingenuous to identify their socialist roots, feel that the government should do for those who have the least - as identified by their income. There are a number of problems I have with this I'd like to bring forth.
I'm Not Going To Disneyland
As EC has just argued, the necessary inefficiency of transferring tax credits from the wealthy to the masses can be a reasonable response by the government to the treason of greed of rich elites. As the first point, I'd like to bring up the old story of how money changes people, or not. Now clearly Obama's tax plan is a great deal more dramatic to the average rich guy than to the average guy. There's a lot that can be done with 100k and not much that can be done with 1k. If I'm at the top I'm likely to pay 100k more in Obama tax and the guy at the bottom will get 1k for free. But let's imagine it were the big giveaway like the email that goes around - if we took the 700B from the Paulson plan and distributed it in 500k chunks to every household in America. What would change then?
How many bankers, doctors, attorneys and scientists do you think would quit their jobs and go to Disneyland? How many postmen, cops, telephone technicians? How many social workers, physical therapists, dieticians and paralegals? How many cashiers, cabbies, bus drivers, doormen? How many movers, gardeners, trashmen and janitors?
I Want My Five Percent
In Andrew Hacker's book Money, he says that the happiest people are people who get their five percent. That according to his survey, the desires of most people are about five percent out of reach and that if they could have what they really wanted, few people ask for more than 20%. It's only after they have gotten their five percent more can they see their way to wanting more. This is very much like the reverse of the boiling frog effect on aspirations. People are very sensitive to what they get and to what they lose. After a while they adjust. Note that this observation is strongly related to the first one.
Coupons and Buses
Yesterday I spent the afternoon with my two daughters and we went driving around the city in my large luxury sedan. Somewhere on Fairfax we noticed some people running for the bus and then again on 3rd Street people were lined up on the curb peering anxiously into traffic and then at their watches waiting for the next bus. I mentioned how much I hated taking the bus when I was young. I began when I was in the 7th grade. My daughters have never taken the bus regularly. But even when I was too poor and/or young to own a car, I never clipped coupons and my mother rarely did, although we did save trading stamps.
I've always thought of the ability to tough it out because of having less money as a virtue. But isn't it more merely a necessity? It's not that you aren't smart enough to learn how to cook Bernaise sauce, it's that you can't afford the ingredients and the cookware. So Bernaise is not important to you - you eat chicken noodle soup. It's not that you can't appreciate the smooth ride of a Cadillac, but that you must take the bus. It's not that you see the value of wearing cheap clothing, buying cheap groceries, living in a cheap neighborhood, it is that you're smart enough to know that you must.
Questions
So if you are a man of modest means, does living within your means make you more moral than the affluent man who lives within his means? What does that say about one's ambitions to make more money?
Don't deprivations make one stronger? Don't luxuries make one weaker? Does frugality born of necessity make one moral? What about voluntary frugality, is that a virtue? Is the poor man less justified in stealing or more justified? Is charity from a poor man more precious than charity from a rich man?
Should any of this be relative, or must it all be absolute?
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