Dressing up envy: AOC's economics is 400 years out of date

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Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Aurora James attend The 2021 Met Gala Celebrating In America: A Lexicon Of Fashion at Metropolitan Museum of Art on September 13, 2021 in New York City. | Getty Images/Mike Coppola

Conservatives laughed at celebrity representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-New York, attending the Met Gala recently. Tickets were reported to cost $35,000 each. But the representative didn’t pay for her ticket; she was a guest and she borrowed her dress. She said she attended in order to send a message to the country’s wealthiest people. 

Voters, and the owner of the dress, should be concerned about the message she painted in scarlet letters on the white gown, “Tax the Rich.” Socialists like AOC are about 400 years behind the times in their view of the rich. They see the rich as having hoards of gold in a bank or secure room in one of their mansions that they amassed by cheating others who are poorer as a result. 

AOC’s understanding of the rich was accurate from prehistory until the advent of capitalism in the 17th century. Through most of history, the “honorable” ways to get wealth if you didn’t inherit it was through plunder in war, kidnapping for ransom and doing favors for the king, who would steal the land of an enemy and give it to you. Or the king might give you a monopoly on trade in some commodity like silk so that you could charge exorbitant prices. 

Often, the nobility would steal the wealth of common people by bribing judges to find the owners guilty of false charges. The commoner would be executed, and the “noble” person would get the wealth, usually land. Old Testament prophets complained about that practice in ancient Israel, and Jerry Bowyer demonstrates in his book The Maker Versus the Takers: What Jesus Really Said About Social Justice and Economicsthat most of the wealthy in Judah had gained their wealth by immoral means.

Few grew wealthy through commerce. Pagan philosophers such as Aristotle considered commerce to be morally lower than prostitution. Theologians baptized that pagan philosophy rather than dig out of the Bible a doctrine of economics and commerce. That’s why Christian Europe refused to allow Jews to work in government or serve in the military and consigned them to commerce and banking, the most despised professions. When Jews would become wealthy, Christians would fabricate charges against them as an excuse to steal it. 

Nothing changed until the Godly theologians at the University of Salamanca, Spain, distilled the principles of capitalism from the Bible and the Dutch Republic implemented them. The Dutch outlawed the traditional ways of gaining wealth and prevented the nobility from stealing. They left hated commerce as the only path to wealth. 

So, AOC is wrong. Most wealthy people for the past four centuries have earned it through commerce by serving the people better than their competitors. Rarely do they keep much of their wealth in gold. Most of it is tied up in their businesses. However, a few have grown wealthy by bribing politicians to legislate favors for them as they did before capitalism. 

The mostly likely cause of AOC’s and the left’s hatred of the rich is pure envy. The left loves to toss around accusations of greed, but they never mention envy, except as a joke, “I envy your new Lexus!” But as Helmut Schoeck showed in his classic book Envy: A Theory of Social Behavior, envy used to be considered the worst of the seven deadly sins because of its destructive power. 

An old European story depicts envy well. An angel visited a peasant and offered to grant him a wish. The peasant thought a minute and said, “Well, my neighbor has a milk cow and I don’t.” The angel said, “So, you want me to give you a cow?” “Heavens, no!” cried the peasant. “I want you to kill my neighbor’s cow.” The peasant didn’t want others to envy him for having a cow in the same way he envied his neighbor. 

Here’s another: An angel offered to grant one wish to a peasant, who imagines the treasures he should request. But the angel explained that whatever the peasant received, his neighbor would receive double. The peasant says, “Ok, then I want you to poke out one of my eyes.”

Those stories show the destructive nature of envy. The envious person doesn’t want to improve his position in life; he wants to bring someone else down to his level. The popular French economist Thomas Piketty, who is Professor of Economics at the School for Advanced Studies in the Social Sciences, in his book Capital in the 21st Century said as much when he admitted that his proposal for an 80% tax on wealth would bring in little revenue to the government, but it would impoverish the wealthy.

Socialists have canceled envy, but Christians should resurrect it because the Bible condemns the sin of envy. Matthew 6:22-23 is an important passage. The New International Versions translates it as

“The eye is the lamp of the body. If your eyes are good, your whole body will be full of light. But if your eyes are bad, your whole body will be full of darkness. If then the light within you is darkness, how great is that darkness!”

Matthew 6:22-23

However, a literal translation would read “…if your eye is evil…” This is a rendering of the ancient fear of the evil eye that is common outside of the West and through history. In the West we tend to call it “green eyed.” An evil eye is envy. Other verses that translate evil eye as envy are Matthew 20:15 and Luke 11:34.

According to Schoeck, envy kept people starvation-poor from prehistory until the advent of capitalism, when Christianity tamed envy enough to allow for innovation and economic development, but only in the West until the 20th century. Then, Christians in the West abandoned Christ and envy burst from its tomb. It stalks the world like a zombie disguised as socialism. Envy is the power behind socialism.

Unfortunately, a minority of evangelicals have had their brains eaten by the envy zombie and so promote socialism. The only defense is the power of Christ to suppress envy so that we love our neighbors, including the rich, as ourselves.

Socialists’ Attack On “Greed” Is Really Concealed Envy

Source: AP Photo/Carolyn Kaster

Gordon Gekko in the motion picture Wall Street regurgitated what socialists have been saying for a century: capitalism is based on greed. Here is part of his monologue:

The point is, ladies and gentleman, that greed -- for lack of a better word -- is good. Greed is right. Greed works. Greed clarifies, cuts through, and captures the essence of the evolutionary spirit.

Greed, in all of its forms -- greed for life, for money, for love, knowledge -- has marked the upward surge of mankind. And greed -- you mark my words -- will not only save Teldar Paper, but that other malfunctioning corporation called the USA.

As I wrote recently, the definitions of greed are confusing. Even the poorest in Western countries are guilty of egregious greed if we adhere to dictionary definitions. The writers who put those words in Gekko’s mouth appear to agree. But if greed is to remain an evil, should we call the self interest that Adam Smith identified as the motive of business people? Is loving one’s family and wanting them to live more comfortably greed? Is trying to produce a better mouse trap greed? Is striving to have enough to give to charities or churches greed?

Socialists see only two evils in the world today: white people and greed. If they could get rid of both, the U.S. would finally be exceptional and a city set on a hill that conservatives claim it is. But what happened to envy? According to Helmut Schoeck in Envy: A Theory of Social Behavior, envy was considered the most terrifying of the seven deadly sins through history. He uses Chaucer’s “The Parson’s Tale” in the Canterbury Tales as an example: (finish at Townhall Finance)

“Fairness” vs. Realistic Economics

Source: AP Photo/Stephen Brashear

Last week I wrote about how John Rawls built his definition of justice on envy. This week I want to focus on the economic weaknesses in A Theory of Justice and Justice as Fairness: A Restatement. Clearly, I don’t have the intellect or stature to challenge someone of Rawls’ reputation. But don’t worry. I don’t try. I have nothing to say that I didn’t get from people with the reputations and status to challenge Rawls, such as Helmut Schoeck, Ludwig von Mises, and Friedrich Hayek.

Rawls’ books are beautiful philosophy. He reasons well and if you accept his assumptions, his conclusions follow naturally. He’s not as good as the people mentioned above at expressing himself, but he’s not too difficult to understand.

Rawls’ ideal society is similar to the one the great German economist Wilhelm Roepke promoted in his book A Humane Economy: The Social Framework of the Free Market. Like Rawls, Roepke wanted to limit large corporations in favor of small to medium sized businesses with more people being self-employed. Roepke thought self-employment offered a healthier lifestyle than working at a corporation, but he didn’t offer a plan to achieve his goal other than to look at taxation. Rawls wanted to redistribute wealth from the successful to the poor in order to provide them with the education and capital to own their businesses with the goal of limiting the influence in politics of wealth.

However, one of the biggest problems in the developing world is that most businesses are small to medium size, for different reasons that what Rawls gives, but we can see the effect. Productivity remains stagnant so standards of living can never improve. The state owns the few large corporations, which suffer all of the problems of state ownership, as China demonstrates daily. State owned corporations lose money and need to be subsidized by tax revenue. Amtrak and the US Post Office offer other examples.

Some corporations need to be large. It would be difficult for a mom-and-pop shop to build airliners, cars, electrical generators, locomotives or many other things. Who decides which ones are large and how large they can be? Rawls would leave it to the state to decide, meaning he thinks bureaucrats will do a better job than the market, which has never been true. Politicians and bureaucrats aren’t angels or smart. They suffer from the same sins as common folk and are easily corrupted, as Nobel laureate James Buchannan demonstrated with Public Choice theory.

Rawls’ theory suffers from a lack of realism much like that of mainstream economics. He assumes that people are perfectly rational instead of acting like real people who are irrational and infected with many evils. Like most socialists, he assumes that people are born innocent and if raised and educated in his artificial society they will remain so. He suffers from Hayek’s Fatal Conceit, the idea that we can ignore human nature, history and tradition and, using pure reason, recreate morality and social organization in our own image, foresee all of the consequences, and perfect humanity.


For example, Rawls wrote, “Under these conditions we hope that an underclass will not exist; or, if there is a small such class, that it is the result of social conditions we do not know how to change, or perhaps cannot even identify or understand. When society faces this impasse, it has at least taken seriously the idea of itself as a fair system of cooperation between its citizens as free and equal.”

We know from history that Rawls’ scheme will result in a large underclass. His plan is not so different from previous attempts at socialism that we can’t project what will happen. Envy and the fear of it will cause political representatives to punish success. That will reduce investment and wealth creation. Everyone will grow poorer. As Piketty wrote in his book, Capital, a tax of 80% on wealth will not bring in significant revenue to redistribute.

But Rawls assures us that we can congratulate each other for having the moral superiority to implement his system, just as poor socialist countries today, especially Europeans, pat each other on the back for their moral superiority to the greedy and wealthier US. All envious people do the same.


Rawls excludes by definition envy and the will to dominate from his political representatives, but in the real world those human passions will erupt in his system. Those with the will to dominate will command most positions in government and use its power to benefit their businesses and those of allies by manipulating the envy, and fear of envy, in others, just as they do today. Of course, they do it all in the name of public health and safety. Rawls seems to be unaware of Public Choice or Baptists and Bootleggers theories that show how corporations grow large by using the power of the state to regulate smaller competitors out of business and create oligopolies. Any time we give the state as much power over the economy as Rawls demands, politicians sell that power to the highest bidders among wealthy businessmen.


Rawls was ignorant of sound monetary theory and Cantillon effects as well, which is a shame because of his fixation on limiting inequality. One of the most powerful generators of inequality is the Federal Reserve, a quasi-governmental organization. The Fed manipulates the economy by creating money out of thin air. It has the legal monopoly to counterfeit money. Creating new money causes price inflation so those who receive the new money first can buy goods and assets before prices rise while those who get the money last, the poor, must pay for goods and assets at higher prices and therefore grow poorer. This process works on the international level, too, to keep poor nations in poverty.

Of course, the Fed does all of that for the public good, stability and job creation. Few PhD economists, let alone the voting public are aware of the problems it causes. This example alone shows Rawls’ naivete at giving the state so much power over the economy.

Rawls’ conception of fairness comes from what Hayek calls family justice. In a family, good parents produce wealth and distribute it to children equally. Children are quick to complain about unfairness when they think a sibling has received more of what the parents doll out. Healthy families need strict equality, but what happens when we try to scale those values to a nation of strangers? They destroy society because members take advantage of the system, as all socialist nations have proven.

In a Biblical society, the state doesn’t play the role of parent and distribute wealth equally. People get the value of what they labored to produce based on how consumers value the product. The producer must serve his fellow man or he earns little from his labor. One who doesn’t get to keep the value of his labor is a slave. While necessary for society, this type of fairness would destroy families.

In Part IV of Justice as Fairness, Rawls compares his ideal society with capitalism, the welfare state, and communism. The casual reader might not notice the sleight of hand Rawls employs when he compares his imaginary construction with historical ones. Socialists frequently use that tactic and reality always suffers in the comparison to fantasy.

Rawls’ utopia is beautiful philosophy. But he assumes that good people will always hold power so that the government could achieve the maximum good. In the same way that mainstream economics sees market failures littering the landscape and looks to the state to correct them, Rawls portrays a democratic state as having the omniscience, omnipotence, and omnipresence (attributes of God) to solve all problems. Capitalism and the US Constitution aim at opposite goals. They assume that evil people will hold power occasionally and are designed so that evil can do the least damage possible.

The Biblical definition of justice, which excludes envy, has many features to recommend it. For one, it’s based on real people and protects us from those who tend to have the evil impulses that Rawls excludes, such as envy and the lust to dominate others.

At the end of his book, Rawls tries to demonstrate that his scheme is not utopian. He argues that once implemented people would get used to it and it would become the normal way of living and thinking. He merely needed to refer to Schoeck’s book to notice how unrealistic he is. Schoeck shows how societies from the primitive to the modern were organized around envy as evidenced by the desire for equality. Most societies weren’t technically democratic, but tribal societies operated on consensus. The more equality they created, the hotter envy burns.

Boiled down, Rawls’ utopia is hardly different from Fabian socialism, communitarianism, or the welfare state. He goes to greater lengths to establish the moral superiority of his system by redefining terms in his favor. He tells us that it differs from the welfare state only in the motivations for helping the poor – it’s justice as he defines it and not pity.

But it’s not morally superior to the Biblical system of private property with voluntary charity for the poor, the system that made Western civilization great.

First published at Townhall Finance. 

Socialists Redefine Envy As Justice

Source: AP Photo/Jacquelyn Martin

Socialists claim they just want justice. That casts capitalists as opponents of justice. But capitalist have always insisted they value justice as much as socialists. Both can’t be right. What’s going on? How can both honestly be in favor of justice?

Untangling the knot is simple: each side operates from different definitions of justice. Capitalists derive their ideas of justice from the Bible: people have rights to life, liberty and property; those who violate the rights of another are evil doers (Romans 13) and should be punished. Christian notions of justice built Western civilization.

Why not free universal health care?

Reading responses to an article on the Christianity Today web site I came across a lady who asked, "Why not free universal healthcare?" Her question reminded me of children who ask simple questions such as "Why is the sun hot?" If you give them the physics of how the sun works, they don't understand it. So I tell them God made it hot to keep us warm. Of course, then they ask, "Why?"

I gave the woman a brief response from economics and she responded that her Canadian friends were happy with their system so there was no reason for the US not to have something similar. Of course, if we limit our knowledge to just what the woman's friends in Canada say about their system then without a doubt we should rush to the ballot box and vote for the most socialist Democrat candidates we can find. The problem with her logic is that she assumes her personal experience and those of her Canadian friends are all she needs to solve the problem of healthcare.

Envy caused the Kavanaugh Kerfuffle

A Slavic folktale has an angel approach a peasant with an offer to reward him for some good deed. The angel asks the peasant what he would like. The peasant thinks aloud, “Well, my neighbor has a goat.” The angel interrupts, “So you want a goat like your neighbors?” “Heavens no!” answers the peasant. “I want you to kill my neighbor’s goat!”

Helmut Schoeck offers the tale as a distilled description of envy in his classic Envy: A Theory of Social Behavior. At the core, envy is resentful of the success of others and R.J. Snell, a contributing editor of Public Discourse, blames it for the Kavanaugh soap opera and similar dramas in US society. That may seem like a Grand Canyon leap in logic, but follow his argument for a moment. He includes a quote from Tocqueville:

The desire of equality always becomes more insatiable in proportion as equality is more complete... It perpetually retires from before [men], yet without hiding itself from their sight, and in retiring draws them on... To these causes must be attributed that strange melancholy which often haunts the inhabitants of democratic countries in the midst of their abundance, and that disgust at life which sometimes seizes upon them in the midst of calm and easy circumstances.

Millennials are socialists for a reason part 2

Last week I wrote about the power of family values and envy to direct the political philosophies of young people and how that has become apparent in the tilt of millennials towards socialism. There is another reason why millennials are more socialist, although it may be a rationalization for it than a cause. That is the socialist propaganda that asserts the US and UK are free market economies.

An article at project-syndicate.org, “The Case Against Free-Market Capitalism” by Ngaire Woods, perpetuates the myth:

Free-market capitalism is on trial. In the United Kingdom, Labour Party leader Jeremy Corbyn accuses neoliberalism of increasing homelessness, throwing children into poverty, and causing wages to fall below subsistence level....

Just a quarter-century ago, the debate about economic systems – state-managed socialism or liberal democracy and capitalism – seemed to have been settled. With the Soviet Union’s collapse, the case was closed – or so it seemed.

Since then, the rise of China has belied the view that a state-led strategy will always fail, and the global financial crisis exposed the perils of inadequately regulated markets.” Woods calls the US “the paragon of free-market democracy.

Young people are socialist for a reason

Young people drove Bernie Sanders' campaign and near upset of the establishment Hillary Clinton in the latest election to the surprise of many.

An old saying goes, “If you’re not a socialist when you’re young you have no heart; if you’re still a socialist when you’re older you have no brain.”

Socialism comes naturally to humanity. Hayek thought that family life was partly to blame. Good moms and dads take care of the children, provide food and security, and distribute those equally among the children. Children get very upset when they think one sibling receives more of anything than the rest or enjoys special treatment.

Then we leave the safety of the home. venture into a more public sphere in school and we carry our family morality with us. We think school should function like a larger family with the teachers and principal substituting for mom and dad and it does that the most part. Eventually we get a job, but we still view the larger society and politics through the glasses of our family morality. The political elite, especially the President, becomes the “father” of the nation who should make certain that the benefits of his regime are evenly distributed and no one gets special treatment.

Hayek points out that the danger of such thinking lies in the fact that in the family we know everyone well. Even in larger groupings, such as school or a tribe, we are still familiar with most people and know their circumstances. But a nation is so large that citizens know only a tiny portion of the population and are dealing with strangers much of the time, especially in business. Transactions with strangers who don’t have your welfare in mind as mom and dad did require different rules of engagement. Treating family members as if they were strangers would destroy families just as using family values in dealing with strangers will destroy society.

The common good isn't so great!

A lot of ink is spilled in Christian publications promoting the concept of the common good. I’m not such a big fan and here is why.

The concept of the “common good” came from pagan Greek and Roman philosophy. As Peter Brown shows in several of his books on the history of the Church after Constantine, such as Through the Eye of the Needle, churches had a habit of making bishops out of recent converts from the Roman nobility. They did so for practical reasons: those converts had good educations, political power through family connections and wealth to contribute to the church and the poor. But those converts had been educated at the feet of pagan philosophers, especially Aristotle and Cicero, and were often babes in theology. So when they became bishops they preached what they knew, pagan philosophy that seemed agreeable to Christianity. Among the more prominent concepts carried over from paganism were the veneration of virginity (imitating the Vestal Virgins) and celibacy, contempt for business and wealth, and the common good.

What did the common good mean? Benjamin Constant wrote about the “freedom” and “common good” enjoyed by ancient Greeks and Romans in his essay “The Liberty of the Ancients Compared with that of the Moderns:”

Adam Smith doesn't explain the wealth of nations

Adam Smith wrote in his Wealth of Nations,

That security which the laws of Great Britain give to every man that he shall enjoy the fruits of his own labor, is alone sufficient to make any country flourish... The natural effort of every individual is to better his own condition, when suffered to exert itself with freedom and security, is so powerful a principle, that it is alone, and without any assistance, ... capable of carrying on the society to wealth and prosperity. 

Smith missed two things that made Great Britain unique - individualism and admiration for commerce. He missed them in the same way that a fish might not think about water. Smith grasped that taxes punished farmers in France to the point that they refused to improve their plots. And he understood that rulers and nobility in the Ottoman Empire and China often confiscated the wealth of successful people and so discouraged them from investing.

Zuckerberg – Embarrassed by riches

Mark Zuckerberg, the founder of Facebook, attracted a lot of attention with his commencement speech last May at Harvard, the school he dropped out of. He started off with some good advice to the graduates:

Now it’s our turn to do great things. I know, you’re probably thinking: I don’t know how to build a dam, or get a million people involved in anything.

But let me tell you a secret: no one does when they begin. Ideas don’t come out fully formed. They only become clear as you work on them. You just have to get started.

If I had to understand everything about connecting people before I began, I never would have started Facebook.

Movies and pop culture get this all wrong. The idea of a single eureka moment is a dangerous lie. It makes us feel inadequate since we haven’t had ours. It prevents people with seeds of good ideas from getting started. Oh, you know what else movies get wrong about innovation? No one writes math formulas on glass. That’s not a thing.

Then he wanders into fantasy land. But I want readers to understand that I’m not criticizing Zuckerberg alone because he is merely regurgitating all of the nonsense that he swallowed through public education, college and the media, all of which promote unvarnished Marxism. He said,

Let’s face it. There is something wrong with our system when I can leave here and make billions of dollars in 10 years while millions of students can’t afford to pay off their loans, let alone start a business.

Look, I know a lot of entrepreneurs, and I don’t know a single person who gave up on starting a business because they might not make enough money. But I know lots of people who haven’t pursued dreams because they didn’t have a cushion to fall back on if they failed.

Even at his young age, Zuckerberg should know that there are thousands of angels investors and venture capitalists scouring the country looking for the next killer app like Facebook. No one who has an idea for anything will be short of interested listeners. What’s really lacking are 1) people willing to put in the hard work to refine their ideas and 2) good ideas. No one deserves to have someone else pay to implement their idea if it’s a lousy idea. So how do we know it’s a good idea? Someone else is willing to pay to make it a reality. Experienced angel investors and venture capitalists do the hard work of analyzing ideas and risking their wealth to see that good ideas bear fruit. 

Then Zuckerberg delivers the socialist pitch:

We all know we don’t succeed just by having a good idea or working hard. We succeed by being lucky too. If I had to support my family growing up instead of having time to code, if I didn’t know I’d be fine if Facebook didn’t work out, I wouldn’t be standing here today. If we’re honest, we all know how much luck we’ve had.

How can it be luck if he spent so much time coding? Luck is the spin of a roulette wheel. Success at it requires no skill, hard work, intelligence or good ideas. If luck, then a defensive lineman on the Harvard football team who never wrote a line of code would have as much chance at starting Facebook as Zuckerberg did. But he admits he did work a little on the project, and suffered criticisms, before he succeeded :

Ideas don’t come out fully formed. They only become clear as you work on them. You just have to get started. If I had to understand everything about connecting people before I began, I never would have started Facebook....

But be prepared to be misunderstood. Anyone working on a big vision will get called crazy, even if you end up right. Anyone working on a complex problem will get blamed for not fully understanding the challenge, even though it’s impossible to know everything upfront. Anyone taking initiative will get criticized for moving too fast, because there’s always someone who wants to slow you down.

The washing of his brain in socialist ideology through almost sixteen years of the US educational system programmed Zuckerberg to ignore reality and fixate on socialist fantasy. In spite of his insight and hard work, his entrepreneurial skills, he has been trained like Pavlov’s dog to express false humility and give credit to luck. Christians might ask why not claim it was an act of God? But that’s another essay. Socialists worship luck today. He continues:

Previous generations fought for the vote and civil rights. They had the New Deal and Great Society. Now it’s our time to define a new social contract for our generation.

We should have a society that measures progress not just by economic metrics like GDP, but by how many of us have a role we find meaningful. We should explore ideas like universal basic income to give everyone a cushion to try new things.”

And yes, giving everyone the freedom to pursue purpose isn’t free. People like me should pay for it.

Of course, he and his wife created the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative to give much of their wealth to help others and that is very admirable, but he has not done anything that most other wealthy people in the US have not done since the founding of the nation. The wealthy in the US have always been very generous to the poor. So why admire the socialist programs of the New Deal and Great Society? And why promote universal basic income? And why credit luck for his success? Because giving his money is not penance enough for his success. He will still be very rich and it embarrasses him.

Helmut Schoeck explains the psychology of wealthy people promoting socialism in his amazing book, Envy: A Theory of Social Behavior. Most people suffer incurable envy of those in their social class who succeed more than others. They resent successful people and want to see them crash and burn. Before he achieved his dream, Zuckerberg probably envied (resented) the success of others, so he knows what others are thinking of him. He seeks to deflect the resentment of others and he knows the ritual to accomplish it, having watched other wealthy people perform it often. He must put on his wool shirt and attribute his success to something other than his own work and abilities, such as luck. And he must declare the system to be unfair and call for greater “justice,” that is, wealth redistribution, by the state. These rituals performed on a regular basis pacify the resentful spirits of the media and academia.

If Zuckerberg were a Christian he would be able to handle his amazing success much more gracefully. He would find no virtue in recommending a satanic system that oppressed the people of the USSR, China, North Korea, Venezuela, Greece and many other socialist countries. He would be grateful to God, give a portion of his wealth to the poor and enjoy his wealth, knowing he deserves it.

 

As Solomon wrote, "A person can do nothing better than to eat and drink and find satisfaction in their own toil. This too, I see, is from the hand of God," Ecclesiastes 2:24.

The rich are getting richer - Baptists and bootleggers

Hillary and Bernie dusted off and hoisted aloft the old medieval standard “the rich get richer while the poor get poorer” during their primary contest. Republicans tended to respond with, “So?” During the Olympics, Hill promised to make the rich pay their fair share in her TV ads. Hill and Bernie imply that the rich have become wealthy at the expense of the rest of us, another medieval economics principle.

Attacking the wealthy always inflames envy, draws a crowd and extorts campaign contributions. That’s why politicians use it so often, as Helmut Schoeck noted in his masterpiece, Envy: A Theory of Social Behavior.

The truth is that Bernie and Hill are half right: inequality is growing. They're just wrong about the reasons. However, free marketeers do a lot of damage to the cause by ignoring the issue or denying that anything is wrong. Worse, some even defend growing inequality. 

Obama inflames envy

"I believe this is the defining challenge of our time," Obama said in a speech at an event hosted by the Center for American Progress, a pro-Obama think tank. "It drives everything I do in this office,” 

“The growing gap between rich and poor can be closed by actions ranging from an increase in the minimum wage to better education to following through on his health care plan, Obama said.”

The quote above was from an article in USA Today. If people care about the poor, they will give their own wealth and encourage others to voluntarily do the same. Focusing on inequality is more than just a legitimate concern for the poor: it’s an attempt to inflame envy, as the sociologist Helmut Schoeck explained in his book “Envy: A Theory of Social Behavior.” Schoeck demonstrated that almost all intellectuals, poets, historians and philosophers through the ages condemned envy and feared it as a persistent threat to society. Organizing society to assuage envy kept humanity poor and on the edge of starvation until Christianity tamed it in the 17^th century, which led to the industrial revolution.