By Don Watkins
Thursday, April 14, 2016
In the wake of the endless controversies surrounding
Donald Trump’s campaign, it’s easy to forget that most of us rightfully pride
ourselves on our opposition to racism, sexism, anti-Semitism, and other forms
of unjust discrimination. But we rarely even discuss another prevalent form of
prejudice: the demonization and dehumanization of the successful. This
prejudice is central to today’s chief economic concern: the campaign against
economic inequality.
Not everyone worried about our economic challenges is
bigoted, of course. There are real problems we all should be concerned about,
whether it’s declining opportunity (especially for those starting at the
bottom), slowing economic progress, the pitiful state of education, or the
political favors bestowed on some businesses.
In our new book on inequality, “Equal Is Unfair:
America’s Misguided Fight Against Income Inequality,” my co-author Yaron Brook
and I address those problems and many others. But whatever one’s view of our
challenges, nothing can justify the way many—including presidential hopeful
Bernie Sanders—are treating those who have achieved economic success.
The Double
Standards for Rich People
Consider just a few of the behaviors that inequality
critics apparently consider acceptable when dealing with wealthy Americans.
Collective
Judgments. Virtually everyone agrees we should judge people by their
actions and the content of their character, not by the (real or manufactured)
sins or shortcomings of other members of whatever group they happen to belong
to.
Regarding businessmen, for example, we should condemn
those who lie, cheat, and steal. But we should condemn them as individuals for their dishonest and
predatory actions. By the same token, we should praise individuals who earn their wealth through ingenuity and
effort—not make them pay for other people’s sins.
Yet what we hear from today’s inequality critics is
across-the-board denunciations of successful businessmen. Sanders contends “the
business model of Wall Street”—which employees hundreds of thousands of productive
Americans—“is fraud.” A headline for a Sean McElwee article in Salon tells us
“Rich white people are ruining the planet.” Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett
write in their popular book “The Spirit Level” that “Rather than adopting an
attitude of gratitude toward the rich, we need to recognize what a damaging
effect they have on the social fabric.” Replace “the rich” with “Hispanics” or
“women” or “Jews” in that sentence, and ask yourself: isn’t this precisely the
sort of prejudice we object to when it is targeted at other groups?
Dehumanization.
Prejudice encourages dehumanization—it encourages demonizing “the other” so
they are seen as less than human and therefore unworthy of respect. This is
precisely what inequality critics are trying to do to “the 1 percent.”
To take just one example, Nobel Prize-winning economist
Paul Krugman has claimed that rich Americans are “less likely to exhibit
empathy, less likely to respect norms and even laws, more likely to cheat, than
those occupying lower rungs on the economic ladder”—they are, in short,
“spoiled egomaniacs.” Well, if so, what concern should we have for their rights
and their dignity?
The Wealthy Are
People, Too
A common myth is that you cannot be a victim of injustice
unless you are powerless or disadvantaged, or that an injustice is okay if it’s
aimed at someone who isn’t powerless or disadvantaged. But those are nothing
more than crude rationalizations for injustice.
We need to ask ourselves: Do we really think of rich
individuals as human beings? Or do we view them as cartoon
villains—one-dimensional stereotypes not dissimilar to the caricatures
propagated by racists, misogynists, and Jew-haters?
When I discuss unfair treatment of successful
businessmen, I almost always hear comments like, “Oh, boohoo. What do the rich
have to complain about? Look at everything they have!” This reflects a crass
materialism, which amounts to the notion that money solves everything, and that
no one can be hurt by or object to mistreatment unless he’s poor.
But have we ever stopped to ask ourselves: What if a rich
individual’s dreams mean as much to him as my dreams do to me? What if he wants
to be respected for his achievements the way I want to be respected for mine?
What if he has made himself into a moral human being—doesn’t he deserve respect and admiration, and
isn’t it an indictment of our society when good people are treated like
villains?
A Cynical
Justification for Government-Sponsored Injustice
Exploitation.
When prejudice gets injected into the political system, it leads to the
government inflicting tremendous injustices on the victims.
More and more, our political system treats economically
successful Americans as resources for
“society’s” desires rather than as sovereign individuals with an inalienable
right to their own pursuit of happiness. Witness, for example, the plans
Democratic candidates have for this country. Free health care—paid for by “the
rich.” Free college—paid for by “the rich.” Larger Social Security
payments—paid for by “the rich.”
Of course, these demands are supported by the claim that
“the rich” aren’t paying their “fair share.” Set aside the fact that affluent
Americans bear the vast, vast majority of the tax burden. Do we ever so much
as ask: Did they honestly earn their money? Did they gain it by dealing
voluntarily with other people, through an incalculable number of win-win
trades? Don’t they have a right to use their wealth to pursue their own hopes
and dreams—the same way we each have the right to use our wealth to pursue our
hopes and dreams?
No, we don’t ask those questions. Preventing us from
asking those questions is the goal of the demonization and dehumanization of
“the rich.” Whether it’s President Obama dismissing individual achievement when
he declares “you didn’t build that,” or Sanders claiming it is immoral for some
people to prosper while others are struggling, or Barbara Ehrenreich arguing
that “To the extent that any demonization is going on, one can’t help thinking
that the rich have been, perhaps inadvertently, asking for it”—all of it is
aimed at erasing the knowledge that economically successful individuals are
human beings and that exploiting other human beings is wrong.
Stripping the
Rewards of Virtue
This is prejudice, plain and simple. What’s worse, it is
not directed toward traits that have no bearing on a person’s character, it is
directed at something that is in fact a moral achievement.
Business success—that is, making a profit through productive
achievement, not special favors from Washington—is something that deserves our
respect and admiration. As we argue in “Equal Is Unfair,” this kind of success
is enormously difficult, and it is
profoundly virtuous.
We live in an advanced technological society, and enjoy a
level of wealth, health, comfort, and opportunity that our ancestors could not
have dreamed of. What made it possible? The effort of producers, on every level of ability, but with the most credit
going to the men and women of extraordinary ability: the inventors,
entrepreneurs, and investors who drive progress—and earn a fortune in the
process.
It’s time we stopped saying “screw you” and started
saying “thank you.”
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