Chapter 6

THE THINGS THAT KEEP
PROGRESSIVES AWAKE AT NIGHT:

The Greed and Inequality Scam

A man must first make a full confession before beginning this penance; then he must immediately start on a long period of fasting and abstinence, which must continue for forty days, during which he must forgo touching, not only all other women, but even his own wife.¹

—Don Felice to Brother Puccio, in Boccaccio, Decameron

Giovanni Boccaccio was a medieval master of scams, and he outlined many of these in story form in his great work The Decameron. I read that book many years ago, and one story stayed with me over the years. It is the one about the dapper con man Don Felice, who has lustful designs on the wife of one Brother Puccio. Through various machinations, Don Felice conveys his feelings to the woman, Mona Isabetta, and finds that they are reciprocated. The problem, however, is that Brother Puccio is always on the scene, and therefore Don Felice cannot fulfill his desires even though Mona Isabetta is receptive to his advances. So he contrives an ingenious diversion.

Knowing that Brother Puccio is “given over to spiritual things,” and has taken the trouble to join the Third Order of St. Francis, and moreover that he was a “simple ignorant fellow,” Don Felice approaches the target of his scam with disarming camaraderie. “I’ve often noticed,” he says, “that all you desire is to become a saint. Now it seems to me that you’re going a very long way round to achieve this, since there is a much shorter way.” Don Felice then says this shorter way is only known to the pope and select clergy and of course him. “Because you are my friend and have treated me so well,” he informs Brother Puccio, “I would, if I could be sure that you wanted to follow this method and would not reveal it to another soul, teach it to you.” Brother Puccio readily agrees.

Then Don Felice gives Brother Puccio an elaborate series of prayers and penances, including fasting and abstinence, all of which have to be carried out at specific intervals, and involve regular presence in church, often for hours at a time, and also several pilgrim journeys, all of these consuming a great deal of time and requiring extensive absences from his home. During all this time Brother Puccio is to stay away from all women, including his wife. Moreover, what these penances and rituals achieve is a full pardon for all previous sins, but Brother Puccio must maintain this new way of life in the future if he wants to be assured of eternal felicity.

As he is laying it on thick, Don Felice professes his reluctance to impose this regimen on Brother Puccio, but by this time Brother Puccio is so convinced that he eagerly embraces it, insisting that this is a very small price to pay to enter paradise. Don Felice even urges him to get his wife’s agreement, and Brother Puccio does—the woman quickly figuring out that a scam is afoot, one that she is quite agreeable to being a part of. In this way Don Felice and Mona Isabetta achieve the goal of their desires, attaining, Boccaccio informs us, a sensual paradise somewhat comparable to the paradise sought by the gullible Brother Puccio.²

Notice that, for the plot to succeed, Don Felice needed several key elements. First of all he needed moral credibility, because he had to convince Brother Puccio that he was a man of supreme goodness and virtue. Second, he needed to convince Brother Puccio, his gullible target, that he, Brother Puccio, was lacking in that same goodness and virtue. Consequently Brother Puccio would have to make himself, in a sense, Don Felice’s student and learn moral virtue from him. Only by following Don Felice’s counsel—his pitch—could Brother Puccio reach the higher spiritual plane that presumably Don Felice had already reached.

Another aspect of the pitch is that it involves diversion and entanglement. The pitch draws attention away from what really matters and entangles its target in a completely irrelevant issue. While the target is embroiled in sorting out this irrelevant issue, Don Felice makes his move and enacts his theft. From beginning to end, the theft works beautifully because it is perpetually bathed in an odor of sanctity and virtue.

In the previous chapter we explored a “history for profit” scam. This scam at least seemed to be based on things that actually happened and actually matter. Here we explore a more audacious progressive scam, no less audacious than the one in Boccaccio’s book. I call it “the things that keep progressives awake at night” scam. I get the title from an article by a progressive icon and fellow Indian, Amartya Sen.³ I read Sen’s article and also his book The Idea of Justice while I did my daily workout on the bike in the confinement center.

Now Sen is an academic superstar who, by Indian standards, lives a highly opulent lifestyle. Given this, I suspect there is virtually nothing that could keep him awake at night. But Sen wants us to believe that he is so worried about greed, inequality, and social injustice that he can’t sleep! In other words, Sen seeks to establish that he is a man of pure motives, of unimpeachable moral credibility. Sure, it’s a pose, but it’s a very profitable type of pose. If you disagree, I remind you that Sen has won the Nobel Prize for Economics, among other prestigious awards.

Sen’s book The Idea of Justice has been hailed as a progressive classic. He sets the tone for the book with a revealing example. Three children—Anne, Bob, and Carla—are quarreling over a flute. Carla wants to keep the flute because, well, she made the flute. Anne claims the flute on the grounds that she is the best flute player of the three. And Bob—there is always a Bob—claims the flute because he is so poor that he has never had a flute of his own.

Now, this is where things take a strange turn. “Having heard all three and their different lines of reasoning,” Sen writes, “there is a difficult decision that you have to make.” Oh, really? Most sensible people can see there is no difficult decision involved at all. Carla made the flute and it belongs to her. Carla would not have made the flute had she any reason to suspect it would be taken from her and given to someone else. It’s Carla’s flute. Case closed.

Not for Sen, who informs us that “theorists of different persuasions, such as utilitarians, or economic egalitarians, or no-nonsense libertarians” may each take a different view of the situation. “Bob, the poorest, would tend to get fairly straightforward support from the economic egalitarian.” But “Carla, the maker of the flute, would receive immediate sympathy from the libertarian.” Probably, Sen says, the utilitarian “would tend to give weight to the fact that Anne’s pleasure is likely to be stronger because she is the only one who can play the flute.”

Sen remains serenely above the fray. “The different resolutions all have serious arguments in support of them, and we may not be able to identify, without some arbitrariness, any of the alternative arguments as being the one that must invariably prevail.”⁴ Sen goes on to argue that there is a plurality of ways in which justice can be conceived, all leading to his conclusion that it’s fine to take people’s stuff as long as it’s used for acceptable purposes. Sen even invokes a Sanskrit distinction between Niti and Nyaya, the former referring to the rules of procedural justice and the latter implying some wider substantive justice that Sen seeks to embrace.

Sen’s Niti seems to be nothing other than property rights, which he wants to override, and his Nyaya is basically theft, which he is wholly in favor of. Like Don Felice, Sen begins by establishing his moral credibility. He is the Eastern yogi of wisdom and virtue, sitting on his sacred pillar. He does this by staying loftily above the fray, while everyone else is in the fray. Others have a theory, while he is the adjudicator of theories. These theories are basically diversions. Most of them have nothing to do with who owns the flute. Rather, they are related to peripheral questions such as “who would like to have a flute” and “who is good at playing the flute.” Eventually, Sen declares, “we” are the ones who decide who gets the flute.

This “we” is the giveaway term, and clearly it refers to none other than Sen. Sen decides, but not just for himself; he purports to speak on behalf of society, or government. Sen’s entire book can be thought of as an “entanglement.” Sen wants us to get entangled in his various diversions, so we don’t spot his hidden assumption, which guarantees victory to his position. That hidden assumption is that ownership of the flute has been silently transferred from the person who made the flute to Sen himself, posing as the mysterious “we.” Sen—speaking for the government or society—now determines who gets the flute. This is theft, pure and simple, and no less objectionable because it is camouflaged by Sen’s academic rigmarole.

I thought of the practical implications of Sen’s vision of progressive justice. I was lying on my bunk, reading an article on Obama’s latest promise to forgive students their student loan debts. Actually Sen, Obama, and the progressives are the ones who keep me awake at night. Obama likes to portray himself as the savior of the younger generation. In reality, however, college costs are so high in large part because the government subsidizes education with Pell Grants and a whole host of other scholarships and loans. Colleges continually raise tuition because they know that a large portion of the tab is paid for by the taxpayer, not the student. That’s how colleges can afford to pay professors six-figure salaries for teaching two days a week and working only nine months out of the year.

So rising college costs, together with government subsidies, represent a collaboration between the government and the schools to take money from the taxpayer. Then, by seeking to relieve student debt, Obama is adding to the national debt. Since the national debt represents a future obligation for younger generations, Obama is offering a benefit to some young people now for which all young people who become taxpayers must pay in the future. Obama’s “generosity” is a fraud: he is bestowing on young people money that is actually their own.

Obama has actually stolen that money, because debt, it should be emphasized, is a form of theft. We are of course used to hearing the usual rhetoric about how a huge national debt imposes a crippling burden on future generations. But missing here is the recognition that debt is a form of robbing from young people. Progressives are brazenly ripping off the young, all in the name of “social justice.”

Yet young people are in general the poorest segment of the population. Progressive government extracts from them to transfer wealth to other groups, like the elderly, who are by and large a much more affluent group. Notice, too, that young people are for the most part ineligible to vote. They are being saddled with obligations to which they have not consented, and that do not benefit them in any way. This is truly “taxation without representation.”

Let’s look at the amounts involved.⁵ When George W. Bush left office, the federal debt was $9 trillion. That’s a huge amount, and Bush added nearly $4 trillion to the total, a disgraceful legacy caused primarily by profligate domestic spending and foreign wars. Bush’s second term deficits averaged around $500 billion. But still, the $9 trillion represented America’s entire debt accumulated from the founding through 2008.

Now, under Obama, the federal debt is $18.5 trillion. It’s larger than America’s gross domestic product which is around $17 trillion. The debt will be over $19 trillion when Obama leaves office. While progressives professed to be scandalized by Bush’s $500 billion deficits, they have remained silent while Obama racks up trillion-dollar deficits. During the Reagan years the left fretted about “two hundred billion dollar deficits as far as the eye can see.” What were annual deficits under Reagan became monthly deficits under Obama. In less than eight years, Obama has doubled the national debt.

If we consider the $19 trillion debt as an obligation being foisted upon the 50 million or so young people in the United States, each person owes $380,000. Obama isn’t single-handedly responsible for this rip-off, but he is the prime malefactor. Basically he is charging young people with the cost of a home mortgage—without them getting the home. I am not even considering the cost of unfunded Social Security and Medicare liabilities, which is estimated around $100 trillion. Whenever I think of this intergenerational rip-off, it makes me angry.

I’ve got a lot of time to read at night. I’m not allowed to bring in my cell phone or my computer, so mainly I read books. I also keep up with social media. Each night I amuse myself by perusing printouts of various leftist attacks on me on social media. I’ve figured out that leftist groups actually hire people to harass me on Facebook and Twitter. I say this because these people have become my online stalkers. Seconds after I post something, several leftists immediately post comments like “How’s prison?” and “You are a felon.”

Yes, I am a felon because I broke the law. But justice requires more than a determination that someone broke the law. If a guy is caught speeding and given five years in prison, that’s unjust, even though he broke the law. It’s unjust because the penalty is disproportionate to the offense, and moreover, no one else who speeds gets that kind of penalty.

So how do my election law offenses compare to those of leading progressives? Well, let’s see. Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid took $31,000 in late 2013 from his campaign funds to buy jewelry for his granddaughter Ryan Elisabeth Reid’s wedding. In his campaign year-end report, Reid tried to hide his granddaughter’s relationship to him by simply listing the transaction as a “holiday gift” to one “Ryan Elisabeth.” The impression Reid sought to convey was that he was buying gifts for his supporters.

When it came to light that Reid had funneled campaign money to his granddaughter, Reid agreed to repay the money, but waxed indignant at continuing questions from reporters. “As a grandparent,” he fumed, “I say enough is enough.” Although Reid’s case involves obvious corruption, the Obama administration has neither investigated nor prosecuted a case against this stalwart Obama ally.⁶

Bill Clinton, you may recall, had his own campaign finance controversy. Following the 1996 election, the Democratic National Committee was forced to return $2.8 million in illegal and improper donations, most of it from foreign sources. Most of that money was raised by a shady Clinton fundraiser named John Huang. Huang, who used to work for the Lippo Group, an Indonesian conglomerate, set up a fundraising scheme for foreign businessmen seeking special favors from the U.S. government to meet with Clinton, in exchange for large sums of money. A South Korean businessman had dinner with President Clinton in return for a $250,000 donation. Yogesh Gandhi, an Indian businessman who claimed to be related to Mahatma Gandhi, arranged to meet Clinton in the White House and be photographed receiving an award in exchange for a $325,000 contribution. Both donations were returned, but again, no official investigation, no prosecutions.⁷

In 2013, Barack Obama’s presidential campaign was fined $375,000 by the Federal Election Commission for violating federal disclosure laws. An FEC audit of the 2008 records of Obama for America found the group failed to disclose millions of dollars in contributions and delayed refunding millions more in excess contributions.⁸ Excess contributions—sound familiar? But the FEC, you see, is a bipartisan group with an equal number of Democratic and Republican commissioners. As a consequence of both parties having a say, FEC decisions tend to be more balanced.

My case, you may remember, was deliberately not referred to the FEC, as such cases typically are. Rather, the U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York decided to go ahead and prosecute it. Unlike Obama, I did not benefit from a scheme involving millions of dollars in excess contributions; rather, I paid $20,000 in excess of the campaign finance limit. Yet I ended up in a confinement center, and Obama, for vastly more serious offenses, paid a token fine.

From these examples, I conclude that progressive justice simply means justice that benefits progressives. There is nothing proportional or evenhanded about it. That’s why Sen wants the government to own the flute, which is to say, to own everything no matter who has made it. If the government owns it, the government can do whatever it wants with it. Progressives determine the outcome, and then solemnly proclaim it “just.”

Operating very much in the Sen mode, progressives today press two pitches that I am going to focus on in this chapter. The first is the “greed and selfishness” pitch, and the second is the “inequality” pitch, also known as the pitch of the “rich and the poor.” Both these pitches are based on the hidden implication that progressives care deeply about the motives that go into wealth creation and also into the social effects of wealth distribution, while their critics don’t. Consequently, progressives are moral people and their targets are morally suspect.

Progressives, in the manner of Don Felice, proceed to instruct entrepreneurs and workers on how they can raise their moral level in society, by turning over the authority for wealth distribution to progressives themselves. In short, the way to become less greedy and selfish is to allow yourself to be ripped off. This pitch, in order to work, requires a good deal of clever diversion and entanglement, drawing people into highly irrelevant issues, and keeping them occupied while the theft is going on. The pitch, as we will see, also requires extremely gullible targets who are suckers in the manner of Brother Puccio.

Let’s begin with greed and selfishness. Is capitalism in fact based on these two “low” human motives? The short answer is no. Greed means seeking more than one is entitled to. The whole point of capitalism is to allocate wealth to the person who has created it. Capitalism was actually founded as an alternative to greed. Historically greed has been in the same abundant supply that it is now. And it had a familiar outlet: conquest. People who had the power to take things, took things. They took things to which they were not entitled by force or fraud, much in the manner that Sen wants to appropriate Carla’s flute.

Under capitalism, you cannot take things without the consent of the one you are taking them from. If I voluntarily agree to have a mutual fund manager invest my money, and agree to pay him 1 percent a year for his service, he is not “greedy” for accepting these terms, even if his services make him a sizable annual income. Nor am I “greedy” for seeking to profitably employ my money in a manner that will multiply it.

Certainly capitalism is based on self-interest. I, as the investor, am indeed trying to benefit myself, and the mutual fund manager is also trying to benefit himself. Our negotiation is conducted entirely on this basis. Of course we are not solely benefiting ourselves. I am working to support my family, and he, his. “Self-interest,” here, has an extended connotation. Moreover, self-interest is not the same thing as “selfishness.” Selfishness, like greed, implies excessive self-regard. It is not selfish for Carla to claim her flute, regardless of whether she chooses to share it with anyone else.

Neither is it selfishness to seek to be paid as much as possible for what I do, nor is it selfishness for employers to seek to pay me as little as possible to get their work done. The self-interest that drives capitalism is the same self-interest that drives democracy and all human relations—the basic assumption that people care about themselves and look out for themselves.

Self-interest, Adam Smith writes in The Wealth of Nations, comes to us in the womb and never leaves us until the grave. It is a “uniform, constant and uninterrupted effort of every man to better his own condition.”⁹ Smith contrasts self-interest on the one hand with empathy on the other. Self-interest means thinking about yourself, while empathy means putting yourself in the place of another. Smith has no doubt which is morally preferable. In his other book, A Theory of Moral Sentiments, Smith admits, “To feel much for others, and little for ourselves, to restrain our selfish, and to indulge our benevolent, affections, constitutes the perfection of human nature.”¹⁰

At first glance, it may seem that a system like capitalism that is based on self-interest disregards or even repudiates empathy. Smith sagely observes, “It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer or the baker that we expect our dinner, but from their regard to their own interest. We . . . never talk to them of our own necessities but of their advantages.”¹¹ Smith finds it paradoxical that individuals each working toward their self-interest nevertheless collectively advance the material welfare of society. Smith invokes his famous “invisible hand” to explain how the one leads to the other. The concept of the “invisible hand” implies a kind of magic. Through some necromancy or deus ex machina, self-interest somehow works to make everyone better off.

But in fact there is nothing “invisible” about how the process takes place. Two factors are visibly at work here, and they both serve to tame and temper self-interest. The first is competition. There are several mutual fund managers who want my business. Each of them would like to charge as much as possible. At the same time, only one of them can get it, so they must compete for my business. If some insist upon charging more, others will win my business by charging less. So there is pressure on the fund managers to lower their fees.

This principle applies to me, no less than to the fund manager. I want to pay as little as possible to get a good manager. My research shows that one particular guy is really good. I’d like to get him for free, to pay him close to nothing for managing my money. I know, however, that if I offer such meager compensation his services may end up going to someone else. Then I will have to settle for a less capable custodian of my money. So I compete with other investors for the services of the good manager. Competition helps to temper my self-interest as well as his and bring us to a juncture where both of us are reasonably satisfied. Our consent defines the point of mutual acceptance. Neither of us is being ripped off, because otherwise we would not have agreed to the deal.

There is a second aspect to the invisible hand that Smith did not stress, yet to my mind it is the most important. Even though capitalism may be motivated by self-interest, the capitalist is successful only to the degree that he or she is empathetic. In other words, capitalism works by putting the energies of the capitalist entirely at the service of actual and potential customers. In order to serve customers, the capitalist must always be thinking about them: their wants, their needs, how to make their lives better.

This is operational empathy of a kind that is both rare and morally creditable. The typical intellectual, for example, spends virtually all his time thinking about what interests him and virtually none thinking about the potential customers whom he wants to buy his books. Among the professions, perhaps only the clergy are as dedicated as the capitalist to routinely contemplating and seeking the good of their “customers,” who in that particular case are parishioners and church members.

So far I have focused on the motives of the capitalist, but it is worth contemplating for a moment the consequences of the system. Remarkably the capitalist does more to actually improve people’s lives than others who seem specifically dedicated to achieving this result. The capitalist, in other words, beats out the professional “servers” and “caregivers.” Consider, for instance, Bill Gates versus the Peace Corps. Bill Gates is a self-interested capitalist. The Peace Corps is aimed at helping poor people around the world. Peace Corps volunteers join up for the specific purpose of helping others. Let’s assume that Bill Gates developed his computer and software systems primarily for the purpose of benefiting himself.

Yet who has done more to help the poor people of the world, Bill Gates or the Peace Corps? The answer isn’t even close: it’s Gates. And why? Because Gates is actually more effective than the Peace Corps in envisioning what serves the wants and needs of people. Gates enables the poor to gain access to a world of information that improves their lives in myriad ways, including the prospect of earning a livelihood. The motives of Peace Corps volunteers may be more pure; the results achieved by Gates are clearly superior.

There is no denying that there are plenty of greedy, selfish people who are capitalists. But the greed and selfishness is not in capitalism; it is in human nature. Capitalism takes human nature as it is and seeks to channel it in a way that serves fairness and decency. One may say that capitalism civilizes greed in much the same way that marriage civilizes lust. Lust, like greed, is in human nature; it is foolish and impractical to try to root it out. At the same time, it is widely recognized that these inclinations can have corrupting and destructive effects. So they have to be tamed and steered in such a way that they serve us, and society, best. The institution of marriage allows for the fulfillment of lust, but within a context that promotes mutual love and attachment and the raising of children. Lust is refined, purified, and in a sense ennobled by marriage.

Similarly capitalism channels greed in such a way that it is placed at the service of the wants and needs of others. Destructive forms of greed, in which we seek to seize and appropriate other people’s possessions, are outlawed in a capitalist society. We can acquire what others possess only by convincing them to give it to us, and the only way to do this is to give them something equally or more valuable in exchange. The point isn’t just that capitalism makes society better off; it is that capitalism makes us better people by limiting the scope of our vices. So capitalism reduces greed and selfishness while at the same time improving the material welfare of society.

I find it amusing that progressives go on about “greed” and “selfishness” when they are the greediest, most selfish people of all. From the progressive viewpoint, Gates is a greedy, selfish guy because he has more than $50 billion and what can a man possibly want with that much money? (I’m reminded here of Obama’s 2010 comment, made in the context of the financial reform debate, “I do think at a certain point you’ve made enough money.”)¹² The progressive solution is to force Gates to part with some, or most, of that money so that they can deploy it as they see fit. This is the progressive equivalent of Amartya Sen’s “who gets the flute.”

The progressives are right that there is no way Gates can spend $50 billion on himself. He can only eat three meals a day and wear one set of clothes at a time. Even his heirs can be provided for with a fraction of that amount. Gates actually knows this. He has vowed to give away most of his fortune to charity. Nor is he waiting for death to do this. He has already given away billions. He buys mosquito nets for people in poor countries so that they don’t get malaria. He invests in medical research. He funds educational projects in America and abroad.

Gates is neither a unique phenomenon nor a modern aberration. Andrew Carnegie gave away $350 million, the vast bulk of his fortune, to a range of charitable causes, from supporting scientific research to endowing several hundred public libraries. Carnegie’s philanthropy was a self-conscious expression of his famous Gospel of Wealth: earn as much as you can, then give away as much as you can. And Carnegie practiced what he preached, which is more than we can say of the progressives who criticize tycoons from the past and the present.

Returning to the question at hand, it is not whether a sizable portion of Gates’s money is being used to help the needy. It is. The only question is who decides how that money is spent. The capitalist answer is Gates. The progressive answer is progressives. But Gates is the one who earned the money. It’s his flute because he made it. Progressives are basically thieves because they are trying to take away his flute by denying his legitimate claim to it. They purport to be champions of the needy, but whether or not this is true, they should be champions of the needy with their own resources. What kind of generosity is it that forcibly seizes and then disburses other people’s money? This is not generosity; it’s larceny.

To see this more clearly, imagine that I’m walking along the riverbank with a guy who is hungry. I am eating a sandwich. He asks me to share it with him, and so I do. Now, this is a virtuous transaction. I have done a good deed, and he is appropriately appreciative. Perhaps in the future, if he has a sandwich, he will share with some other needy guy. But this virtuous transaction is completely corrupted when it is brought about by the forcible intervention of the government.

Now envision the same scenario as above, but this time Obama shows up on a white horse, dismounts, points a gun to my head, and compels me to share my sandwich. Now I have not done a good deed, since I only shared my sandwich under duress. I gave not out of charity but out of fear. The receiver is not grateful to me; why should he be? He knows that I didn’t give voluntarily. So the free sandwich does not provoke a feeling of appreciation; indeed, it is more likely to instill a feeling of entitlement. “I’m still hungry. Why am I getting only half a sandwich?” So even though the result is the same—I and the other guy each end up with half a sandwich—the morality has been completely stripped out of the transaction.

But this does not take into account the most invidious aspect of the transaction: the role played by Obama. Upon reflection, his actions are not only unjust; they are criminal. If he were a private individual, instead of a government agent, I would call the authorities and he would be arrested for assault, extortion, and theft. Unfortunately, in this case I cannot call the authorities because the authorities are the ones stealing from me. So I am doubly deprived: I am being stolen from, and I do not have the recourse of being able to rectify the theft.

Yet Obama is able to get away with it because, for years prior to the theft, he has been convincing people that he is the great apostle of social justice. I am supposed to be “greedy” and “selfish” for possessing a sandwich and he is wonderfully compassionate for taking half my sandwich and giving it to someone else. Notice that, through this process, the recipient of the sandwich is grateful not to me but to him. He becomes the provider even though it is my sandwich that he is sharing.

In fact, Obama is the one who gains the most from the outcome. His gain is not the mere half sandwich he took; rather, it is the allegiance of the fellow he is supposedly helping. That guy is now indebted to Obama, and more likely to vote for him. While the other man gains a meal, Obama gains power. So now we must reconsider the assumption that Obama’s actions are motivated by altruism. It’s far more likely they are motivated by a will to power. He is the greediest, most selfish one of all because he is the only person among the three of us taking something that does not belong to him. Obama’s talk about “greed” and “selfishness” is a fraud; it is simply part of his con man’s pitch.

Next we turn to inequality. Here the reigning mantra is that “the rich are getting richer and the poor are getting poorer.” If this were true, it would of course be unfortunate. But it still would not follow that the rich are getting richer at the expense of the poor, much less that the rich are therefore exploiting the poor. Progressives, however, intend to leave those impressions without explicitly accusing the rich of impoverishing the poor. Thorstein Veblen gives us the familiar pitch, “The accumulation of wealth at the upper end of the pecuniary scale implies privation at the lower end of the scale.”¹³

As with the greed pitch, the inequality pitch is designed to provide a justification for confiscating from those who have more, supposedly to provide to those who have less. Progressives are so attached to this pitch that it has acquired the status of a moral principle or ethic. Stealing of this kind is considered not only permissible, but indeed a good thing to do.

This progressive ethic is not found only in the political realm; we also saw it among slave owners, who insisted that their enslavement of others was a “positive good,” and we see it today among criminals. Consider the case of Hero, a South Side Mexican who beat and robbed an old African American woman. I learned about the incident in the confinement center from one of his fellow gang members, Sancho.

“We called the woman Mabs,” Sancho told me. Sancho wears a rosary around his neck and has a single earring, a diamond stud. “She had lived in the neighborhood from the time we were kids. We didn’t talk to her, because Mexicans don’t like to talk to black people, but everyone recognized her, because she was bent over, you know, and walked with a cane and a little dog. Every evening, at the same time, she took the dog for a walk.”

Apparently Hero, one of the young punks in the Forty-Fifth Street gang, decided to jump Mabs and take her money. It wasn’t as easy as one might expect. The woman put up quite a fight, whopping the guy with her cane and even biting him. Still, what can an elderly woman do against a strapping young man? Mabs took a heavy blow to the back, and another to the head, and she ended up unconscious in the street while the punk made off with her ring and a paltry sum of money.

When word got out in the gang about what happened, Sancho said, “Everyone felt bad. We didn’t know this woman, but we thought it was pretty f*cked-up to go after a person who had even less, you know, than we did. We liked this guy Hero. He had pulled off some of the biggest jobs for us. One time he beat the sh*t out of this Asian store owner. The wife and son showed up, so he beat the sh*t out of them. Then he cleaned out the place. I think he got nearly two grand from that job. We were like, f*ckin’ A!

“But this was different, man. I mean, some of us actually wanted to kick Hero’s ass. We couldn’t do that, you know, because stealing is what gang members do. But I did ask him, what the f*ck, man? And he said, I was high when it happened. Even he felt a little bad about what he did. I told him, leave that bitch alone—don’t do that sh*t again.”

Actually I was not surprised that Hero beat up the old woman. Violence and robbery are what guys like Hero do. If he could unremorsefully beat up the Asian guy and his family, why should he have qualms about beating up Mabs? The remarkable thing is that Hero was cheered by his peers for harming and robbing the Asian family, while he was on the defensive for doing the same to Mabs.

Certainly the Asians weren’t wealthy, but they were perceived to have more than their assailant. Mabs, by contrast, was perceived to have less. While criminals typically steal from anyone from whom they can extract money, inequality provides a pretext for them to take from those who are above them, while no such pretext is available if they steal from those who are below them. In other words, in their mind, it is fundamentally unfair for someone to have more than they do. Therefore it is perfectly fair to rob them. The same principle, it seems, applies to modern progressivism.

Before we ask how much inequality there is in society, and whether it has gotten better or worse, let’s explore at the level of first principle how inequalities come to exist in the first place. Imagine a society with 100 members, and each of them has $50. There is perfect equality. Now one of those members—let’s call her J. K. Rowling—publishes a Harry Potter book. She prices each book at $5. For some reason, and the reason is not important, everyone wants this book. Indeed all the other 99 members of the society are willing to part with $5 apiece to purchase the book. So badly do they want the book that they ignore the possibility of pooling their resources and sharing a few books among the group. Each one wants his or her own book. So 99 people all fork over $5, and J. K. Rowling gets nearly $500 in exchange for her product. Rowling now has nearly $550 while the others now have $45 each. Suddenly we have inequality, and there is a yawning chasm between Rowling and everyone else. Nor is this a one-time event; when Rowling’s next Harry Potter installment appears, the inequality is sure to increase.

Even so, has any injustice been perpetrated? No. The inequality is directly in proportion to what Rowling has provided the others. Not only are they fine with the inequality; they are actually the ones responsible for causing it. They voluntarily gave their resources to her because in their minds her book was worth at least $5. She has their money because they wanted her to have it.

What we learn from this example is that there is nothing inherently objectionable about inequality. Nor is increasing inequality by itself a problem. What matters is how this inequality came about. Progressives who insist that J. K. Rowling is a crook and is depriving people of their “fair share” are themselves crooks who are trying to take the justly earned fruits of her labor. In Lincoln’s terms, she works and they eat. It doesn’t matter whether these crooks then share the money with others, in exchange for votes and power, or keep the money for themselves. In both cases their conduct is equally reprehensible and their inequality pitch must be recognized as being part of the political thief’s standard bag of tricks.

The problem of inequality must be distinguished from the problem of poverty. The two are quite distinct. A society in which everyone is poor has no inequality and lots of poverty. A society in which there are lots of rich people and few poor people has considerable inequality but very little poverty. Americans who respond to the progressive moral appeal about inequality are usually thinking about the need to alleviate poverty.

Yet there are comparatively few poor people in America. This statement may seem shocking. What about all the progressive data that show that nearly 15 percent of people are poor? That number is determined without taking into account government benefits. Once government benefits are factored in, there are very few poor people in America.

Moreover, when progressives tell us how little money the poor have, they are once again not counting the government benefits they currently receive. So when you hear that “it’s nearly impossible to make ends meet for a family of four on $12,000 a year,” be assured that no one is actually making ends meet for a family of four on that amount. In reality, the family making $12,000 a year is getting subsidized housing, food stamps, free health care, and a host of other benefits. If we added these up, we’d find that this family is actually making ends meet on closer to $30,000 a year. We taxpayers are the ones who are paying for the difference.

Progressives realize, however, that it doesn’t sound quite so convincing to say “it’s nearly impossible to make ends meet for a family of four on $30,000 a year.” After all, the mean income in this country is $50,000 a year, so getting by on 60 percent of the national average does not seem to be a case of extreme deprivation.

Let’s now examine the progressive pitch about inequality. Progressives typically begin by dividing America into three groups: the rich, the middle class, and the poor. Then progressives point out that the middle class appears to be shrinking. Consequently, progressives say, inequality must be increasing. The rich are getting richer and the poor are getting more numerous. Indeed, the rich must be benefiting at the expense of the poor. The progressive solution is to give progressives free rein over rich people’s money. Progressives then pledge to implement a series of government measures to reduce inequality.

As I consider the progressive tripartite division of people into poor, middle class, and rich, I ask myself where I fit into these camps. Then I realize that, when I reflect on the course of my working life, I fit into all of them. I came to America with $500 in my pocket. That sum had to last me for my first year as an exchange student. As it turned out, it was also the total of my discretionary spending throughout my four years of college. When I was admitted to Dartmouth I had no idea how I could afford to go; Dartmouth made that possible by giving me a package of scholarship grants, student loans repayable after graduation, and fifteen hours of work-study employment per week. Dartmouth in those days cost $30,000 a year, half of what it costs now.

During this period of my life, I was so poor that I could not afford to eat at McDonald’s. I don’t mean I couldn’t eat regularly at McDonald’s; I couldn’t eat there at all. I found it ridiculously expensive. By contrast, poor people in America eat at McDonald’s all the time. They don’t even know what it means to be poor in an absolute sense. It’s funny to recall now, but there was a period in which my circumstances were so modest that I envied the poor because they had so much more than I did.

Things didn’t improve dramatically with my first job, which paid just over the poverty line. But as I became a magazine editor in Washington, D.C., and then secured a coveted job in the White House, my salary rose and I entered the comfortable middle class. Eventually when my books hit the bestseller list, and I was invited to give speeches, and later when I made successful documentary films, my earnings rose even further and I accumulated enough to qualify as rich, or at least very well-off.

Mine is undoubtedly a success story, yet this upward trajectory of earning is hardly uncommon. It defines the path taken by typical families in America. People start out with meager earnings, then they do better, and they reach the peak of their earning power in their fifties or sixties. Yet progressives would count them as poor in one stage, middle class in the second, and perhaps rich in the third. This hardly describes one class of person exploiting another, or benefiting at the expense of another; rather, it describes the same person moving through the familiar stages of life.

This pattern shows we must be careful in evaluating the progressive inequality pitch; it doesn’t prove the pitch untrue. One aspect of it is clearly true. The middle class as a group is indeed shrinking. At one time it described virtually the whole of American society; now it describes less than half of it. Why is that? It’s because over the past few decades, many people have moved from the middle class to the ranks of the affluent. In other words, they haven’t moved down; they have moved up.

Previously it was a rarity to find a millionaire—a person with a net worth of $1 million. Today there are nearly 5 million families with a net worth exceeding $1 million. I wouldn’t call these people “rich,” because being rich today, unlike in the past, requires more than $1 million in total assets. Even so, these people are certainly well-off in that they have capital to invest and they have a good deal of discretionary income. In a sense, they make up a new class in between the middle class and the rich. We can call it the upper middle class or the affluent class.

In departing the middle class, these successful Americans have widened the gap between themselves and those they have left behind. So inequality is greater. But far from being a bad thing, this is a very good thing, because so many people now have access to the privileges that were once the prerogative of the very few.

Over the past century and a half, the great achievement of the West was to create a middle class, allowing the common man to escape poverty and live in relative comfort. Now the United States has performed an equally impressive feat. It has created the first mass affluent class in world history. A mass affluent class is just starting to emerge in several European countries as well. And this mass affluent class is now large enough in America that it outnumbers the poor.

What about the people who have not moved up, the ones left behind? Their condition certainly hasn’t worsened; it has improved. Nor has the condition of the poor worsened; it too has improved. Poor people have amenities today that would in previous eras clearly establish them as middle class or better. Being poor today means having a place to live, home appliances like refrigerators, washing machines, and microwave ovens, decent clothing, a car, cable television, and a cell phone. Poor Americans today are better housed, better clothed, and better fed than average Americans were half a century ago; in many respects they live better than the average European does today, and of course by world standards they are in the very upper echelon.

When so many in the middle class have prospered and moved up, why have so many others stayed put? Why have their incomes stagnated? Here the main problem isn’t rich people; it’s poor people. Middle-class Americans have seen the price of their labor driven down, or at least held constant, by the competitive pressure coming from three different directions: globalization, immigration, and technology. A guy making steel today isn’t typically being exploited by his wealthy boss; rather, his problem is that some other guy in another country can make steel more cheaply. So either his plant has to close down, or it has to pay its workers less in order to stay competitive.

Similarly, new immigrants are willing to work for less and therefore they exert a downward pressure on the price that labor commands. Many Americans are not willing to do those jobs anymore at the price that the market is able to bear. Finally, technology replaces workers by doing, more quickly and cheaply, what humans were previously required to do.

Of course, progressives could call for a slowing down of the pace of technology or for restrictions on immigration or globalization. This, however, would pose serious political risks. Silicon Valley, which has been quite friendly to the Democrats, would likely turn against them. Hispanics, an important voter bloc, would also recoil if the Democrats proposed to reduce legal and illegal immigration. Finally, there is no easy way to stop the global exchange of goods and services that puts downward pressure on certain types of jobs but also produces goods and services more cheaply and thus benefits American consumers.

Consequently, progressives pretend not to notice these factors and even when they do, they don’t do much about them. In some respects, they advocate policies, such as immigration amnesty, that make the problems worse. But at the same time progressives point to CEOs and entrepreneurs and blame them for the plight of those whose incomes are stagnant. More broadly, they demonize the rich and the successful. This is pure scapegoating. It is a devious scheme to target innocent people for public venom so that progressives can steal from them and come across as the good guys for doing it.

I mentioned that technology was one of the factors responsible for suppressing the wages of certain types of workers, and thus a contributor to the income gap. Yet at the same time, technology ensures to people across the swath of American society access to products that even rich people didn’t have in the past. Contemplating the vast range of technological wonders that even poor people have today, the novelist Tom Wolfe once observed that they would, if he could see them, “make the Sun King blink.”

Moreover, while technology may contribute to certain types of short-term inequality, long-term it is a powerful instrument of social equality. Consider: A century ago a rich man traveled by horse and carriage, while the poor man traveled on foot. That’s a huge difference. Today a rich man might drive a Jaguar, and his poorer counterpart a Honda Civic or a Hyundai. That’s not such a huge difference. A century ago the rich could escape the bitter cold of winter, or the scalding heat of summer, by escaping to holiday retreats; the poor, by contrast, had to endure the elements. Today most homes, offices, and cars are temperature-controlled and the benefits are enjoyed by rich and poor alike.

These examples could be multiplied, but here’s the most telling one of all: a hundred years ago, the life expectancy of the average American was around fifty years. The gap between rich and poor was about ten years. It was not uncommon for a wealthy person to live into his late sixties or seventies but quite rare for a poor man or woman to do so. Today the average life expectancy is just over seventy-five years, and the gap between rich and poor has narrowed to 2–3 years. So the poor have not only made huge absolute gains; they have also made huge gains relative to their more affluent counterparts.

Now, progressives may attempt to argue that these improvements are due to government policies, such as medical allowances for the poor, but it was technological capitalism that produced the medical improvements in the first place. Moreover, when it comes to inventions like the car, the computer, the cell phone, and a whole arsenal of lifesaving drugs and treatments, rich people paid the exorbitant initial prices that financed the research and development over time that made those products better and cheaper and brought them within the reach of virtually the whole society.

Summing up, we can see that the progressive pitches about greed, selfishness, and inequality are basically diversions. They seek to deflect us away from the core issue, which is that the creators of the wealth are the ones who deserve the wealth they have created. To put it in primitive terms, the farmer who grew the crops gets to keep the crops and the hunters who killed the deer get to eat the deer.

Progressives, however, have always had their eye on those crops and that deer. Through an elaborate flimflam—“that greedy selfish farmer who wants to keep the food he planted and harvested,” “look how much meat those hunters have compared to those who didn’t go on the hunt”—the progressives seek to establish themselves as the moral arbiters in adjudicating an issue that needs no adjudication, namely, who has the right to the crops and the deer. The moment we enter into their pitch, we have unwittingly transferred ownership of the crops and the deer to the government, which is to say, to the progressives. This is the biggest theft of all, one that is especially diabolical because it marches behind a banner of justice.