I think a lot of people have come to the conclusion that rich = evil, and lower to middle class = victims of the rich. If you’re wealthy, no matter how you became wealthy, you’re looked at differently these days. You’re not looked at as someone who is successful and should be looked up to, you’re looked at as someone who is greedy and who should give back their wealth to the less fortunate.
What if we weren’t talking about money though. What if we were talking about grades in school? Could we justify having the students who get A’s supplement the grades of those who are failing so that everyone passes? That way everyone has a chance of landing a good job. The grades become useless, because their intent is to provide a scale to judge a student’s previous experience. If you take all the grades and level them off, to roughly the same level, then potential employers, and colleges won’t be able to tell who has worked hard for their grades, and who just got by benefiting from the hard work of others.
What about in sports? What if there were no winners or losers? Would you watch a baseball game that you knew was going to end in a tie? At least no one’s feelings get hurt by the outcome, unless of course you’re the better team and feel that you deserve some recognition for your hard work. And at the end of the day, you don’t even need to have good athletes on the team if the game is always going to end in a tie. (You also won’t have good fans coming to watch the games).
These people don’t understand that you don’t just become rich, like the way someone becomes sick, or becomes thirsty. It’s not something that just happens. In order to become rich, you need to work hard to get to a high paying position. You’re not simply selected at random, as your experience and hard work will get you to the top. And by hard work, I don’t mean being able to do manual labor for 12 hours a day. I mean smart work. People will pay you more for what you know than for what you can do, because anyone can be trained to lift 100 pounds all day, but not everyone can manage a Fortune 500 company. (Oh yea, companies come and go from the Fortune 500 list every year because of how well they perform. It’s not a weighted scale so that the mom & pop shops can compete on the list with the Exxon’s of the world).
Also, don’t forget that many of the wealthy in this country run businesses that employ millions of people. Small businesses employ more people than the Fortune 500 companies in the US. So in addition to the US government, there are millions that benefit from the wealthy…but as the author suggests, the wealthy are usually branded as being “lucky”, “selfish”, “dishonest”, etc. People in general feel they have a right to other’s wealth…and the Obama administration supports this notion. How many times have you heard Obama say he wants to “level the playing field”.