The Envious and The Elitists

[UPDATE: Okay, okay, okay. I hear you! This post wasn't up for an hour before I was deluged with email asking me to expand on my thoughts regarding Envy. Will do so and post it on Monday of next week.]

The free market system is oblivious to your bloodlines: it cares about what value you have to offer. The only “entrance fee” into this market is a product or service that others are willing to pay for. As our forefathers envisioned it, being a Lord or Lady is irrelevant here in the US: being a producer is what matters.

So as to insure that the aristocracy of bloodlines did not give any particular citizen an unfair advantage in the market place, our founding fathers established a nation based on equality under the law. Every citizen is free to compete for the wealth of his neighbors. In other words, we don’t care if you are “nobility” or a “peasant”; all we are interested in is whether or not you produce something that satisfies our needs.

And herein lies the rub for many people …

Capitalism is brutally honest. By this I mean that, in the arena of achievement, you cannot hide your shortcomings and failures. You contribute or not. You produce or not. You cannot sell or trade hopes, fantasies or dreams: you have something of value to add in the market place, or not.

Today, people are acting like the aristocracy of old, demanding to be rewarded without having produced anything, or demanding equal rewards for unequal production. These are the envious people who want what the successful person has earned and, if not, they don’t want anyone to have the reward.

Go back and reread the previous paragraph: this is key to understanding the emotional and psychological make up of the envious. Envious people would rather all of us be poor, rather than seeing any of us attain success.

There is a very important difference between jealousy and envy. While jealousy is tinged with resentment, envy is vicious.

It is one thing to be jealous of the success of another. For example, I am jealous and resentful that you have a BMW and I drive a ’82 Buick, and sorely would love to have a Beemer myself. Envy, however, is different from jealousy in that it goes farther than mere resentment of your success. Envy believes, “If I can’t have a BMW, you shouldn’t have one … if I can’t have one, no one should have one.”

Envy and Big Business
When you hear someone castigate Big Business, you are usually hearing the echo of envy.

Sir Envious: “I deserve to be wealthy. I am not wealthy, however. Big Business and its executives are wealthy. This wealth obviously came their way through greed and cheating, so it should be punished and the wealth of the executives confiscated, or at least severely scaled down. “ (For the envious, success can never be attributed to exceptional performance: it is always a sign of cheating or some such nefarious practice.)

It doesn’t seem to occur to Lord and Lady Envious that a majority of citizen-consumers chose to give Big Business more capital so as to maintain and increase its production and services. In other words, Lords and Ladies, if you have a problem, it’s not with Big Business: it is with your neighbors.

To the envious person the damnable thing is that the market has placed a different value on his contribution than he believes is “fair.” (Fair: a woman’s complexion? a weather report? a place you take a pig to compete for a ribbon?) All the government of a nation that is committed to a free market economy promises is equality before the law: in other words, it maintains justice. Period. Other than this, it is our fellow citizen-consumers that decide who stays in business and who doesn’t; whose contribution is worth a salary of one million dollars a year, and whose contribution is worth an annual salary of twenty thousand dollars.

The envious man, of course, rejects the market’s evaluation of his contribution. Whereas the marketplace makes decisions based solely on the fulfillment of mutual self-interests and not on some indefinable principle of “fairness,” the envious person insists that he be rewarded for merely existing or for being a Good Person.

Consumers are interested in meeting their needs and desires. The entrepreneur who does this with a quality product and at a cheaper price than his competitors is rewarded. I may be a great guy who people really like, but if I have nothing of value to offer in the marke-tplace, I am invisible to the consumer.

If, up until now, I have been unable to succeed in the marketplace, I have two choices:

I can get some more education, increase my skill level, and work harder and smarter.

I can join with large numbers of envious people and insist that Big Government deal with the stupidity of my neighbors who, with their purchasing power, voted YES to Big Business. Here, what is demanded is that Big Government either begin taking over these businesses and start paying people a “fair” wage, or begin taxing these businesses to such an extent that it can now support us Good People who have little if any value in the marketplace. … or both.

Enter the Elitists
[Warning: Long Sentence] Upon hearing the cry of the Good People who are producing and contributing little if anything of value to the market place, and seeing the rage of the envious assembly line workers who insists that they are “almost” as valuable to the company as the CEO (actually they believe they are just as valuable as the CEO, if not more so: they simply realize that even uneducated people would find that hard to swallow), the Political Elitists take up the cause of The Voiceless Victims of Big Business.

Hear the Cry of the D.C. Elitists!

Something Must Be Done! (Something IS being done: the market is, through creative destruction, wiping out businesses that are no longer producing what the majority of citizen-consumers want at the price they want to pay, and rewarding those who are offering values that satisfy our needs and desires.)

Big Business Had Decades to Get Its House In Order: Time’s Up! (Don’t you wish the majority of voters would say this to Congress?)

Somebody Must Stand Up For the Good Defenseless People (Sure would be refreshing if someone in D.C would start standing up for the people who are producing the wealth of this nation.)

We Politicians Will Begin Managing the Market Place (You know, we who have never had to compete in the market place and manage a business a day in our lives.)

Of course, if there are too many citizen-consumers who have a philosophical or, at least, an instinctual distrust of Big Government, what the envious and the elitists do here is begin covertly sneaking in their socialistic agendas with words such as “compassion” and “justice.”

“We need an equitable (just) capitalism; a more compassionate capitalism.”

Aw … just saying that feels so good and pious, doesn’t it? Obviously to say this means I am a man filled with love for the poor and downtrodden. Maybe. Then again, how many politicians are donating more than a few percent of their personal incomes to charity? I think it is, more often than not, code-speak for turning the market over to people (government agents) who are “more qualified” (elites) than American citizens in deciding what best meets their mutual self-interests. This is Anti-American, Anti-Capitalism, Anti-Individual freedom (I realize this is a redundancy but, hey, I am seeking to make a point!), and, as history has repeatedly demonstrated, will create more poverty and injustice.

Justice Free markets, to remain free, require justice: there is to be no fraud and no force, no cheating and no threats of violence. If this does occur, our courts must act swiftly to rid the marketplace of such practices.

Justice also requires that each citizen be equal under the law. Both the rich and the poor, the politician and the entrepreneur, are to be held accountable to the same laws. Capitalists have always maintained the need for justice. The problem for them arises when “justice” no longer means equal under the law, but, rather, equal results.

As for compassion, go and research just how many trillions of dollars both individual citizens and our government have, over the last one hundred years, donated to the less fortunate, both domestically and internationally. What the envious and the elites mean by “compassion” is that the government should decide who is paid what. In the Socialists estimation, you, Mr. and Ms. Citizen, are a bumpkin so brainless you cannot be trusted to decide where you invest your money.

Charity (compassion in action) is an act of an individual’s free will or it is not “charity.” Once our nation’s governments turn compassion and charity into government programs funded by coercing taxpayers into paying higher and higher taxes, once it decides the elites in Washington, D.C. know better than the citizens do as to where to give the citizen-consumer’s hard earned money, the wealth this nation has generated and is capable of generating will be depleted, and poverty will increase. So much for “compassion.” But then again, for the elites, it isn’t about “compassion.” Never has been. For these people, it is all about power. Always has been.

And what of the reaction of the envious to the dwindling of our nation’s wealth and the increased poverty that will inevitably spread across the nation, if we continue down the Road to Serfdom? They are just fiiiiine, thank-you-very-much … because all of us are in the same sinking ship.

Copyright, Monte E Wilson, 2009