It Ain’t Envy and It Ain’t Jealousy Plutocrats

Recently a number of the 0.1 Percent have come out of the woodwork to complain about how they are being treated by the press and bloggers like, well, me for one. Of course, they came out ham-handed, referring to how they are being treated with Nazi references and slavery references.

Really? Just stop.

Their core complaint, if I can discern it, is that when jealousy and envy are stirred up against a minority it off doesn’t end well.

Really? Just stop.

These plutocrats say that we are jealous of their wealth and power, that we envy them. Interesting because I don’t recall ever having met any of those people and I am someone who really, really likes hanging out with rich people. I like it when somebody picks up the check for dinner and says “Think nothing of it” and means it. I am neither envious nor jealous of their wealth.

Instead they say they are rich because they studied harder in school. That they are smarter. That they work harder.

Really? Just stop.

Are you smarter than a theoretical physicist? I doubt it. Smarter than a brain surgeon? I think not. Did you really study harder in school? I think not. I studied chemistry. At no time did I take the minimum number of units required in a semester or fewer in my first four years (and played basketball all four years). Did you study harder than two of me? If so, you are superhuman and you would deserve two or even three times what I made as a chemistry professor. (I made about $2 million in my forty years of work.). And, you say you work harder. Harder than three bus drivers pulling eight hour shifts? If so, you’d have to work over 24 hours per day. And then you’d deserve to earn over three times what a bus driver makes. But you don’t do you?

In 2011, for example, eleven hedge fund managers made over one billion dollars that year which put them into the top 0.1 Percent, no? That, in case you aren’t a regular reader of this blog and would know this already, is over $500,000 per hour of income (based on a 40 hour work week, normal holidays and two weeks of vacation per year).

What we are criticizing you for is not your wealth but for your extremely bad behavior. Realize that to blow through a billion dollars, you would have to spend over $500,000 per hour to get it done in a calendar year. That amount of money would do for anybody for their entire lifetime but it was not enough for you, now was it.

It wasn’t enough that you played games with other people’s money, you took your gains (of which we were neither envious nor jealous) and parlayed them into even greater wealth . . . by gaming the system. You bribed public officials to change the rules (aka tax laws, investment laws, etc.) to favor you over others. You encouraged others through your securities purchases and manipulations to screw their employees by shipping their jobs overseas and by suppressing their wages while you saw to it that your bribed politicians made it harder and harder for labor unions to defend the interests of workers. You financed Republican and Democrat campaigns to make sure all were beholden to your interests.

You have gutted the middle class, your best customers by the way, and undermined American Democracy just so you could make a second (or third, or sixty-eighth) billion dollars. And for what? Just to prove you are a bigger asshole than the other billionaires?

We aren’t jealous or envious of your wealth. Most of us would look at your money and say “if to get this I have to be as big an asshole as you are . . . it’s just not worth it.”

So, really, just stop. If, like your predecessors, you took your money and ran, no one would be saying boo to you. It is because you just have to screw with the rest of us that you are hated.