What Is Income Inequality?
Of all the nonsense that Leftists spew, perhaps only the crapola about climate change is more absurd than income inequality.
Of all the nonsense that Leftists spew, perhaps only the crapola about climate change is more absurd than income inequality. But since it is basically at the core of all the drivel that Karl Marx was pushing 150 years ago, there’s no way that Socialists are about to give it a rest at this late date.
You can’t really blame them. The two words themselves scream of unfairness. After all, how dare some people make more money than others! How dare Bill Gates, Jeff Bezos, George Soros or Mark Zuckerberg be richer than I am!
But people aren’t really measuring themselves against billionaires. After all, nobody can even imagine what that much money looks like. Instead, they compare themselves to their friends or neighbors or maybe their relatives. All over the nation, people are looking at their brother-in-law and thinking “How can that bozo be richer than me? How can he have a vacation home and a boat?”
The fact is most people don’t think they’re paid enough, so income inequality strikes a chord with nearly everyone. Even I am not immune. But I have specific high-earners in mind. My bugaboo happens to be politicians. It’s not just that they get paid far more than they’re worth, but that, unlike most high-earners, they are easily replaceable.
There isn’t even special education required to get the job. All they have to do is win an election, which is basically a popularity contest in which the competition is someone as unappealing as they are. Then, once they have the job, all they are ever called upon to do is vote. A chimpanzee could do it. And so long as the chimp wasn’t a Democrat, he or she could do it better than most.
The most common form of income inequality can be explained by the fact that some skills pay more than others. Whether it’s the ability to sing and sell millions of records or star in movies that sell millions of tickets; whether it’s the ability to hit, catch or pitch a baseball or throw a 60-yard spiral; or come up with an electronic system or device that a couple of billion people wish to purchase; if you stand out from the crowd in certain fields, you stand to become very rich.
Some people think Capitalism is evil because a bad actor can make a lot more money than a doctor or a teacher, a cop or a nurse. But it’s the only economic system that makes sense because, unlike its main rival, Socialism, it takes human nature into consideration.
Everyone doesn’t need or even want to a millionaire. For some people, so long as they can make enough for food, clothes, shelter and maybe cable TV, they’re happy finding satisfaction in their work, their family and their friends.
In America, most people make enough money to live on, so long as they’re not the fools who decide that only cocaine or heroin can make life worthwhile. Furthermore, most people earn what they deserve. Besides so-called public servants, the only exception are those who depend on welfare.
They’re the ones who don’t have to wake up every morning and punch a clock. They don’t have to leave the house and go to work. They don’t have to dig a ditch or pick cotton or stock shelves or flip burgers or run a business.
They just have to keep breathing and every month, like clockwork, a check arrives thanks to
the unappreciated labor of others, of strangers, of people who don’t love them or know them, and would probably dislike them if they did know them.
But it’s not charity willingly bestowed, as it would be if the recipients were elderly or handicapped or wounded military veterans. The checks arrive because the tax man demands the money be available and the politicians decide who gets it. And the only thing that’s asked of those who stay in bed or spend their days on the couch watching TV is that, periodically, they go out and show their appreciation by voting for the middlemen in this criminal enterprise.
You are never very likely to hear honest words spoken by a politician. But perhaps because the media acts as a permanent shield for Democrats, occasionally they forget to censor their words. So it was that in the midst of the impeachment investigation, with the presidential election less than a year away, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, second in line to assume the presidency, said: “We can’t leave Trump’s fate up to the voters.”
Of course not. Why should the people decide on a president when Nancy Pelosi, Chuck Schumer and Adam Schiff are so much wiser than the rest of us?
In the grand scheme of things, it won’t really make a world of difference. But sometimes it seems like good news is at such a premium, even the tiniest bit of it should be highlighted and applauded. So, just in case you missed it, President Trump and Secretary of State Mike Pompeo recently reversed the Barack Obama-John Kerry policy towards Israeli settlements.
Those two anti-Semites referred to the settlements as the single greatest obstacle to peace in the region, but they said a lot of stupid things and did a lot of stupid things in the Middle East.
Every sane and reasonable person knows that the two greatest obstacles to peace between Israel and its enemies are Arabs and Muslims.
For my part, I always thought it was foolish of Israel to refer to communities inside its borders as settlements. It made them sound temporary in nature, something to be traded away as bribes to their existential foes.
The Israelis might as well have called Jerusalem, Tel Aviv and Haifa mere settlements. It’s certainly how their enemies saw them After all, so far as the mullahs in Iran are concerned, all of Israel is a temporary settlement.
Pete Buttigieg may be soaring to the stratosphere in the Iowa polls. But he shouldn’t leave home without a parachute. No matter if he wins the Iowa caucus or even goes on to carry New Hampshire, his Waterloo in the form of South Carolina looms ahead. The majority of voters in that state are black and among them, Buttigieg is scoring 0%.
It isn’t that blacks have anything against Indiana or against a 38-year-old whose work experience includes being the mayor of a small city in deep doo-doo. Heck, blacks don’t even consider that a bad thing. They’re accustomed to electing lousy mayors. In fact, they’re the only kind they’d even consider electing.
Mayor Pete’s problem is the very thing that’s so appealing to white Democrats. He is openly homosexual. In big cities like New York, Chicago, L.A. and San Francisco, most Democrats think electing a gay president is even cooler than electing a woman or a black.
Unfortunately, for Buttigieg, even non-religious blacks disapprove of homosexuality. It was the majority vote by blacks that got Proposition 8 passed in California. That was the proposition that declared that only marriages between a man and a woman were legitimate. Whites split 50-50, but blacks voted by a 60-40% margin in favor of the bill.
Looking back on my life, I don’t think I’ve done many things that I or anybody else would regard as shameful. But the other day, while looking at Angel and realizing what a comfort she has been in the 11 months since my wife died, one dark memory popped up, and it was definitely unbidden. I wish it had remained forgotten, but now that it’s here, I feel I have to own up to it.
Back in the ‘60s and '70s, I wrote a weekly humor column for the L.A. Times. As I was always on the lookout for comedic fodder, I could hardly wait to run out to a pet cemetery I’d heard about in the San Fernando Valley.
The mere idea of people paying good money to bury and hold a service for a dog or cat struck me as hilarious.
Once I read the epitaphs on the tombstones of four-legged creatures named Fluffy and Whiskers and Rex, the article virtually wrote itself. A mix of prose and poetry, the tombstones read as if the buried remains were those of beloved children who had died at the tender age of eight or nine or ten.
I know it sounds cruel. Hell, it was cruel.
All I can say is that I had never lived with a dog or a cat. Now that I have had three dogs – Sammy, Duke and Angel – I understand that what I did was profoundly wicked.
For what it’s worth, I am ashamed of myself.
To all pet owners and to the pets themselves, I apologize. It’s about 50 years too late, but what can I do?
I would appreciate it, though, if we could keep it our little secret. I couldn’t bear it if any of this got back to Angel.
