Supply-siders assert that giving tax cuts and scrapping estate taxes will boost spending and help the economy. Opponents fear the rich will just hoard it. I say on with the tax cuts, because we want them to hoard.
By extending the temporary repeal of the death tax (scheduled to jump to 55 percent at year’s end for the affected millionaires) and by fighting inflation (rumored to perhaps be increased soon), we must propagate a permanent, hereditary upper class, whose existence is both fair and useful.
For what is unjust about a little Rothschild boy getting a few billion for nothing? Of course he didn’t deserve it, but what did you deserve? Did you deserve college; I mean, are you such a fine specimen that college is owed to you in strict justice? What about, from before you could work, your clothes, food, vaccines, milk, diapers and shelter?
No, we did not deserve it; an accident of birth delivered these things, which could have been distributed differently. They are just our birthright for being born under particular circumstances.
All is much the same for young Rothschild, just much more so. That may goad us, but from offended justice or just envy?
Why is it wrong for him to be rich, in accordance both with the custom of millennia and with the wishes of the owners, who have the right — in the strictest, most concrete sense — to do what they want with their money?
Yes, the government may tax wealth, provided it has sufficient reason, and “sufficient reason” is stamped all over so many things. But those things will remain undone no matter how much our government taxes, so our task is to weigh having a wealthy class against an insignificantly smaller national debt.
For one thing, the rich are, well, rich. Some people don’t like that, especially when they just hoard it. But “hoarding” is another word for “minimizing risk,” or “making sure somebody still has money if it all goes to pieces.” Daily columnist Evan DeFilippis was upset on Wednesday that $10 trillion of private cash aren’t making jobs, but that’s the safest kind of $10 trillion.
And hoarded money isn’t gone forever even if untaxed; each generation a Paris Hilton returns some to the larger economy.
The inflation which is supposed to increase wealth is what can end up actually destroying it.
Further, the rich by inheritance, with their leisure and their liberal educations, money to buy both respect and whatever they like, a natural concern for their heirs and ancestors, and a habit of considering more than immediate necessities, have historically been superb patrons of the arts and sculptors of society. Today, these roles are filled by trashy pop stars and the derided National Endowment for the Arts.
Yet in response, our wealthy are encouraged to think, not about how best to use money, but how best to get more. The goal of our monetary policy and our tax structure is to promote investing by eroding wealth, putting us all into an absurd and unstable looking-glass world where you must sprint to remain standing.
This looks silly to you; why are we talking about things like art and future security during a crisis of unemployment?
We don’t want to spend all our ammunition killing today’s bear. But also, we are in a crisis of culture; even among the educated, nobody reads, nobody has decent manners, nobody learns simply for enjoyment, nobody looks at the future except in terms of material prosperity, nobody thinks. This brain-atrophy is the disaster of our time, and must be fought now.
While the masses of Europe were impoverished farmers, hereditary wealth had a culture that was, with its faults, noble and thoughtful. Today, with the educational institutions to give everyone that culture, few even in the upper classes have it. Not only could more hereditary wealth stabilize markets, but maybe it could re-humanize us.
— Gerard Keiser, linguistics and classical languages junior
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soonerboomers 1 year, 7 months ago
If we bought to underlying premise, which is that allowing aristocracies would create high culture and that high culture is a good thing, we are still made to ask whether the sharing of high culture among a handful of people should be be pursued in the face of poverty and inequality and other sorts of distributive injustice that could be alleviated instead.
Any objective disinterested bystander would surely prefer the latter. These counter-intuitive arguments are fun to read, but ultimately boring when one takes a second to actually consider the argument.
No, as a matter of fact, it is not the case that a handful of people having some sort of high art is preferable to the well-being of millions.
sniferriple 1 year, 7 months ago
No, it's definitely offended justice I'm feeling here.
A hereditary aristocracy would do a lot for culture... for the hereditary aristocracy. How would the rest of us poor unlanded folk afford to go to the concerts and art shows they paid for? We'd be too busy working. To support their lifestyle.
Moreover, poverty is a problem historically cruelly interlocked with race. Even now, the vast majority of the very rich in this country are white. A hereditary aristocracy would put power in the hands of the males who passed on the family name. Basically, you're suggesting that we wipe nearly a hundred years of forward momentum for women and underprivileged minorities out of existence and put more power in the hands of straight white males.
And who's to say the aristocracy was any better-mannered or had "more humanity" than the middle and lower classes? The human rights offenses they committed were part of the reason for the shift in mentality that led to its decline, along with the loss of the hereditary systems of government that funded their existence and the rise of an American culture that rejected the notion of a society lacking the possibility of upward mobility.
America's already a classist country. It doesn't need to be more classist than it is. There's nothing wrong with being rich; there's something wrong with deciding who gets to be rich and who gets to be poor.
braceyourself 1 year, 7 months ago
Yeah, those Fendi bags and expensive cars really help propagate culture...
Tiberius 1 year, 7 months ago
I think that you should have stopped after talking about what people deserve. The culture part is absurd, but you are right in saying that the lower classes do not deserve the funds of the wealthy.
Bubba 1 year, 7 months ago
Is this an article designed to inspire others to think better, but whose author can't spell "brainier"?
-Bubba
academon 1 year, 7 months ago
The saddest thing is that I cannot tell if this is satire or not. Congratulations, Gerard, you just evoked Poe's Law.