What have the rich got that we haven’t got? Besides money?
Well, many assaults on their money.
Less cash-encumbered mortals also get our pockets picked by those with political pull. But persons of certain envious bent are particularly eager to assail the wealthiest among us. (You know who you are, envious people and wealthy people.)
Peter Schiff took a camera to the Democratic Convention and asked attendees what they felt about the idea of curtailing or outlawing corporate profits. Interviewee upon interviewee exclaimed in grateful agreement, “Oh yes! Great idea. Love to see that!” Outlawing profit, killing enterprise, destroying economic life, turning the earth into a barren landscape, sure, let’s do it!!!
Forward!
Then there’s the Chicago Teachers Union’s strike bulletin, which was issued on September 8 but has apparently been memory-holed from the web page where the Illinois Policy Institute found it. Among the chants for union members hoping to pad their on-average $76,000 per annum salaries with a 30 percent hike were such beauties as “The war on unions is a joke. Tax the rich that made us broke. How to fix the deficit? Tax, tax, tax the rich!”
Blame the rich? While some rich people and businesses rigged and gamed the system to take huge government subsidies, thus helping “make us broke,” everyone with their hand in the cookie jar contributed. The problem is the cookie jar itself.
And I note that the teachers’ chant isn’t “Stop, stop, stop subsidizing some corporations and appeasing the ridiculous demands of teachers unions!”
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
Free Trade! What is it? Why, breaking down the barriers that separate nations; those barriers, behind which nestle the feelings of pride, revenge, hatred, and jealousy, which every now and then burst their bounds, and deluge whole countries with blood; those feelings which nourish the poison of war and conquest, which assert that without conquest we can have no trade, which foster that lust for conquest and dominion which sends forth your warrior chiefs to scatter devastation through other lands, and then calls them back that they may be enthroned securely in your passions, but only to harass and oppress you at home.
I didn’t know I was a slave until I found out I couldn’t do the things I wanted.
I am credited with being one of the hardest workers and perhaps I am, if thought is the equivalent of labour, for I have devoted to it almost all of my waking hours. But if work is interpreted to be a definite performance in a specified time according to a rigid rule, then I may be the worst of idlers. Every effort under compulsion demands a sacrifice of life-energy. I never paid such a price. On the contrary, I have thrived on my thoughts.
Nobody would work for starvation wages if he were not in a situation in which he preferred such wages to not working at all.
If you are neutral in situations of injustice, you have chosen the side of the oppressor. If an elephant has its foot on the tail of a mouse and you say that you are neutral, the mouse will not appreciate your neutrality.