The Spiteful Rich


I read this article entitled “Soaking the Spiteful Rich” on Just One Minute and also followed the linked articles within it. The whole discussion centered on a post by Brad Delong with the central point being “…a good chunk of the utility the rich derive from their conspicuous consumption is transferred to them from the poor”. Mr. Delong followed his original post up with another post that claimed “…one reason that America's rich today live the expensive and ostentatious lifestyles they do (rather than spending much more money on charity, or philanthropy) is that it is a way of making other people feel small and unhappy”. This idea seems so intuitively wrong to me that I just have to make a few points.

• When you start guessing about other people’s motives, you say more about yourself than you do about them. We barely understand our own motives and we understand others motives even less. When you speak of an entire group such as America’s rich, you are certainly going to wrong about the majority of them.


• The decisions that people make are usually motivated by more than one concern. If, for instance, I’m trying to pick a new car to buy, then I’m interested in its style, performance, reliability, utility, comfort, economy, etc. Even if the status associated with the car is one of my acknowledged criteria, it’s only one of many. So to say that I buy a car to make other people feel unhappy is just ridiculous.


• People are by nature status-seekers. Given any group of people brought together for any reason (anything from a nation of people down to a small church group), they will instinctively look around and start comparing themselves to each other. They’ll find ways to compete and establish a hierarchy of status within the group. It could be grade-school boys competing to be the king of the schoolyard, high-school girls competing for boys, or suburbanites competing for the best-kept home. It doesn’t matter: form a group of people and you’ll form a group of competitors. America being so fond of money and materials, we compete for economic status. That shouldn’t be a surprise because it’s inevitable. Now, all of the competitions are relative. If you’re living in a mud shack while everyone else is sleeping under palm fronds then you’re the winner. You can feel good about yourself while everyone else wishes they had what you have. Even if you were to tax the heck out of the rich and reduce the income gap between rich and poor (regardless of the consequences to the economy and everyone’s overall welfare) the rich would still be rich and poor will still be poor. Thus it has always been and thus it will always be.


• Finally, when did it become the job of the government to guarantee the happiness of its citizens? It’s so obviously an impossible task. The best the government can do is to provide for the safety and security of its people so that we can get about the task of making lives for ourselves.