Haven't we always loved this pairing of words? Obscenely Rich, Disgustingly Rich, an Embarrassment of Riches? What is wrong with being rich? Is being wealthy a sin? Why do so many of us simultaneously love and loathe wealth? Envy? Well, duh! Of course! In popular culture there is a general sense that a person is wealthy because they have somehow worked for it, they have earned it. Fair enough. What do they do to earn their wealth? Work hard? Well, so do I. And so do you. But we aren't wealthy, are we? They are driven, ambitious, they have a driving force propelling them that would reduce us lesser mortals to ashes? Maybe.
This post is derived from two separate conversations that I was eavesdropping on. But I wasn't really eavesdropping. I just happened to be a passive audience to some rather loud voices in conversation. One between a couple of middle age women walking in the forest just yesterday. I happened to be seated on my favourite bench bedazzled as always by the play of sunlight on the tree trunks, branches and leaves and two women of a certain age (which is to say, my own) were walking by and they were speaking about the driving ambition that makes certain people wealthy and how unfair it is to try to judge everyone else by the same standard. I almost shouted out to them how much I agree but loud as their voices were I knew it wasn't my conversation and besides I was too busy being bedazzled by the play of sunlight on the trees.
Today on the bus there was a similar conversation between two women, perhaps a bit younger, and I particularly heard the words "Filthy Rich" and I mentioned to the person with me, "You know, I think I might write about this in my blog this evening." So, what is it that brings together the words rich and filthy? Money does cling to one like dirt but dirt is also fertile and this is what grows trees and plants and food. It goes without saying that wealth can produce and create a lot, good or evil. It creates munitions and weapons of mass destruction and it also builds housing and support infrastructures for the poor and homeless.
Far more gets spent on weapons and war and monuments and public follies and vanities. I am thinking of the new roof they put on Vancouver's BC Place Stadium five years ago that cost the taxpayers in BC a half billion dollars. This is the same government that claims that it does not have the money to invest in affordable housing. That half billion if invested wisely would have solved for the long term Vancouver's crisis of homelessness.
Last night I listened on CBC Radio One to a program by Anna-Maria Tremonti about how wealth makes people more selfish and less concerned about others. Famous Canadian millionaire (billionaire?) Kevin O'Leary shot back with the rejoinder that he among many other rich people give millions to charitable causes that they support. Okay. Your money, your choice. But this is my question about what makes wealth filthy. This comes right down to your own social perspective or your leitmotif about money and wealth: it is a personal reward for hard work and since you have earned it and it is all yours and no one can tell you what to do with it. Or, as I tend to believe, all wealth is part of the common good and the community treasury and those who happen to accrue wealth by fair means or foul, have a civic and moral duty to see that wealth applied to the common good. This has very little to do with supporting causes that you agree with and everything to do with creating and developing a system of taxation that does not permit any excess of wealth to rot in Swiss bank accounts but rather to build and develop your community, your society, your country, and the world.
Ms. Tremonti found that people who became wealthy tended to praise only themselves and believed that even if it was inherited wealth that they had somehow done it all themselves. Those who do give away their wealth, with a few happy exceptions, tend to give only to foundations and societies that reflect their personal values. For example, Kevin O'Leary supporting an organization that helps young people become entrepreneurs, presumably so they can get rich as Croesus, like him? He didn't say anything about helping the homeless, or widows and orphans. He likely doesn't even know, much less care, that they exist. This is what taxation and high taxation such a necessary evil (or perhaps a necessary good?) Left with complete control over their wealth and holdings the generous wealthy would only support causes and charities that reflect their own values. Since it has already been reliably found that the moral compass of rich people tends to be limited, damaged or nonexistent the prospect of this kind of unbridled and selective generosity and its potential impact on the common good would be, to put it mildly, frightening.
Listen up all you millionaires and billionaires, you rich bastards. You are all robber barons. Not one of you got rich on your own. There were people helping you, promoting you, working for you at crap wages, and being stepped on by you all the way during your climb to the top. None of us rises alone and for this reason you owe us, all of us because that money is not yours. We have all worked for it with you and it is time for you to break your Swiss piggy bank because if you don't do it then we are going to do it for you and then we are going to break you along with your goddam Swiss piggy bank.
Deng Xiao-Peng, when he announced the opening of market forces in China in 1979 decreed that to be rich is glorious. And I agree, so long as the riches are shared out for the common good, like fertilizer and rich black soil from which beautiful things can grow and produce gardens of good food to nourish us all. But if you cling to your wealth without giving a thought to the rest of us who made you rich then your money becomes filth, clinging to you and defiling everything that you touch. Filth or fertilizer, it is right now up to you, but the gap between rich and poor is going to grow only so much wider before all the rest of us decide that it is no longer up to you when we rise up in revolution and take back from you what rightfully belongs to all of us.
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