Very wealthy driven by addiction for even more
Lewis DiuguidAfter the Bush tax cuts created a tornadic updraft of greater wealth to people at the top of America’s income ladder, a friend offered an observation.
Having grown up in a wealthy family, he said people who are already rich can never get enough money. They become slaves to the need to keep what they’ve got while striving to acquire more. It sounded as if he was talking about most people’s idea of the American dream, but he didn’t say it in an endearing way.
It wasn’t until another friend sent me a decades-old article by Philip Slater in Quest magazine that the earlier statement made sense. Slater wrote that rich people are hopelessly addicted to their own wealth.
Not only that, but most other Americans are enablers. Slater calls them “closet addicts.” They seek to join what the Occupy Movement derides as the 1 percenters.
“Money, like heroin or cigarettes, is certainly an addiction, and one to which few of us are altogether immune,” Slater said.
It’s why the Republican controlled House and the timid Senate have opposed President Barack Obama’s efforts to raise tax rates on people making more than $200,000 a year. Obama has been labeled a socialist for wanting them to pay their “fair share” in a nation with a wealth addiction, starting with the first Europeans landing in the Americas 520 years ago.
Slater said: “Poor and middle-income people seem to tolerate being ripped off by the wealthy — either because they sense the neurotic needs of the rich and feel indulgent, or because they entertain the fantasy of becoming rich themselves. This fantasy betrays the closet addict, whose secret dream brings him into unwitting collusion with the wealthy. But it is a conspiracy from which the closet addict gains nothing and the wealth addict gains everything.”
It’s not an accident in this country that people who were white indentured servants felt akin to the landed aristocracy rather than blacks as slaves, American Indians, Hispanics and Asians. The minorities were all lowly, exploited laborers, but racism enabled whites to feel superior.
It’s why whites who never had a chance of owning slaves enlisted in the Confederate Army during the Civil War to “protect their way of life,” hoping to ascend to the ranks of the wealthy.
Lotteries, casinos and other gambling keep the dream of outrageous wealth, like Mitt Romney, Bill Gates and Warren Buffet alive for people whose best hope of getting through these hard times are places that fleece them with payday and title loans. Such joints enable the wealthy to take more from the poor and middle class.
“The closet addict, however, has lost the capacity to feel indignation toward those who take more than their share of things,” Slater wrote.
“He is deaf to injustice, blind to inequality and numb to exploitation” Slater wrote. “Injustice can’t be corrected without resentment. We don’t have to hate wealth addicts, but we need to resent their addiction and the misery it creates for all of us — our economic instability, our miserable environment, poverty and so on.”
Instead of fighting America’s third gilded age in a Teddy Roosevelt fashion, people are enamored by it. Slater calls it “plutomania,” or a morbid craving for wealth. Plutomaniacs “exercise a lot of influence in our society and have been able, through the media to inculcate addictive responses … (and argue) that everyone is after money except for a few deranged derelicts.”
Slater writes that wealth addicts aren’t happy. “Wealth tends to make people unhappy because it encourages them to try to translate all their fantasies into reality — an exhausting and usually disappointing pursuit,” he notes.
This country has to come to see that “equality is a public health measure.” Slater advocates the U.S. reinstituting a progressive tax system and the elimination of inheritance to remove the wealth addiction hazard. It would make necessities of life such as food, housing, medical care, education and a safe, pleasant, nontoxic environment attainable for all.
The November election will determine whether the wealth addiction is treated or we stay on the same hopeless path.
To reach Lewis W. Diuguid, call 816-234-4723 or send email to Ldiuguid@kcstar.com.
George Harris
Kansas City
8 months agoI think many people are satisfied with their possessions and income and don’t aspire to great wealth. That’s why they don’t resent people with multi-millions/billions. Almost everybody would take more money if offered but most wouldn’t change careers to get it. I have no proof of this; it’s just an opinion.
There probably isn’t any definition of what’s fair, though I think when some people have billions and kids are starving or need medical care, most people would think this is unfair.
Bill Mccwiliams
8 months agoPeople who are already rich can never get enough money! People who are already rich can never get enough power and control, that comes with having more money.
Matt McKinley
8 months agoTime for all you socialists to step up. If you have money left over every month after paying for food, fuel and shelter, turn that extra cash over to the government, they will take care of all your other needs. It’s your duty to lead by example for all of us misguided capitalists and christians.
Phil Cardarella
8 months agoIt is interesting that in the USA, the wealthy have been able to conflate capitalism with religion and patriotism — as if the protection of the accumulation of great wealth were a patriotic duty and religious duty. As if putting reasonable limits on capitalism were Un-American. Taxing the wealthy and the corporate equates with heresy and treason.
Interestingly enough, nations with actual nobility do not treat the nobility of wealth with near the sacredness we do.
I have always said that the greatest con job in our history was when penniless rednecks — many of whome could not afford shoes, let alone a slave — were convinced to charge grapeshot to preserve slavery for a bunch of “billionaire” plantation owners. They were able to conflate slavery with patriotism.
Frankly, Karl Marx did the USA a huge favor. Fear of socialism and communism — fear that the Rockefellers might meet the same fate as the Romanovs — allowed for some rational restrictions on the worst aspects of capitalism. Anti-trust, child labor laws, union protections, restrictions on corporate ownership of government and actual progressive taxation — all allowed a middle class to develop to insulate the wealthy against the Red Menace. TR and FDR saved the rich by helping the rest.
Wnat to know the difference? George Romney made lots of money building things. Mitt became obscenely wealthy destroying them.
Steven Fetter
66223
8 months agoThe rich founded this country. Washington, Jefferson, Madison, Hamilton and the boys, despite their enormous wealth, risked all to implement a system of government that allowed citizens to achieve their personal desires with limited government oversight.
The rich founded the banks, oil, railroads, airplane, auto, computer, and technology companies that power the economy.
The rich have charitable trusts that fund almost every library, arts, education, and civic project in the country.
Coincidentally, the rich tend to be the brightest, hardest working, risk takers in the country.
I don’t know why Warren Buffet keeps working. But I am glad he does.
Jon Whitten
8 months ago“Very wealthy driven by addiction for even more”
“Very poor are lazy and worthless bums”
Generalizations are dangerous, wouldn’t you say? However, if you are trying to fan the flames of class warfare they serve your purpose just fine.
JR Beillenhouser
8 months agoand now for proof from the “non-science” crowd, who understand something called the Laffer curve.
http://news.yahoo.com/california-facing-higher-16-billion-shortfall-213905732—finance.html
Tax increases, don’t necessarily increase the general fund.
Socialism does not work. It never has and never will. You can’t point to the social democracies in Western Europe, they are going broke and they have to pay for their defense.
Those “enablers” Lewis speaks of, are smart enough to realize that in terms of Utopia, you are living in it. This is the best the world has ever had. This is one of the few places in the world where with hard work, and some luck, you can join the rich.
Mark Hastert
8 months ago“Let me tell you about the very rich. They are different from you and me. They possess and enjoy early, and it does something to them, makes them soft where we are hard, and cynical where we are trustful, in a way that, unless you were born rich, it is very difficult to understand. They think, deep in their hearts, that they are better than we are because we had to discover the compensations and refuges of life for ourselves. Even when they enter deep into our world or sink below us, they still think that they are better than we are. They are different.”
From “The Rich Boy” F. Scott Fitzgerald, 1925
Mark Hastert
8 months agoSocialism does not work. It never has and never will. You can’t point to the social democracies in Western Europe,
Read more here: http://voices.kansascity.com/entries/very-wealthy-driven-addiction-even-more/#storylink=cpy
Gee JR. Check out Sweden, Denmark, Norway, Germany…
What hasn’t worked, what has never worked, and never will is Conservative economic policy. Tax cuts have only resulted in slower growth and fewer jobs. Republicans have been worshiping their holy trinity of tax cuts, deregulation, and tort reform since before Ronald Reagan with only failure after failure. The economy has grown more during after the Bush1 and Clinton tax increases as has job growth. Your “have your wars and tax cuts too” policy resulted in… well look around. Ten+ years of Bush2 tax cuts…still waiting.
George Luce
8 months agoMr. Duiguid,
Since you advocate that our inheritance should not go to our children. I hope that you have already signed up for that program and have given all that you have worked for to the government to distribute as they see fit.
Unfortunately my money and possessions will go to my children and not to a welfare recipient with 8 kids. Stop trying so hard to be so likable and loved by people. You don’t believe this dribble you just put it out there. I am sure your children are more deserving of what you attained than the government and its programs.
But if you really believe this BS then prove it and post that you have willed all you have to a shelter or the local welfare office. You just might spark a trend. I think that you will not, you’ll say I will wait till the powers that be take it from me. Liberals and the ilk are not giving people in general, they wait for the government to give first.
Piss a liberal off, work, be successful, be happy. Liberal/Democrat= government dependency. That’s why they have such a big base and they pander to the people on government assistance. You guys know how to make hay for people that don’t want to contribute other than to the population boom of welfare roles.
Thanks for being part of the problem and not the solution.
Kent Mueller
8 months agoOnce again, Mark spouts off and strays from the truth. Mark says Sweden is an example of a country where socialism works. But Mark doesn’t have the fact to back that up. Here are some facts. The Swedish government is selling off businesses they should not own, pharmacies being one example. Obama converts GM and Chrysler to partial ownership by the government. Obama is also on record that Obamacare is the necessary step on the way to his goal of government provided health care. I guess the government would be owning those pharmacies instead of selling them off as has been done by the Swedes.
Full or partial privatization of state pension (partial privatization of social security come to mind?), healthcare (we are going towards a single provider program), Post offices? public transportation? (if the KC streetcars would be privately owned, would the system be built?)
Mark, thanks for the example the US should follow.
Kent Mueller
8 months agoLewis, your argument that the rich are addicted to trying to get richer is false on its face.
If that was true, then Mitt Romney would not have left Bain to rescue the Olympics. He also would not have run for public office. Herb Kohl, a liberal, stopped working to maximize income to run for office, as did liberal Jon Corzine.
Lewis, that premise sounds good, well until you examine it.
Mark Hastert
8 months ago“Mark, thanks for the example the US should follow”
Thanks Kent, I’m looking forward to the social democracy like Sweden’s that you’re hoping for too. Strong environmental laws, labor unions, good health care. Their tax rates are high enough to provide the quality services good governance (56%+). And it works!