February 28th 2009
Class Warfare
T
here’s a book excerpt in Salon today, a story by a Brooklyn woman of her quest to buy a home back before the bubble burst, driven by the common fear that if she didn’t get in, she would continue to pay landlords for the rest of her live, that her children would never play in their own backyard.
The excerpt ends abruptly after two pages, just as she’s talking with her Realtor about buying a place using a no-documentation loan. I know the rest. They get a crappy, expensive loan and buy a vastly overpriced home. They’re now upside down, and since they never really had the wherewithall to afford the place, they’re at risk of losing it and want The Gift-Giver in DC to bail them out using other people’s money.
Yawn. Not interested. But I am interested in the class hatred this woman exhibits as she watches more successful families move into the new condos that are being built in her new neighborhood:
Later, I’m in the park with my friend Geri and our spawn. I’m talking about the weekend and the million-dollar condos and the fancy new crop of families at the school when I find myself off on a rant against rich people and their designer diaper bags that starts from my toes and gushes forth like a Vesuvius of resentment. “These douchebags come in and ruin everything. What is it?” I ask. “Why do they make me so crazy?”
Geri, with all the wisdom of the Dalai Lama if he’d grown up over a bar in New Jersey, fixes her gaze on me. “Do you know any rich people?” she asks.
I ponder this. I have a suspicion a few of our friends are wealthier than they let on, but actual, three-kids-in-private-school, wheeeee-I-have-so-much-money rich? “A few,” I tell her.
“They’re all a**holes, right?” she replies. I have to admit she has a point there. “You don’t get rich enough to buy a house in this neighborhood today unless you’re f***ing people. So when you see somebody pushing one of those $800 strollers, you know it was paid for by f***ing people. That,” she says with a flourish, “is what you hate.”
That’s it? If you’re rich, you might as well have a tattoo on your forhead that says “I f*** people?”
Look, I live in Coto, where the nefarious “Real” Housewifes of Orange County folks live, so I know ruinous rich folks when I see them, but I also know plenty of amazingly decent people who happen to be rich – and they didn’t get there by hurting others. I know an amazingly giving and charitable family that owns a chain of restaurants that serve hearty meals and a fair price, and another that owns a chain of hotels and loses bookings every day because they refuse to put pay-for-view movies in the rooms since doing so would require carrying porn.
Rich folks like this are all over the place; it’s called success, achieving your dreams, filling a need. And if the author of the book gets bailed out, it will be these rich people who pay for her mistake. Obama will dig deep into their pockets so the Brooklynite doesn’t have to deal with her prejudices and her errors, so that she can go on with a grudge on her shoulder, hating anyone who does better than her, demanding a neutered and dying America so she can feel better.
She’s an Obama gal. No doubt.
Posted in Housing/Development, Uncategorized | 9 Comments » | |
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March 4th, 2009 at 4:49 am
March 4th, 2009 at 7:10 am
March 4th, 2009 at 2:46 pm
March 5th, 2009 at 2:23 am
March 5th, 2009 at 10:26 am
March 6th, 2009 at 10:36 am
March 12th, 2009 at 1:04 am
Comments
March 1st, 2009 at 6:01 pm
Well said, Laer.
There are two ways to get rich. One is by taking from other people and it is unfortunately true that some people do get rich that way. The other way is by giving to other people, and in my experience that is how most of the rich people I know became rich.
Liberal leaders like to assert in the media that all rich people got that way by taking from others. Could that be because that is how they themselves became rich?
Their assertion is based on a common fallacy which has been in circulation so long that hardly anyone thinks to question it any more. It is the notion that there is only so much wealth in the world and that that quantity fixed.
Liberals like to refer to this “fixed” quantity of wealth as a “pie” and proclaim (as Michelle Obama did recently) that there is only so much “pie” to go around, the implication being that if one person wants more of the “pie”, someone else will have to make do with less.
It is true that if you take a snapshot of the world economy, you will find that there is only so much wealth in it. But if you take another snapshot of the economy, say a year later, you will see that the amount of wealth has changed and most likely increased.
The amount of wealth in the world is not fixed like a snapshot. It is, rather, always changing like a motion picture. That is because surrounding that “fixed” amount of wealth which you see in the snapshot is a vast and limitless ocean of opportunity, and the function of businesses, owned by people who with a desire to become rich, is to convert that opportunity into new wealth.
Consider, for example, the telephone. Its invention made Alexander Graham Bell a very wealthy man, but how much wealth did it generate for other millions of people? Consider airplanes, lasers, personal computers, Teflon, automobiles, antibiotics — the list could go on and on practically forever. The wealth created for the general population by these inventions and other inventions like them is incalculable.
So the other way to become rich is simply to go about the business of baking more “pie”, and that is what good and healthy businesses do.
If liberals take away the incentives for people who desire wealth to form and grow healthy businesses, then the “pie” will indeed become fixed, and we will become a nation of takers instead of givers.
March 4th, 2009 at 10:30 am
There are many people who have those same opinions of the “rich”. But they don’t know anything. We send our grandson to private Christian school in Nashville, because (1) his father has seen him a total of 2 times in 10 years; (2) his mother is a lazy good for nothing (our daughter) who was raised in a loving home, was smart, got scholarships to college, but decided to leave home, live with a drug adict, get pregnant, and 11 years later still takes no responsibility for anything’ (3) the grandson needs a Christian, moral, school with friends and adult role models, because he sure does not get them from either parent.
Our daughter told our grandson that the parents who had children there were “rich”, that the mothers didn’t have to work, that they could buy and do anything they wanted because they were “rich”. She doesn’t have a job, works a home-phone gig for spending money.
The truth is many of the grandparents are paying the tuition for kids there and some of the parents work 2 and 3 jobs in order to keep their children in this good environment.
You can’t tell some people anything. They get an idea in their head and it stays. It is envy, pure and simple. However, people like our daughter don’t have enough gumption to get up off their lazy butts, get some education, get a good job, and take care of themselves. No, they would rather the government or their parents pick up the bill.
We have her on TOUGH LOVE. We give her nothing, we provide for our grandson’s necessities, birthday, Christmas gifts. We provide a good place for him to come and spend holidays, as do our in-laws who live close.
We are college educated, professionals who didn’t have anything given to us. We worked whatever jobs we could get to support ourselves, get through school, get out on our own. We worked hard for everything we have.
Some people don’t understand that concept (including our daughter).
Sorry for the rant.