The ideology of the left is, at its core, about redistribution—taking wealth, money, and resources by force from some and giving them to others. We can sum up the history quickly:
After 2,000 years of gradual growth, the philosophical ideas of classical liberalism blossomed in the Enlightenment era, and reached the zenith of their political expression in the 19th century. The result was unprecedented prosperity—a meteoric rise in human wealth.
A certain portion of people (guided to a significant degree by university-educated intellectuals) looked at this unprecedented prosperity and said, in essence,
Hey, we just finally got rid of political inequality, and now it has been replaced massive material inequality. This isn’t fair!
Humans are wired to resent inequality, and the resentment rises as the gap grows. In the 19th century, many people remained poor while some became wealthier than most kings had ever been.
We were poor before, and we’re still poor. What gives?
What those who felt the resentment most keenly failed to appreciate, however, is that the rise material inequality happened (in large measure) because of the fall in political inequality. (They also failed to realize that they were not nearly as poor as their ancestors had been—that as poor as they were relative to the ‘robber barons,’ most were wealthy in comparison to the vast majority of humans who had ever drawn breath on planet Earth…though that is a topic for another time.)
Political inequality was based in a lie (that some are born to rule and others to be ruled) and maintained with oppression, or at very least by stultifying rules that no one had questioned for centuries.
Material inequality was not, but it didn’t matter. In a weird way, Marx was right—for a lot of people, it really is all about material stuff. Everyone wants stuff.
That, in a nutshell, is how the left began. It was a political movement fueled by resentment of material inequality and the promise to do something about it. While many of its trappings have changed in the modern era, redistribution has always lain at its core.
This post is too short to divert into apologetics for ‘capitalism’ and explanations for why most people who become rich do so not through trickery or oppression, but by efficiently providing things that other people want. We will, for now, take those as understood by most readers here.
Rather, I would like to take a very quick look at redistributive motives. What fuels a desire to take things from other people?
It seems to me to be morally obvious that if you did not make a thing, earn a thing, or acquire a thing in a voluntary transaction with another…that thing is not yours and you have no right to it. And yet so many people think the opposite—that the collective has some sort of just claim to your stuff, and that it has the ‘right’ to take it from you by force and to distribute it in various ways.
Even worse, people treat this moral crime as if it were some sort of virtue.
The reality is quite the opposite. Indeed, it seems that deadly sin is at work far more than any virtue…
The redistributive engine is sparked by ENVY, which is reasonably defined as follows:
[S]adness at the good fortune of another, whether in possessions, success, virtues, or talents. The sadness arises from the sense that the other person does not deserve the good fortune, but you do; and especially because of a sense that the other person's good fortune has somehow deprived you of similar good fortune.
This encapsulates much of the rhetoric emitted by the redistribution machine: Economics is a zero-sum game. You have gotten poorer because he got richer. It’s not because he worked harder or she was more talented, it is because they cheated somehow—they stole their wealth from you.
No one properly explains how the rich person stole his wealth from the poor person.1 Marx’s explanation had begun to collapse even before he died, but it did not matter—the die was cast. People resent inequality. People want stuff. And there’s stuff there for the taking!
The redistribution machine takes advantage of natural envy, magnifies it, and infects ever-more people with it.
Thus, we move straight on to COVETOUSNESS: “the strong desire for possessions, especially for possessions that belong to another.” Note that this is not the same as greed. Greed is the desire to accumulate lots of stuff. Covetousness is the desire for other people’s stuff. It is rooted in envy.
Some of the redistributive phenomenon is based in SLOTH, a.k.a. laziness.
We all have our lazy moments, but for some, laziness is a lifestyle. Perhaps there is some sort of impulse, as an apex predator, to want to conserve energy—to put in the minimum amount of effort necessary to achieve a survival objective. I don’t know. But some people are clearly lazier than others, and when they discover that there is a means by which they can subsist on the efforts of others, many will. The redistribution machine gives them the means.
Redistribution is not all about the recipients, however; it is as much, or more, about the VANITY of those who advocate for it.
Mirror mirror, on the wall, who’s the fairest one of all?
Why you, my dear—how noble you are, as you spend other people’s money to show your compassion. How fair is your voice as you tell everyone about how compassionate you are…unlike those wicked trolls who actually earned the money and foolishly believe that it is theirs to keep.
There is also vanity at work in their belief that they have a right to take it, and to rule the rest of us. They, our Olympian moral overlords. We, the benighted and greedy rabble who resist their noble purposes.
Is there GLUTTONY involved here—in the insatiable desire for more money to redistribute, more of the power needed to take that money, and more of the virtue-signaling opportunities that come along with it? You bet there is. More, more, more.
And if you oppose the redistribution machine—if you question the noble goals of the august personages who run it, or threaten their power—then you have absolutely seen their WRATH.
It is probably a stretch to include the final of the deadly sins—lust—in this enumeration. It is tempting to at least make a Jeffery Epstein joke here, but that would be crass. Six out of seven deadly sins is more than enough indictment.
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Cronyism and rigging the system are a separate matter—those are moral crimes that do not count as proper free-market ‘capitalism.’
Very interesting article that could easily become a book. It left my mind going in many directions, mostly based on my own experiences. It seems there are many different scenarios that can play out with many different outcomes, and the bottom line is that humans will always be human, and some more human than others.
Capitalism is horrible but better than anything else. It really goes awry when government gets unduly involved, evolving into fascism which is pretty much what we have in most first world countries. It certainly seems to be on a roll in this country, fueled by greed, envy and covetness.
One of the "thoughts" that I considered is that capitalism was negatively affected when companies when public; shareholders became more important than customers. Labor unions often undermine the system too. Power corrupted them as well.
Of course, I can't change anything, but your article made good conversation in my head, for which I'm grateful.
A Rinpoche of Tibetan buddhism shared with us on a retreat I went on that a compassionate king in China once redistributed, but because of people's karma (which in my mind, though I don't know in hers, could just be their energetic status quo, id their blueprint around $) the people quickly reverted to whatever their economic status had been. I see all way wins where we move toward ecology away from economy altogether, though I know it won't be instantaneous.