The Rich Get Richer

I said I’d have one more post on the problem of wealth, but I’ve changed my mind, and I have two. I’d like to take a moment here to ponder the just-released Census Bureau report in which we learn that the income disparity between rich and poor in the United States has increased yet again. America now has the dubious distinction of having the greatest gap between the rich and poor among Western nations. The top wealthiest 5 percent of American families earned more than $180,000 last year—an increase from the year before. Meanwhile, the median income was down more than $1,500 from the previous year. Oh, and one in four American families today earns under $25,000.

If this keeps up, we’ll have to wake up Tocqueville from the grave to have him rethink his proposition that history is moving inexorably toward equality. Or perhaps the wealthy in America can keep on pulling the wool over the eyes of the middle and lower middle class, promoting their canard that a good society rests on “free markets” and the “freedom” of everyone (including the wealthy, of course) to “keep their earnings.” And that anyone who objects to this notion of what constitutes freedom and a good society is “spewing class hatred.”

The idea that freedom can be married to enormous wealth is a strictly modern idea, emerging at least in part as a way to justify the grossest excesses of capitalism. Few think about any of the pre-modern ideas of freedom—the notion of positive freedoms, for example, where freedom only means something when it’s understood in terms of what it’s used for. Today, we talk of nothing but negative freedoms—freedom from government interference, freedom from taxation, freedom from interference in doing what we want, when we want, and so forth. The freedom of a Socrates, who could take or leave wealth, who dressed in the blanket that covered him when he slept during the night, and who freely and cheerfully went to his death for the good of Athens, is virtually incomprehensible to any of us moderns.

Who, then, could be surprised to learn that in a country where people see wealth as the purpose of their freedom, everyone is obsessed with money? Except for the poor. It turns out that the poor spend the largest percentage of their income on charity, while the miserly rich and middle class strive desperately to imitate Midas.

Charity was the most appropriate ethical and social response to the problem of poverty in pre-modern times. It’s an unexamined assumption, however, to conclude that it’s the best approach to the stubborn problem of 21st-century American poverty. The confusion comes about at least in part because being charitable prompts in the giver that warm and fuzzy all-over feeling of being good, and, as I just mentioned, those who are the most good in this respect, unfortunately, are the poorest.

Some may shrug off the gap in income between the rich and poor. To unapologetic progressives like me, however, the gap exposes the devastating loss of what was once a healthy American public sphere. The gap tells us that we’re being sucked into a vast black hole where each American is no more than an isolated speck of matter.  

And to unapologetic progressives like me, charity is all well and good for the giver, but it will never close the gap.

Next Post: Why the Wealthy Are So Helpless