(Update at bottom)
The United States and the West are in a world of trouble. I say this for probably not the reasons that you expect and are so obvious to most concerning debt and a poor economy. I say this because the USA & the West are in serious trouble due to poor schooling and with that, are you ready for it? The current hate of the rich and wealthy.
Send your kids to the best school you can afford
Yes. Far too many people in the west seem to hate the rich these days. It's a very bad situation and if this continues will certainly have seriously bad repercussions for all nations and even poor people. Why? Well, Karl Marx would be happy, but hating the rich translates into people thinking it is OK for the government to increase taxes and get more involved with wealth redistribution.
Folks, more government is not the answer. Government is the problem. If more government were a good solution to our problems then the Soviet Union would have been a very successful country. But they weren't.
One thing good about Japan, though, is that I don't notice the Japanese hating the rich. The Japanese have their problems too but they have their heads on straight and do not hate the rich. They aspire to become the rich. That's logical and normal behavior. It used to be normal behavior in the west too. But now? Now in the USA and the west, people have probably started hating the rich because they can't find a way out of their debt and their financial troubles so they become jealous of what others have. I know this trend is definitely forwarded by the mass media.
Just think how much derision was scorned on Mitt Romney because he is rich! Sure, Romney is might be a jerk, but being rich is not one of the reasons why.
It hasn't been that long ago that books like "Rich Dad, Poor Dad" by Robert Kiyosaki was a best-seller, was it?
The seeds of this current trend of hating the rich (around for a long time on Liberal Arts university campus) seem to me to have been really accelerated from the so-called "99%" trend that came out of the "Occupy movement" that says the 1% are evil and somehow got their money through dishonest ways. Certainly there are some who were involved in criminal enterprises but I'd wager they pale in comparison to the crimes our government commits on a daily basis. Certainly it was the government who bailed out the banks and zombie industries. But how that now translates into the current trend of hating the rich is a curious leap indeed.
It's not the rich who are our problems here folks. It's the poor who are the problem; the poor have no money and, in many cases, a bad education. If you think I am wrong then go to some rich neighborhood and check it out then, after that, go to the ghetto in Los Angeles, New York or Detroit look around and then tell me that you think it's the rich that are "part of the problem."
Recently, I posted an article entitled, "Japan is Collapsing" I wrote:
I am angry at the stupid Japanese government for taking our tax money and bailing out these zombie banks and keeping the status quo intact at the expense of the people and our children's future. I am furious that the situation has gone on for so long. I am angry that it is not only us who is feeling the pain but everyone else I know... I get angry when I read the news and see that 15.7% of all Japanese are under the poverty level. I get pissed off when I see that our debt to GDP is over 237%....
And I really get angry when I read that these idiots in government want to raise our taxes and keep with the failed policies of these last twenty plus years.
And it really really astounds me that the people who got us into this mess can get reelected again. What a farce.
Due to that article, I've been infuriated with socialists making absurd claims. The most ridiculous (and incorrect ones) one from a reader who still insists that "one of the problems with Japan's economy is that everyone assumes a paternalistic company to pay for all these benefits for their employees?"
This is just so wrong on so many levels that I don't know where to begin. First of all, companies do not pay for the local Japanese to send their kids to private schools; this is a practice limited to hiring and recruiting top-class foreign labor. To think that such a small .00078740157 percent of the population is part of the reason of Japan's economic funk is mind-boggling.
Anyway, it shows what I mention above: a bad education and a trend for hating the rich. There are rich foreigners in Japan, for sure, but most of us do not get paid that well... Sure they might drive nice cars and live in big houses, but those houses and cars are paid for by the corporation. Also, ex-pats are only here for a short number of years. Their children cannot be allowed to fall behind in school compared to their peers back home (otherwise the experienced foreign talent won't come here). The companies pay for these expenses as a tax break (individuals paying for private schooling in Japan is not tax-deductable).
Think about it; a corporation pays for good talent to work for them in order so that the company can make more money. The schools receive these funds and pay for employees and those employees take that money a recycle it back into the economy. And some people think this is a part of Japan's economic problems?
What the heck? Don't people understand basic economics anymore?
There's 127 million people in Japan and ex-pat westerners don't even number over 100,000...
So the debt to GDP of 237% and 15.7% of all Japanese living below the poverty line is, in part, fault of the .00078740157% of the population of the country and, people who comprise folks living in the upper-class of wealth. (100K divided by 127 million is .0007874015 or .078740157 percent).
Right. You see, it's the rich people who are the problem?????
Like I said, the real reason (and the real part of the world wide problem of too much government spending and too many people on the dole) someone makes a claim that "one of the problems..." (is because of foreign corporations paying for ex-pat children schooling) is actually a symptom of what's really wrong with American & western society today: People have a poor education and can't think. They watch too much TV and have been indoctrinated (brain washed) into thinking that being rich and having money is a bad thing (Why not hate what you can't have, right?) Whereas decades ago, being rich and having a nice car, a large house, a beautiful wife, were things to aspire to, today they are something that people criticize and hold in suspicion.
The mass media has done a good job of marketing to the unwashed masses.
I have written volumes about mass media brainwashing. It shouldn't surprise me at all how easily people are duped... But it still does sometimes.
Interestingly, over at Zerohedge, there is an article today that explains exactly what the problem is with these people who think private industry or the wealthy are the problem... Please refer to "Hating the Rich:
Western culture is presently defined by many things; one of which being an instilled sense of extreme jaundice toward wealth. No doubt Karl Marx would beam with pleasure in seeing how the contemporary bourgeoisie is regarded with hateful suspicion.
...
Before the twentieth century and the ascendance of the all-intrusive state, sumptuous living was typically seen as something to aspire to. It aroused jealously which fueled a lust for reaching such heights of luxury; not to pick away at success.
...
The bourgeoisie values of prudence and temperance are no longer respected in the Western world. They are seen as anachronistic and not in tune with the needs of society. This is a self-defeating attitude that will only lead to further impoverishment. For as long as success is punished and high time preferences are rewarded, the capacity for productive efforts deteriorates.
Coercive egalitarianism based on ill feelings of Schadenfreud is a cancer.
Absolutely. How anyone could think that people who create private business and create jobs and wealth (and pay huge taxes) are a part of the problem is beyond comprehension. It is they who have no money and think the government should do more, along with that government interference in the economy and our lives that is the problem.
What a pathetic situation indeed. I'm teaching my children that being rich is good and that emulating and aiming for that in life is what each and everyone of us should do.
My kids deserve the best. Don't yours?
Update: I know economically illiterate people, especially leftists and Liberals, won't bother to read Henry Hazlitt, "Economics in One Lesson" so let me direct them to a short explanation in a more macro sense at Market Ticker: http://market-ticker.org/akcs-www?post=214480
5 comments:
"One thing good about Japan, though, is that I don't notice the Japanese hating the rich. The Japanese have their problems too but they have their heads on straight and do not hate the rich. They aspire to become the rich. That's logical and normal behavior."
I was just thinking about this re: Hong Kong. Class warfare is alive and well in the US, but it was hard to find in Hong Kong (unless you hung out with British expats). There are plenty of rich people in HK and plenty of poor people, and guess what? The poor people believe they can become rich by working hard, and they actually DO! To be fair, it is a lot easier to do that in HK, where you don't have a million stupid regulatory hoops to jump through every time you want to engage in business of any kind.
Class warfare over here dates back longer than Occupy though, sadly. It's the attitude that's taught in liberal arts colleges, and it's just "cool" to hate the rich and identify with the downtrodden. The irony of course is that compared to the rest of the world those in the US and UK ARE the rich. - Bretigne Shaffer
I think these last blog entrys are really on perception and need to be put into perspective. The United States citizen hates the decline of the middle class, loss of spending power, high unemployment, and the ultra-high concentration of wealth in the hands of a few. Do politicans exploit this angst and muddy the waters for their own gain, you betcha. Mike Rogers decrys cronyism, and I believe is part of the solution. The United States is not the same country it was when M. Rogers left it. I proudly voted for Ron Paul. The press decried Ron Paul's idea that the Federal Emergency Management Agency should not bail out rich people who could easily buy private insurance for their expensive beach front properties. The upper echelons of the Democrats are fabulously wealthy. The finanical collapse of 2008 was really eye opening for this generation. The banker bailouts proved it was Socialism for the rich, and free market for the rest. One only has to look at the last four president's cabinet members. Its made up of bankers galore. The same type of bankers that are hurting Japan with allowing so much debt. Harvard educated Americans become lawyers (mainly corporate) or bankers. People in the mid to late 2000's really thought if they could get a 2nd house they could be famously wealthy.The free market proved otherwise and the government got the tax payer to bail them out. Both Obama and Bush 44 voted for the bail out.
I think most of the rich hate in the U.S. stems from the fact they don't pay the same tax rate the rest of us do. It's BS that Romney only pays a 12% tax rate. You can argue it's due to his 'charitable contributions' but he can donate to a non-profit Super Pac to get tax deductions, that spends the donated money supporting Romney, it's a pretty screwed up system.
Also, the fastest growing Rich in the U.S. isn't job creators it's the financial industry. A hedge fund doesn't make it's money from creating jobs, it makes it's money from shuffling around investments.
Entrepreneurs are the ones that create jobs, but the likelihood of getting incredibly rich as an entrepreneur is minuscule to the financial markets.
When I was in college I came home for the weekend and was discussing economics with my grandfather, who was a genius with a 6th grade education. He listened a lot and after letting me regurgitate the Keynesian and Monoterist crap I had been taught by my economics professors, he just said "I ain't never worked for a poor man." A profound economic principle if I ever heard one. Wealth is the basis for having a division of labor and increasing productivity. No rich people, no jobs. - Mark Davis
Most people probably don't know Karl Marx treated money like water because he was always mooching off his rich friend Friedrich Engels and that Marx . I'd like to think a man's lifestyle greatly shapes his beliefs, some not necessarily for the better.
Also, in mentioning the "rich", it probably excludes the ones they expect, the megacorporations funded by the government itself.
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