Friday, March 12, 2021

Chapter 1: Section 4: Page 32: Line 131-132 (503-504)

 "Hell, send it on to me," Ray Ipsow put in. "Or even to somebody who really needs it, for there's sure enough of those."

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Ray's first reaction, like probably everybody's, is "I'll take some of that!" But at least he has the clarity of mind to pretend he's not all selfish greed like these evil capitalists and suggests that maybe some of that unspent wealth just sitting there not buying gold-paved dog runs might be used for some good. But now who's being naïve?! Scarsdale Vibe will surely have some standard rich-person argument against this suggestion. "Do you think rich people have enough to raise everybody out of poverty? How do you choose who gets it? Do poor people even deserve it? How do they prove they deserve the hand out? If they didn't want to be poor, they could pull themselves up by their bootstraps. It's my money; I don't owe it to anybody."

It's easy for a rich person to think, "I earned this money. I don't owe it to anybody." But it's also easy for everybody else to see how they almost certainly didn't earn the money at all and, in most cases, exploited the system to, in effect, steal as much of it as possible, or simply inherited it from fathers and grandfathers who did all of the theft themselves. And it's also certainly easy for them to think, "I worked hard for this money. Poor people must be lazy bastards who definitely don't deserve a hand out." Again, they're simply deluded in this thinking. Ultimately, they got their riches through theft, imperialism, or the exploiting of the labor classes who actually did do all of the hard work and were paid a pittance for it because of a system that forces other people to accept maybe less than a pittance if they can get it because they have families to feed and the industrialization of the world, and the move of large populations to urban centers, has sunk the ability of most people to earn a quiet, self-sustained life.

I hope Ray Ipsow winds up punching Scarsdale Vibe in the nose. Sure, it wouldn't be civil and I'm encouraging violence. But when rich people have taken away your every ability to counter their illicit behavior by controlling the means of production and by having police forces as their own attack dogs, what more can you do put pull back your fist and let one rip?

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