Number Six- That Would Be the Sin of Envy

Bill Whittle’s latest Firewall Video deals with number six on the list of seven deadly sins, envy, and how the left uses it to promote class warfare. I had a few things to say about envy myself a few years back, as well as envy’s kissing-cousin, greed. You can read that here but meanwhile, here’s Bill:

 

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Rich Man, Poor Man - A Dose of Perspective from Bill Whittle

The War Against the Producers - Victor Davis Hanson

The incomparable Victor Davis Hanson has a post up at PJ Media that is a must read. So, um, why not go read it. A sample:

Ponder a simple fact: The Obama administration is dispersing income lavishly to those who do not pay taxes and it will have to be paid for by those who do. For all the talk of that awful percentile who make over $200,000, this administration has not distinguished the hyper-rich 1% that make untold money (e.g., the Buffets, Soroses, Turners, Gateses, Kerrys, Gores, etc), from the much more demonized, larger 5% of the population whose income does not come from investments and insider influence and deal-making, but rather from providing more tangible goods and services — the family doctor, the plumbing contractor, the small lumber company owner, the car dealer, the local family-held insurance company, the airline pilot, the car-leasing firm, the patent attorney, etc.

What the Democrats Are Up To - In the Words of One of Their Own

I've posted a couple of times now about how the Republican Party keeps trying to play by Marquis of Queensbury rules while the Democrats bring knives and brass knuckles to the fight. The Republicans get slaughtered, every single time. David Kahane (the nom de plume of a Hollywood writer), a self-professed "man of the left", openly tells us the same in this article at the National Review. Can we please take them at their word, that is seriously, now?

Yes, my friends, it’s once again time to quote Sean Connery’s famous speech from The Untouchables, written by David Mamet — the lecture the veteran Chicago cop gives a wet-behind-the-ears Eliot Ness (Kevin Costner, back when he was a movie star) while they sit in a church pew. “You want to get Capone? Here’s how you get him: he pulls a knife, you pull a gun, he sends one of yours to the hospital, you send one of his to the morgue. That’s the Chicago way!” If you just think of us — liberal Democrats — as Capone you’ll begin to understand what we’re up to. And we just put one of yours in the morgue.

I don’t know why I’m telling you this, but maybe now you’re beginning to understand the high-stakes game we’re playing here. This ain’t John McCain’s logrolling senatorial club any more. This is a deadly serious attempt to realize the vision of the 1960s and to fundamentally transform the United States of America. This is the fusion of Communist dogma, high ideals, gangster tactics, and a stunning amount of self-loathing. For the first time in history, the patrician class is deliberately selling its own country down the river just to prove a point: that, yes, we can! This country stinks and we won’t be happy until we’ve forced you to admit it.

In other words, stop thinking of the Democratic Party as merely a political party, because it’s much more than that. We’re not just the party of slavery, segregation, secularism, and sedition. Not just the party of Aaron Burr, Boss Tweed, Richard J. Croker, Bull Connor, Chris Dodd, Richard Daley, Bill Ayers, the Reverend Jeremiah Wright, and Emperor Barack Hussein Obama II. Not just the party of Kendall “Agent 202” Myers, the State Department official recruited as a Cuban spy along with his wife during the Carter administration. Rather, think of the Democratic Party as what it really is: a criminal organization masquerading as a political party.

As much as most people would like to think that everyone's intentions, on both sides of the aisle, are honorable, it ain't so. If an admission like this doesn't wake you up to that fact, I don't know what will. Read the whole thing, of course.

(hat tip to MBG)

The Rapacity of Odacity

A friend forwarded this article by James Lewis from The American Thinker. It ties in pretty nicely with my post on the Yin and Yang of Greed and Envy from earlier this month.

"Socialism is rapaciously greedy -- that's what endless envy warfare comes down to. The Left likes to preen itself with the word ‘progressive,' when it is actually the most regressive political strategy in history. The key political move is to seek out the most rapacious people -- not hungry for food but power -- and use them to mobilize an attack on the productive sector, the milk cows of society. It is the most primitive political strategy ever. It goes back to the Romans and long before. Karl Marx merely reinvented a very old and decrepit wheel."

Read it all.

The Yin and Yang of Greed and Envy

The political left likes to hurl the epithet that those on the right, Republicans in particular, are greedy. Greed, one of the seven deadly sins enumerated by the Catholic Church, is defined as the overwhelming desire to have more of something, frequently money, than one actually needs.

In Chinese philosophy there is the concept of yin and yang. Yin, a so-called feminine principal, has connotations of darkness and negativity. Its polar opposite is the principal of yang, which denotes light, heat, motivation and masculinity. Both concepts are believed to exist in some balance in all things. If this is true, then greed has a yin and a yang too.

A little greed, where yang dominates, is a good thing. Someone who wants more of something and is willing to do the work necessary to earn that thing should feel no shame in pursuing it, as long as it is not pursued through illegal or immoral means, i.e., no force or fraud. These people are the ambitious ones, the entrepreneurs and strivers. In their ambition to get ahead, they bring a lot of the rest of us along with them, as they build the businesses that will help them realize their ambitions. Those businesses provide jobs. Were there no such thing as greed, civilization would not exist.

The yin form of greed is the one I see at work on the left. This form is the one that desires to have more without being willing to do the work for it. This is the form that demands that one’s every want and need be provided for and believes that it is the job of government to provide it. The problem of course is that the government cannot provide anything to one person that it did not first take from someone else. This kind of greed is also a form of arrogance. What is it about the left makes them think that their priorities, their wants and needs are so important that it justifies taking money earned by one person, who is willing to do the work to provide for his own wants and needs, essentially at gunpoint, to spend it on the wants and needs of someone else?

This brings us to another of the seven deadlies, envy. Envy is defined as wanting something someone else has. It’s a kissing cousin of greed. Once again though, there is a yin and a yang that comes into play.

Envy in its yang form can be a positive motivator. I may see something that another person has and desire to have it myself. For example I’d love to have an airplane and seeing another’s airplane makes me a little envious. However, that just serves as inspiration and example. I reason that the owner of that airplane has worked hard and done some things right and that airplane is his reward for hard work and good decisions. If I also work hard and make good decisions, one day I may be able to buy a plane like his (and maybe he’ll want to sell his to me so he can trade up). I would never think to just take it away from him.

The dark or yin form of envy is, once again, the one I see rearing its ugly head on the left. This is the form that resents that some people may have more than others, resentful to the point that those on the left would seek to deprive those they perceive as having something they don’t of their rightfully earned money or property. If we can’t have it, you can’t either. It is at the heart of class warfare rhetoric. Once again, it is driven by a lack of willingness to put forth the effort necessary to be able to have more money or a bigger home or that private jet yet seeks to prevent their acquisition by those that are willing and able to work harder.

Are those on the right greedy? Speaking for myself, the answer is yes if we’re talking about the yang form. Guilty as charged. I want to have more. I may not, strictly speaking, need more money right now to live comfortably, but if I don’t make more than I need now and set it aside so that I might provide for my future needs (yes, I’d like to retire some day) when will I? However, the form of greed I see coming from the left sickens me. It’s a bottomless sense of entitlement to whatever the left feels as its due, fueled by extreme and unreasoning envy of the most productive members of society. It’s a very ugly, relentlessly negative form of politics and only diminishes society as a whole. I want no part of that thank you.