Probably he’s kidding. At first I thought he wasn’t, but couldn’t be sure. I read it again, and a crack about the “Occupy Wall Street crowd” put me over the edge into “yeah, it’s satire.” But so many stupid things have been said by the OWS crowd, this genuinely could be real. The sad part is that it’s so hard to tell.
And maybe I’m showing my age here, but when I read scary nonsense in an actual newspaper, which presumably has some editorial policy, it makes a difference to me. And the logic in this makes as much sense – and chills the blood as much – as anything Pol Pot ever said.
It’s easy to see how the wealthiest 1 percent are devastating our country. Let’s say you took part in a raffle and won a prize of $500. Happy at your good fortune, you’d start thinking of all the neat things you could buy with $500.
But say the person next to you won $1 million. Then, suddenly, your $500 would seem like nothing in comparison, and all your ideas of what to do with that $500 would seem pathetic compared to what you could do if only you had the other person’s $1 million.
One truth would ring constantly in your mind: “That’s not fair!”
That’s what the wealthiest 1 percent do to us a nation: It’s just impossible to appreciate our affluence while other people are allowed to have so much more than us.
Wow, talk about the politics of envy. The writer, Frank J. Fleming, actually manages to get his other foot in there with the first one when he tries to express it like a problem in an arithmetic quiz:
Let’s say you had two apples and another person — let’s call him “Rich” — also had two apples. If you then got one more apple and Rich got 80 more apples, would you now have more apples? No, you’d have fewer apples — fewer than that other guy who has an unfair number of apples!
So, you see, it’s a zero-sum equation even when it’s not. “Rich” didn’t take any apples from you, but you still have less than you did before because (I presume) he didn’t give you forty of his.
Fleming’s solution to this – I was waiting for the guns and guillotines to come out, but he kept them under wraps – is very simple.
Here’s the thing: They’re the 1 percent, but we’re the 99 percent. Their wealth may be much more than ours, but 99 is a much bigger number than one. So we should just gang up and take their money.
When one person takes the property of another, that’s tyranny, but when lots of people get together and do it, that’s democracy. So we should legislate that the 1 percent no longer get to keep that vast wealth and must instead distribute it among the rest of us. (I should get the largest portion because it was my idea.)
That last bit of snark is when I started to think, “satire.” The stupid gets thicker toward the end…
After we’ve taken care of their wealth, to keep the nation happy and prosperous we should pass a law making it illegal for there to be a wealthiest 1 percent — this country should just be the normal 99 percent.
Dumb, right? But not impossible, in his mind. See, he has omnipotence on his side.
Sure, that isn’t mathematically possible, but government shouldn’t be about what’s possible; it should be about what’s fair.
The difficult, the Benevolent Government does immediately. The impossible takes a little longer.
It just struck me as weird, that’s all, that I’m still genuinely not certain the guy is kidding.
