Envy drives politics, blaming the rich for problems rather than fixing them.

What this episode covers

Envy is an awful thing. It's horrible. And you've got multi-millionaire politicians denouncing billionaires, and now a trillionaire, as the source of all evil. And you've got a bunch of college students clapping like a bunch of trained seals pretending to be working class. If it wasn't so sad, it would be funny. And the billionaires are not the problem, neither is the trillionaire. But the Democrats disagree with this. Uh, Bernie Sanders, who owns what? Three, four houses? And I'm sure he doesn't worry about paying the power bill or retiring, whenever that's going to be for him. Um, and you know, the Bernie Sanders wing, which has seized control of the party, they they don't they don't like these guys. And then when SpaceX pushed Elon Musk's estimated net worth over $1 trillion, which is not in cash, and it's all based upon the stock market, which it could go down tomorrow, right? Uh, one congressman whined, "Trillionaires shouldn't exist in a moral society." Well, I've got a, you know, [laughs] I've got a count counter for that. $39 trillion in debt shouldn't exist in a moral society. But you know, that's beside the point, right? And these arguments are being made by people who actually, you know, you and me looking at this, we would say, these guys are fabulously wealthy. And they're not going to give up their millions. It's it's the same thing as this whole stolen land trope. And they continue to blame the problems of the world, and the nation, and their lives, on the ultra-rich. They've also been calculating, quite erroneously, because, you know, this is all Their calculations are based upon a liquid position which is not it's not based on solvent liquid cash. It's simply based on paper. It's all on paper. How you could spend Musk's wealth if it were just taken from him. They say we can fix society by taking from the rich to spend on the poor, which never mind that we've spent, you know, $3 trillion on that. Never mind that the Democrats, and probably some Republicans too, either waste or fraudulently take a lot of this money. We have trillions being spent right now on healthcare, education, and so on, and a bit more is not going to make much difference. And the Democrats tend to believe wealth comes from exploitation, although here in the United States, I don't know of anybody that actually holds guns to people's heads to get them to go to work at a factory, or get them to go to work in a store, or get them to go to work, you know, on a farm. So there's no, you know, it's not the advant- the ones the haves are not taking advantage of the have-nots. The haves are actually making a job for the have-nots to have, that they can come and apply for and and try to get into it. And then from there, they go on and they do what they do. And the truth is that we are naturally poor. Life in the state of nature is nasty, it's brutish, and it's short. But along the way as you're going, you can create wealth. And generating wealth is about more than just labor. Hard work is not always very productive, which is why the subsistence farming that most of humanity engaged in didn't make its practitioners rich. Wealth is produced by tools, and technique, and organization, and the sweat that goes along with it. There are also legal and cultural prerequisites for wealth creation and preservation: rule of law, property rights, a high-trust society, and, you know. And this gives us the abundance of modern life in which even the rich get richer, and the poor have air conditioning, two cars, iPhones, full back tattoos, and more calories than they need. That's the substance of the poor here. And I know that we are not the best of all possible worlds, but we are materially better than all humanity before us, and conditions are much better than anything that was result from letting a bitter socialist run things. But this isn't really about economics. This is about envy and resentment. And it's not the poor who are the most resentful towa ...

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