25A001 Fat Cats by Jim Davies, 1/7/2025

Envious expressions of vicious hatred toward rich folk are two a penny, but I've not noticed many who say they would like to be poorer themselves. A common bleat is that the rich ought to pay more tax, and that's especially odious, for the bleater has apparently never understood the phrase "progressive income tax", meaning that the more one earns, the higher the rate of tax. So more affluent people are already forced to do what the bleater is demanding; he has not even done his homework.

It comes from raw jealousy, and from the idea of "entitlement" - that is, that A is somehow entitled to the fruits of B's labor, because G says so. It's not so, because both A and B (and everyone else) are self-owners; each owns his own labor, and whatever he may have obtained for it in voluntary exchange. So if a wealthy person has acquired his money that way, for example providing things others choose to buy - then it's HIS. Nobody else's. It's a matter of natural right.

It's worth reflecting that rich people cannot avoid bring the rest of us benefit, even if they wish to, because there are four and only four ways of using money:

1. Spend it. That brings work (hence, wages) and profit to those who provide the things they buy.
2. Save it. That provides capital, to enable businesses and their employees to grow and prosper.
3. Give it away. Obviously, that helps the beneficiaries (and pleases the donor.)
4. Destroy it, or hide it permanently under the mattress. I doubt if any do that, but if they did it would lower the quantity of money in circulation and thereby reduce prices of everything for everyone; that would be the opposite of government inflation.

Provided again that the owner of the riches acquired them honestly, that means that the wealthy are necessarily benefactors and so deserve our thanks for their industrious work. I've met a few, and found all of them very agreeable, humble and caring.

We can put rich people into two classes: (a) those who acquired money by fraud, notably by using politics and (b) those who built enterprises that produced goods and services people chose to buy, or became wealthy in some other voluntary way.

Class (a) consists of crooks, but there are many more poor and middling crooks than there are rich ones. Indignation may be due them - but on account of the fraud, not the riches.

Class (b) should attract no hostility at all. Those folk worked harder and smarter than you or me and prospered accordingly and are entitled to whatever riches they accumulated. That is one important measure of human success (though not the only one!) and the fact that you and I may be relative failures does not entitle us to find fault with them.

What, though, of the rich who inherited their wealth, as in the caricature above? - do they deserve it, when they may not have done a day's work in their lives?

First, it's not a matter of "deserving" it or not; again, it's a matter of right. Did the owner of the wealth obtain it by fraud, or voluntarily? If he or she inherited it, that means that someone - a parent, usually - chose to give it to the beneficiary (recipient.) The parent had an absolute right to dispose of his own property any way he wanted. Therefore it reached the recipient without coercion, so he has an absolute right to his inheritance.

Then second, sons and daughters of the rich who inherit wealth may or may not use it wisely. Some do (like Donald Trump for example) and some are wastrels who fritter it away and leave little to their offspring; yet still, as above, bring benefit to those on whom they do spend it on. Should several generations of a family prudently use what they inherit and increase it, that family will grow very wealthy. I expect many will do that, and the result will be that a good portion of the society's capital will be invested for optimal benefit, with none frittered away on wars and other futile projects. Living standards for all will increase almost beyond imagining.

That's the way it will be, in the coming zero government society.