A great read:
The Sad Legacy of Unearned Riches
by Tibor R. Machan
Although I have visited Paris, France, a few times, I have never made it out to Versailles, the famous — or notorious — palace of several French kings and queens. It is, of course, a fabulous place, not unlike Schönbrun in Vienna, Austria, and the Pyramids in Egypt. The only thing I have seen, however, that compares to the opulence and massiveness of Versailles is the huge edifice in Bucharest, Romania, built for the communist dictator Ceausescu. And the similarity does not end there.
One thing that has made it impossible for me to fully enjoy the castles, palaces and even cathedrals of Europe when I have visited them is my relentless awareness of the history of how they came about. The opulence of these edifices were accomplished largely on the basis of massive subjugation of ordinary people, nothing less. Indeed, arguably many of such edifices would not have come about without this oppression, without the availability to the rulers of the various places we now visit and behold often with unthinking awe of massive forced labor. That, too, characterizes the history of Ceausescu's humongous building in Bucharest. And it may make better sense of the horrors of the French Revolution in which Marie-Antoinette, one famous resident of Versailles, so famously lost her head!
Embarrassingly enough, there are plenty illegitimate colossi that get build right here in the United States of America as well as other so called free societies. Our gigantic sports arenas at universities and various metropolises, not to mention those obscenely massive government buildings everywhere, would not likely exist were it not for that anomalous institution of our free society, called taxation. This institution has its home in feudalism and is quite out of place in a society in which government is supposed to protect individual rights, including the right to private property, and does not own the realm as monarchs did. It is the link between the inexcusable past and the present, even here in the good old USA.
Now consider the view many folks have of the rich and how many politicians and public commentators, even in relatively free societies, practice unremitting rich bashing. Since the birth of the very idea of a free society is relatively recent — especially as any kind of official public philosophy — is it not somewhat understandable that even the most honestly earned wealth be associated with the sort that has been gained via oppression and conquest rather than production and free exchange?
Why There Is Suspicion of Wealth
This, it would seem, is one serious source, apart from sheer envy, of the continuing suspicion of the rich in many societies. When one considers that for millennia upon millennia ordinary folks in every society have looked upon opulence and even simple prosperity as the result of the inhumanity of human beings upon other human beings, this imagery can easily be seen as having serious staying power.
The idea, propagated by socialists and other champions of top-down style economic (dis)organization, that private property comes more from theft than from honest earning, is certainly a contradiction in terms — for how can one steal that which no person honestly, legitimately owns? Yet when the most visible and audacious possessions throughout human history have indeed been confiscated from millions of people — by way of taxing and conscripting their labor and its produce — it is understandable that to many, even now, that that legacy is of great significance. They and their offspring will probably continue to look upon everything spacious, lovely, beautiful, comfortable, luxurious and such with disdain and even abhorrence.
It would then matter little to such folks that Bill Gates or Warren Buffet — or indeed anyone making a good income now in Hungary or Bulgaria — earned their wealth and have built their fabulous homes from this wealth and not from theft. The historically customary means to luxury east and west is, after all, oppression and inhumanity, so is it not understandable that those who are rich today from their own good fortune and ingenuity are still despised? Countries that had been ruled by monarchs and then communist dictators are populated with citizens who are hardly aware of what it is to actually earn great wealth.
Yet justice and good sense would counsel us to think in context and not to forget the means to ends. Even without personal experience of it, folks should be able to figure out that outside of stealing and looting there is also the decent way that great wealth can be acquired, namely, through production and commerce. But it is not always easy to discipline oneself to think this way.
It is, yes, unjust to blame today's honestly wealthy for the precedents that were set by their corrupt "ancestors", and once an individual has managed to gain some wealth honestly one can perceive the difference clearly enough. But those who are making money hand over fist in honest ways need to explain themselves now and then so as to dispel the suspicion that they are like those in the past who gained wealth through very disreputable means indeed. This goes double for those earning good incomes in the former Soviet bloc countries — most folks there have no clue where bona fide wealth — as distinct from loot — comes from.
It is arguable that a major reason for the hate that's unleashed against the West, the USA and capitalism, in particular, comes in part from this misguided suspicion about wealth. It certainly seems to fuel already existing feelings like envy and resentment.
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Machan, who teaches at Chapman University in Orange, California, advises Freedom Communications, Inc., on public policy matters. His most recent book is Initiative—Human Agency and Society (Hoover Institution Press, 2000). His email address is Tibor_R._Machan@link.freedom.com.
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