Capitalist Philosophers And Fundamentalist Protestants

[David Sklansky]

What you have in common is a need to rationalize rewards you don't deserve.

Heart surgeons who have sacrificed their twenties, work hard and study, deserve to be millionaires. So do many entrepreneurs who have risked bankrupcy. Many other successful people also should not be ashamed of their riches.

But there are planty of people who are wealthy because of the nature of the capitalist system. Options traders, baseball players, rock stars etc. Almost all of them would continue to do what they do if their salary was cut by 80% whether they liked their job or not.

Right now we "steal" a bit of their money through the graduated income tax. So the concept is obviously not foreign. We don't steal more or condone someone else stealing it because it would disrupt the system if we did and we don't want to prevent naive people from dreaming.

But the fact that we won't allow these people to be stolen from in no way implies that they "deserve" their money or that some high quality people don't "deserve" to have it transferred to them.

Those who advocate systems that will protect these people's assests from "theft" are almost always self serving if they claim that it would be "immoral" to redistibute a lot of their money. Nonsense. It may not be a good idea to for practical reasons but its not immoral. People who are rich for technical capitalistic reasons do not truly deserve to be a lot better off than hardworking chemists in Burma. Period. Philosophers who try to claim otherwise are rationalizing.

In a similar vein are those who want a system where God sends you to heaven, not because you deserve to be there but rather because of a system that will reward people due to a technicality. In this case it isn't the technicality that you can make jump shots or arbitrage commododites but rather the technicality that you accept Jesus as the son of God right before you die regardless of how you lived your life.

Both stances make me nauseous. You want to go to heaven or feel that you do not deserve to have your moderate wealth taken away from you? Study hard. Work hard. Use your talent to truly help humanity (that doesn't mean providing liquidity to the orange juice market). Otherwise don't be mortified if you get scammed or go to hell.