In the previous, Christmas Day posting on this subject, we noted there was a significant difference between Ebenezer Scrooge and the rich of today. Scrooge, for all his faults — and his unsuspected, if very real virtues! — did not seek wealth as an end in itself. True, as Dickens portrayed him, Scrooge was —
. . . a tight-fisted hand at the grindstone, Scrooge! a squeezing, wrenching, grasping, scraping, clutching, covetous old sinner! Hard and sharp as flint, from which no steel had ever struck out generous fire; secret, and self-contained, and solitary as an oyster. The cold within him froze his old features, nipped his pointed nose, shrivelled his cheek, stiffened his gait; made his eyes red, his thin lips blue; and spoke out shrewdly in his grating voice. A frosty rime was on his head, and on his eyebrows, and his wiry chin. He carried his own low temperature always about with him; he iced his office in the dog-days; and didn’t thaw it one degree at Christmas.
But wealth merely for the sake of being wealthy, or even for what wealth would allow him to obtain, no, such a thing was alien to Scrooge. He accumulated money for protection against a world that had (at least in his opinion) turned against him. Money, for Scrooge, served one purpose, and that was to keep other people as far away from him as possible. People had betrayed and hurt him, and he wasn’t going to give them another chance to get their hooks into him, not if he could help it:
External heat and cold had little influence on Scrooge. No warmth could warm, nor wintry weather chill him. No wind that blew was bitterer than he, no falling snow was more intent upon its purpose, no pelting rain less open to entreaty. Foul weather didn’t know where to have him. The heaviest rain, and snow, and hail, and sleet, could boast of the advantage over him in only one respect. They often “came down” handsomely, and Scrooge never did.
Nobody ever stopped him in the street to say, with gladsome looks, “My dear Scrooge, how are you? when will you come to see me?” No beggars implored him to bestow a trifle, no children asked him what it was o’clock, no man or woman ever once in all his life inquired the way to such and such a place, of Scrooge. Even the blindmen’s dogs appeared to know him; and when they saw him coming on, would tug their owners into doorways and up courts; and then would wag their tails as though they said, “no eye at all is better than an evil eye, dark master!”
But what did Scrooge care? It was the very thing he liked. To edge his way along the crowded paths of life, warning all human sympathy to keep its distance, was what the knowing ones call “nuts” to Scrooge.
Did Scrooge consider himself virtuous for being wealthy? Hardly. Money kept others at a distance. Keeping him from having to deal with the fools and traitors who constituted the rest of humanity was money’s virtue, nothing more. Had it not been for the fact convicts are totally dependent on their jailers (or, in Scrooge’s case, gaolers) and completely at the behest of others (convicts are, technically, slaves, but not chattel slaves, i.e., privately owned), Scrooge might have found solitary confinement in a prison quite congenial. It would have kept all the fools and knaves away from him.
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| Robert Kiyosaki |
In our day, as F. Scott Fitzgerald noted, the rich are different and not — as Ernest Hemmingway is alleged to have quipped — because they have more money. The financial difference between the rich and the poor today, despite what “Rich Dad” financial guru Robert Kiyosaki claims, is the rich have access to capital credit while the poor do not . . . but that is the subject for another day.
Today we are looking at a fundamental difference in attitude between the wealthy of yesteryear and the rich, mega, and ultra-rich of the twenty-first century. In large measure thanks to virtual worldwide adherence to the principles of Keynesian economics, the belief is widespread that rich people confer great benefits on society simply because they are rich. Being wealthy has become a virtue in and of itself.
Why? Primarily because people and policymakers mistakenly assume that accumulated wealth is essential to “create jobs” and a “job” is the only legitimate way for most people to gain income. Both assumptions are incorrect, but that, too, is the subject for another day.
Ironically, people who believe themselves to be what they call “conservative” but are really individualist liberals often cite Adam Smith’s “invisible hand” argument to “prove” being rich is virtuous . . . which is not what Smith said.
As far as Smith was concerned, the rich confer great benefits on society, but not because they intend any such thing. In Smith’s analysis, it was just the opposite. Unlike Scrooge and his fear of others, the greedy and rapacious rich in Smith’s world didn’t give a hoot about others. What they cared about was satisfying their desires . . . which in Smith’s world required the rich to hire the poor and pay them well to supply the needs of the rich, for there was no other way (at least as Smith saw it) whereby the rich could get what they wanted.
Thus, in the system Smith envisioned, the rich ended up as inadvertent public benefactors, almost against their will, moved by an “invisible hand,” which is how Smith described the functioning of the economic system if ethically and morally structured. As Smith concluded, the wealth of the Earth thereby ended up as equitably distributed as if ownership had been widespread.
Ebenezer Scrooge was on the fringes of this class of wealthy individuals. He had no desires other than the protection he believed mere possession of wealth conferred. He was greedy, but not rapacious. He cared not a quarter farthing what other people had or did so long as they left him alone, and he had enough to take care of himself and keep others away from him:
“[A] few of us are endeavouring to raise a fund to buy the Poor some meat and drink, and means of warmth. We choose this time, because it is a time, of all others, when Want is keenly felt, and Abundance rejoices. What shall I put you down for?”
“Nothing!” Scrooge replied.
“You wish to be anonymous?”
“I wish to be left alone,” said Scrooge. “Since you ask me what I wish, gentlemen, that is my answer. I don’t make merry myself at Christmas, and I can’t afford to make idle people merry. I help to support the establishments I have mentioned: they cost enough: and those who are badly off must go there.”
“Many can’t go there; and many would rather die.”
“If they would rather die,” said Scrooge, “they had better do it, and decrease the surplus population. Besides — excuse me — I don’t know that.”
“But you might know it,” observed the gentleman.
“It’s not my business,” Scrooge returned. “It’s enough for a man to understand his own business, and not to interfere with other people’s. Mine occupies me constantly. Good afternoon, gentlemen!”
So, how did being wealthy become a virtue in and of itself? We’ll look at that next week.
#30#
