Philanthropy, pets, and socialism

Two arguments for the rich, against resisting socialist redistribution.

First, enough is enough.

After that, the rest matters very little and most of it not at all.

Read Hobbes.

You risk the real good of peace for what, to you, are necessarily trifles of vanity.

Second, many of you spend lavishly on pets, stables of horses, saving the whales, preserving polar bears, and the like.

Why not take as much interest in necessitous people as you do in necessitous animals?

But overseas philanthropy will not do, whatever accolades it wins from other rich folk.

It is your neighbor's lot you must relieve.

Your near neighbor's.

Your countryman's.

The distress of distant foreigners, however much greater it may be, is outside the city walls.

Your disaffected compatriot is by your side.

Consider that, carefully.

Libertarians, soi-disant "cosmopolitan liberals," and all forms of contemporary post- and anti-nationalists are unanimous in rejecting compatriot - I leave the issue of nationality aside - as a morally significant category.

That is unfortunate since accepting it as that makes what is anyway necessary more palatable.

《Pause》

But socialism, you say, is far from philanthropy, and the latter is much the lesser evil.

It is voluntary, no more costly than one will allow, covers only expenditures one approves, and teaches gratitude or, at any rate, helpless dependence on the benevolence and power of the rich.

Socialist redistribution is just the opposite.

It is involuntary, more costly than one wants, spent in ways one does not control, and teaches the altogether unacceptable lesson that the state can and even perhaps morally may take what it wants from the rich and spend quite as it likes, if they, the people, like it as well.

And as for dependence, there, too, it teaches a bad lesson.

It teaches dependence on the state, on the party of the people, on politics, and on the vote, but most certainly and most objectionably not on the rich, their power, and their good will.

But surely that, too, is not too great a price for peace, though many a foolish oligarch has thought so?

Bismark, you recall, was quite clear it made good sense.

You may think the thousands of years of successful slavery show the rich can have peace on much better terms than that, if they are determined and bold.

But plebians are not slaves, and slaves do not vote.