By Nathan Barton

I heard it on the radio, and the New York Daily News is very excited about it, and how it shows all rich people are not evil, greedy, heartless monsters.

It seems that eighty of New York’s upper class have written the NY State governor and legislators telling them that they and other wealthy New Yorkers ought to pay more taxes; 2 billion dollars more, in fact, to do their “fair share” to “support schools, roads, bridges and programs to help poor and homeless residents of the state.”  The names include Soros, a Rockefeller (not the one who just died), and a Disney.

It is, of course, utter nonsense; the elite trying to continue to be parasites on society.  I am certainly not one of their elevated status (people who live in the Empire State, that paradise deluxe, and make $650,000 a year or more), but even if I were, this strikes me as an example of their arrogance and selfishness.

There is, I am sure, absolutely NOTHING in the law – federal or state (or even that tyrannical police state of the City of New York) – that PREVENTS ANY of them from whipping out their gem-crusted checkbook and writing a check to “The Treasurer of the State of New York” with as many zeros (or nines) as they want as often as they like.  Or to whatever school (government-run/tax-funded or not) or college or welfare agency or charity or clinic or hospital that they want.  Even New York surely has a plethora of worthy recipients of such funds.  (And compared to how much government skims off the top of its revenues before paying teachers or giving food stamps or medical vouchers to the poor, even the American Red Cross looks like a pretty good deal.)

But this really isn’t about helping the poor and disadvantaged of New  York.  It really isn’t even (directly) about the money.  It is about the power and the influence.  If they just wanted to pay more (Soros?  A Rockefeller?) they’d take their money out of the trust funds and the foundations, and stop claiming the billions in tax dodging that they (or their ancestors) wrote the tax code to provide for them).

But it is OTHER people whom they want to force to pay for all these desperately needed services of government – and when compared to Soros or a Rockefeller, certainly people not nearly so “elite” or wealthy as them.  And they want to give government MORE power through providing MORE money – money that they want to be “forced” to give, knowing that thanks to their precautions, these 80 people (and their clans) will pay only a small part of that additional $2 billion they want stolen from taxpayers by Albany.

If this isn’t enough to make you sick, it should be.  Like the Clintons, like the Obamas, like the Kennedys and the Shrivers and the Udalls and all the other dynasties or clans that infest the Fifty States, they get their wealth from being the “capitalist” cronies and contractors and influence-peddlers for and with government, whether we are talking the borough governments of NYC, the City of New York, all the special districts and authorities and the State agencies, or the maze of FedGov agencies.  Indeed, when you go back to look at their ancestors, much of that inherited wealth that they preserve so well today came from government; the production of munitions to crush the Confederacy, the vast lands given to the railroads by the FedGov while imparting a meager 160 acres to a farm family of sodbusters, and on and on.

Their arrogance and hypocrisy and self-righteousness is incredible, and things like this little act of political theatre are intended to (and do) let the media and government officials praise them, and the mass of people swallow the whole dog and pony show.

No, not ALL wealthy people are evil, greedy, heartless monsters.  But I suspect that most of these 80 signers DO deserve to be classified that way.  They reject people living for themselves, by their own means, and voluntarily providing education and health care and the like (or not).  They want us all to be the tools and fools of government, which they think that they can control.

Mama’s Note: The question remains… by what authority? That’s what people must begin to think about, critically, and consider taking on personal authority and responsibility. Otherwise, there will be no end to this except war and destruction for everyone.