Toles - Coddling toward Gomorrah

[n2doc]

Warren Buffett (disclosure: he has a habit of owning publications I work for) is spoiling EVERYTHING for the rich by pointing out that are being CODDLED by the Internal Revenue Service. That’s right, coddled. In a grinding economy where we are all paying for the sins of...oh yeah, the RICH, who is it that is being CODDLED? Had you already guessed? This also spoils the GOP narrative of the rich as beleaguered Galt Guys, barely hanging on by their fingernails to the percentage of national wealth that used to be shared by, um, you.

I’ve been reading a 1939 (Depression year!) history of Greece by Will Durant. Why? Because it was there on the shelf. The history of Greece turns out to be a good deal longer and more complicated than an afternoon of bearded philosophers striding about in the sunshine saying Thoughtful Things. But it does have Lessons to Teach! For us right now here today! Durant employs a telling phrase “the legally entrenched rich” to describe a pattern of self-destruction he sees societies as repeating throughout history.

What tendency? INCREASING WEALTH DISPARITY! And all done legally by carefully self-serving laws! He also issues a warning, one that Americans might profit from mulling. Put on your philosopher’s robe and mull: “liberty and equality are not associates, but enemies.” (p112) And “The concentration of wealth begins by being inevitable and ends by being fatal”. Athens was rescued from this by Solon, a wealthy man and a REDISTRIBUTIONIST! He understood not just the unfairness, but the lethality of being coddled.

By Tom Toles | 08:00 AM ET, 08/17/2011

http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/tom-toles/post/coddling-toward-gomorrah/2011/08/16/gIQAgPPJJJ_blog.html