This morning, the Financial Review had a piece titled ‘Tax cuts are no handout to the rich’. Well, of course, they would say that, as their whole purpose as a media publication is to write pieces that are of interest to those with money or interested in money. Such investigations are the bizarre product of a world in which technological developments speed ahead of regulatory ones. From tax treatment of online multinationals to the regulation of industry disruptors such as Uber and AirBnB, tensions regularly emerge between long-held principles and the realities of the modern world. In the second chapter, Hendershott surveys classic literature for the “narratives of envy.” This is worth reading by anyone who seeks wisdom. Even the Business Council of Australia, in their long list of what they think is great for the economy– namely themselves and big business– includes: We would do well to recall the late Milton Friedman’s famous saying: A society that puts equality—in the sense of equality of outcome—ahead of freedom will end up with neither equality nor freedom. The use of force to achieve equality will destroy freedom. On the other hand, a society that puts freedom first will, as a happy by-product, end up with both greater freedom and greater equality.

Hendershott explains how envy leads to resentment, which eventually erupts into violence and rage, malicious mobs, cancel culture, and the elevation of dysfunctional political systems such as socialism and Marxism. In focusing attention on relative disparities, we encourage people to resent others’ good fortune, hard work, or income. You’ve got something I want. I can’t have it, so I’m going to destroy what you have. I don’t want anyone to have it unless I can have it.” That there is a natural inequality between angelic excellence and divine excellence, and that the former could not be made even to approximate the latter except by the help of the one who is more excellent, is intolerable to the demons. It is the inequity as such that pains them as an affront to their pride. So deep does this resentment go that, according to Aquinas , “when the devil tempts us to envy, he is enticing us to that which has its chief place in his heart.”

Lists

Previous generations thought of envious people as morally deficient; the modern world thinks the enviable are morally deficient. Will greater wealth redistribution end the perceived moral deficit facing America? Will legitimizing envy and vilifying the enviable help the poor? Perhaps the better question is, are there public policies that lead to tangible improvements in the well-being of impoverished Americans, without harboring the vice of envy? Bertrand Russell said, “Envy consists in seeing things never in themselves, but only in their relations. If you desire glory, you may envy Napoleon, but Napoleon envied Caesar, Caesar envied Alexander, and Alexander, I daresay, envied Hercules, who never existed.” Envy throws us into distraction, never allowing us to see ourselves for what we are. It ruins not only our ability to govern ourselves, but also our sense for what is true happiness. Heroes combat envy Full-time employment over the course of one’s productive life usually results in significant income mobility. Although the federal government is the largest U.S. employer, with more than 2,700,000 employees (surpassing Wal-Mart by approximately 600,000), it comprises just 2 percent of the nation’s workforce. The vast majority of jobs are created and paid for by corporate America. Thus, public policy to encourage income mobility would make it easier for businesses to operate, innovate, produce, and grow. The jobs will follow. In the short term, wholesale costs look to be heading in one direction. The US imposition of sanctions against countries that import Iranian crude from November could drive up oil, and therefore gas, prices. I also show that the thesis is more dogmatically asserted than argued for, and that what arguments these writers do give for their claims rest on crude logical fallacies, easily exposed errors of social science, and the rhetorical tactic of shrilly abusing as “racist” anyone who dares disagree with them. These writers also demonize Western civilization, which they claim upholds inequity, as “racist,” “white supremacist,” and otherwise uniquely oppressive. They favor policies of racial discrimination against those alleged to benefit from “white privilege,” and a program of reeducation to bring discomfort and self-doubt to those whose minds have purportedly been molded by “whiteness,” “white consciousness,” and “white fragility.”

The decline in envy scores with age – which does not appear to have been previously reported – is interesting in its own right. This result is consistent with other research that suggests that adult aging may lead to decreases in negative affect in general ( Charles and Carstensen, 2007, 2009). The current study adds to this body of work by showing that a specific emotion, envy, also occurs less in older individuals. This raises the question of what might account for the age effect. One possibility, often implied in the literature, is that people get better at regulating their emotions as they age. For example, it has been suggested that such changes might be due to higher quality social relationships, decreased memory for or attention to negative events, greater avoidance of conflict and negative experiences, and altered appraisal of negative situations (see Charles and Carstensen, 2007, 2009). One also might wonder whether youth is associated with greater envy because the young have less and therefore have more to envy. One of our findings would argue against this possibility. There was a small tendency for younger people in our sample to have higher incomes than older people, and yet they still reported greater envy. Moreover, there is a great deal of movement in and out of the top income groups. The Treasury data show that 57 percent "of households in the top 1 percent in 2005 were not there nine years earlier." The rich sometimes get richer, but they get poorer as well. The study also reveals that income mobility has increased, not decreased, during the past twenty years. For example, 47.3 percent of those in the lowest income quintile in 1987 saw their incomes increase by at least 100 percent by 1996. That number jumped to 53.5 percent from 1996 to 2005. It is a similar story in the UK. Another survey from last week shows the pay of FTSE 100 chief executives rose six times as fast as those of the wider workforce in 2017. In a year when prices rising faster than earnings meant living standards fell for the bulk of the population, those running the biggest quoted companies saw their remuneration going up by 11%.

On The Go

In chapter eight, begins her discussion of envy in Academe with, “Several years ago, American writer Gore Vidal, a public intellectual known for his piercing prose and clever witticisms, famously said: “Whenever a friend succeeds, a little something in me dies.” What we are seeing today in many forms, and most recently, President Biden’s call to boycott the State of Georgia because it passed voter ID laws (and Major League Baseball doing exactly that) is not only political opportunism and authoritarianism but, more important, given its unhinged from truth dimension, a kind of scapegoatism to make leftists feel “clean.” The most likely rationale for growing economic disparity is also the engine of America’s unprecedented prosperity: technology. As this indicates, envy can follow from the sin of pride, and Aquinas holds (in Summa Theologiae Part I, Question 63 ) that this is precisely what happened in the case of the fallen angels. It was because of their stung pride that these angels “grieved… over the Divine excellence,” which is greater than their own, and “desired to be as God.” To be sure, there is no sin in wanting to be like God in the way God himself makes possible through grace. But this was not acceptable to the fallen angels, who resented the fact that they needed divine assistance for this and were not owed it by nature. Aquinas writes:

Why do governments underspend on policies that would make their constituents better off? Why do people participate in contentious politics when they could reap benefits if they were to abstain? In Envy in Politics, Gwyneth McClendon contends that if we want to understand these and other forms of puzzling political behavior, we should pay attention to envy, spite, and the pursuit of admiration—all manifestations of our desire to maintain or enhance our status within groups. Drawing together insights from political philosophy, behavioral economics, psychology, and anthropology, McClendon explores how and under what conditions status motivations influence politics. The ideology that has in recent years come to dominate left-wing politics goes by many names: Critical Social Justice, identity politics, “wokeness,” the “successor ideology,” and so on. It also encompasses multiple sub-movements: Critical Race Theory, Queer theory, fourth-wave feminism, and the like. But a pervasive theme is that inequity as such is unjust, so that achieving equity is essential to social justice. Indeed, inequity is often treated as if it were the telltale mark of persistent and structural injustice, and eliminating it the highest imperative. And such claims are presented as if they were simply the consistent working out of principles of justice to which the modern West is already committed. They are all men of ressentiment … insatiable in outbursts against the fortunate and happy and in masquerades of revenge and pretexts for revenge: when would they achieve the ultimate, subtlest, sublimest triumph of revenge? Undoubtedly, if they succeeded in poisoning the consciences of the fortunate with their own misery, with all misery, so that one day the fortunate began to be ashamed of their good fortune and perhaps said one to another: “it is disgraceful to be fortunate: there is too much misery!” (p. 124) The Never Trump movement and Trump Derangement Syndrome was clearly related to envy in the sense that the formerly “in-group” found itself out of power: Ministers say the subsequent tariff increases by energy suppliers are “completely unacceptable” and justify the government’s imminent price cap. They urge people to switch.

Materials and Methods

Yet, for some reason, the decisions and choices as to how our Government is spending taxpayer money are not being reported on in the same manner. Again, for Nietzsche as for Aquinas, it is inequality as such that is resented by the envious person, and Nietzsche hammers on the theme that modern egalitarian politics is an instance of this fabricated morality of ressentiment . In Thus Spoke Zarathustra he writes: The French aristocrat Alexis de Toqueville studied American democracy extensively during the 1830’s. He particularly noted the dangers associated with our system of government. He warned, “Democratic institutions awaken and flatter the passion for equality without ever being able to satisfy it entirely.” Hendershott offers the classic distinction between envy and jealousy. Envy is “hostility or a negative feeling toward someone who has an advantage or something that one does not have and cannot seem to acquire. Jealousy, on the other hand, typically involves an attempt to protect a valued relationship (especially marriage) from a perceived threat (especially adultery). In some ways, jealousy can be a useful emotion — it is the desire to hold on to a loved one — especially when one feels the relationship may be threatened by outside forces.” “Envy is the pleasure, the malicious joy that is felt when the object of one’s envy falls, fails, or suffers.��� “In On Rhetoric, Aristotle described envy as “the pain caused by the good fortune of others.” The president and Congress are seeking a solution to the worst economic recession since the Great Depression. Lurking beneath President Obama’s economic agenda are campaign promises and political appeals that call for societal change on a grand scale. For example, on the eve of Martin Luther King Jr. Day, the incoming president stood at the civil rights leader’s historic pulpit and spoke of the need for unity. Americans must unite, Obama demanded, to end the country’s moral deficit. "CEOs are making more in ten minutes than some workers make in ten months," he said.