A letter in today's NYTimes says it rather nicely:
Re "Rich Man’s Burden," by Dalton Conley (Op-Ed, Sept. 2):
Many people who earn more than $100,000 a year have to work long hours because their jobs demand it, not because of a sense of economic inequality.
And as hard as their jobs may be, few of them would ever want to trade places with the millions of Americans who, despite working even longer and harder hours in low-wage jobs, are barely getting by.
There is a real problem with economic inequality in America, and President Bush and his Republican friends have done everything possible to exacerbate it. Thanks to Republican policies, the rich have gotten very rich over the last eight years, and the rest of us — including many middle-class professionals — are less well off than we were eight years ago. We cannot afford more of the same.
Ken Freedland
St. Louis, Sept.2, 2008
http://www.nytimes.com/...
Ah, the poor unfortunate wealthy, so beleaguered by their electronic communications toys:
FOR many American professionals, the Labor Day holiday yesterday probably wasn’t as relaxing as they had hoped. They didn’t go into the office, but they were still working. As much as they may truly have wanted to focus on time with their children, their spouses or their friends, they were unable to turn off their BlackBerrys, their laptops and their work-oriented brains....
Dalton Conley in Rich Man's Burden (NYTimes Op-Ed, Sept. 2):
http://www.nytimes.com/...
Those "poor" rich Americans who can't stop working, even on holidays!
Conley traces this troubling idiosyncrasy back to Max Weber's observations in the first decade of the 20th Century on what he called "The Protestant Ethic":
A hundred years ago the German sociologist Max Weber described what he called the Protestant ethic. This was a religious imperative to work hard, spend little and find a calling in order to achieve spiritual assurance that one is among the saved.
Weber claimed that this ethic could be found in its most highly evolved form in the United States, where it was embodied by aphorisms like Ben Franklin’s "Industry gives comfort and plenty and respect." The Protestant ethic is so deeply engrained in our culture you don’t need to be Protestant to embody it.
This lazy, lapsed-Protestant eyes this outlandish idea as a plan of the devil to make the great accumulation of wealth a religious calling.
And, wasn't that sort of sentiment presaged in the last year of the 19th century in the mocking "White Man's Burden" by Rudyard Kipling, who was probably twitting that imperialist twit (aka "The Colossus") Cecil John Rhodes.
... Kipling's poem mixed exhortation to empire with sober warnings of the costs involved, imperialists within the United States latched onto the phrase "white man's burden" as a characterization for imperialism that justified the policy as a noble enterprise.
http://en.wikipedia.org/...
And, somehow, it just seems to me that this faux whining about "a rich man's burden" or "a white man's burden" is just a thinly disguised elitist or classist snobbery that considers non-white, translate that now to non-rich "men" as stupid and lazy slackers, this snobbery is the new imperialism of classism, the virtuous and deserving rich against the undeserving beleaguered poor.
And, to steal a concept or two from Wikipedia:
http://en.wikipedia.org/...
You fools who believe in a "living wage for people who work for a living," PTAH!. You must recognize that there is a divinely ordained hierarchy which ranks people according to socioeconomic status, family lineage, and other class related divisions.
If this system leads to a drastic income and wealth inequality, it is, most assuredly, God's Will. And a totally Noble Enterprise. Of the nobility, by the nobility, for the nobility, the deserving wealthy and their descendants.