The self-made person and other dangerous myths

Sometimes mistakes acquire legs and longevity great enough to outrun truth itself. They are called urban legends. Some are comical, such as the lovers-lane madman with the hook for a hand. Others have more consequences, like foreign aid. Those polled think we should cut back on what they think is 24 percent of our national budget, the aid we give to allies. We actually give much less than 1 percent. Further fallacies include the belief that we give cash to less fortunate people abroad. Instead we give away coupons. Coupons? Coupons that can be used by favored foreign governments like Israel and Egypt to buy American made weapons, nothing else. So the tax-supported aid goes to U.S. munitions corporations in order to get cooperation from foreigners.

Or how about cutting our fantastic national debt by cutting the taxes of the rich? Some fervently believe that if we taxed the rich less, they would take the savings and make jobs, which we all agree make for more universal prosperity. Only the rich have the wherewithal to make jobs. The less endowed certainly do not. So, the thinking goes, cut them a break and they will benefit us all. Trouble is, whenever we do this, the rich fail to direct the money for the common good. Instead they invest or spend it. Time after time Jesus is vindicated when he said that it is easier for a camel to get through the eye of a needle than for a rich person to attain the kingdom of heaven. Greed, after all, kills. And the non-rich who consistently vote to protect the rich do so under the delusional notion that someday this will help them become rich. Then they will benefit from this advantage. Yet they would sooner become rich if they voted rather for their own bracket’s benefit.

It must be good to be rich. Statistically they are quite few, yet they have so many legions of non-rich voting to make their finances even more comfy. Why, for instance, do the non-rich allow, year after year, Social Security taxation to top out at $106,800, leaving all the income above that untaxed, as though there were some good reason for that? It is as though the non-rich get some pleasure out of shooting themselves in the foot by authorizing government to give free passes to those who least need aid. Catholic social teaching maintains that the rich should pay more, given their greater responsibility for the common good, a phrase the rich dislike. Granted, in actual dollars the rich pay more, but in percentages, they get a ride on the backs of those without whose sweat they would not be rich. It pays the non-rich to attend to this social doctrine instead of listening to the pronouncements of the Wall Street barons who gave us the Great Recession without even one of them going to jail.

Of course, government should be as small and non-intrusive as possible. But notice what the advocates of small government decide is expendable when it comes to actually naming what gets cut. This is where greed kicks in. Programs for the poor in an economy made worse by corporate titans who export jobs overseas, in defiance of the U.S. common good, are deemed liberal boondoggles and failed social planning blunders. But let a disaster like Irene strike and you hear the ones with the most property at stake bellow the loudest for big government to ride to the rescue with declarations of a state of emergency so they can get low-interest fix-up loans. Did you see all the picketers shouting for big government in the high-rent districts, as though they had experienced a religious conversion? Maybe I overdosed on TV coverage of the hurricane, but I could have sworn I saw mobs of wealthy demonstrators positively clamoring for even bigger rescue-type government.

Finally, another urban legend is the myth of the self-made person. Those with much sometimes lecture those less fortunate about the value of hard work. This is fine as long as everyone remembers that we are born personally equal but financially very unequal. A good way to learn this is to get out the Monopoly game, and set it up so that some players start rich and others poor. See what it takes for hard work to bring up to parity the disadvantaged. We get from our parents and families and environment and our country far more than we realize.