I’ve always been perplexed about why intellectuals in universities seem to care so much about income inequality.

They don’t create jobs. They don’t commune with the ‘working class’ folk that they seem to care about so dearly. Their jobs are more or less secure after a certain point – maybe that’s it, maybe they don’t understand upward or downward movement within a society because they have none.

Maybe it’s jealousy, as they view people that are dumber than they are making a heck of a lot more money, creating – obviously – more jobs and a bigger positive impact on society.

It’s never really made sense to me. You have these detached individuals that have made inequality their main focus in life, but because they’re so detached they somehow see solutions that have failed over and over again in very deathly fashion, to be viable solutions moving forward, ignoring all evidence, and clearly misunderstanding the facts and stats they seem to proclaim in unison.

It never made sense to me because of the aforementioned fact that they’re incredibly detached from those they claim to want to help.

They share nothing in common with them and completely misunderstand them – rarely actually attempting to understand anything besides ‘proving’ their own viewpoint of a problem with their constantly regurgitated solution to the problem that, again, they have a very odd viewpoint of.

They constantly push increased regulation when we know that decreased regulation creates more movement within the classes as regulation typically only serves those with enough money (corporation or dynasty) to lobby the politicians who create the regulations and who will eventually get a job within their company to navigate around the regulations (for every increase in dollar growth in government it’s matched by an almost identical number in lobbying toward the government).

They ignore that more heavily regulated economies have more generational wealth, as wealth is passed down through generations able to protect their finances from risk due to regulation.

In more free market economies, you get rich by risking – be it time, effort, or money – and that same risk – or a lack thereof after you’ve made your money and grown comfortable – leads you to move out of the 1% that you only resided in briefly

Back to the intellectuals, I’ve never been a fan of the ones who’ve never worked real jobs or had actual skin in the game in the real world or the economy.

I took a couple years of college courses and the only good professor I had was an entrepreneur. Everyone else – especially in philosophy, obviously – struggled with truth.

I once had an argument with a religions teacher about Christianity. He claimed their were new forms of Christianity sprouting up that didn’t believe in the Crucifixion. The nature of Christianity, be they Catholics or Protestants or Lutherans or any of the other denominations, is the fact that they believe in the Crucifixion, that’s literally the moment God as man – Christ – took the weight of the world and all of its sins.

That’s what differs a Christian from a Jew or a Muslim – especially Islam, as they view Christ as a great profit, whose name is mentioned even more than Mohammad’s in versions of the Quran. The difference being one doesn’t believe in the Crucifixion, and one does.

The issue the professor had was with fact, truth, real answers. He couldn’t get his head around that there are rules to religions or facts, everything was ruled by opinion. 

It appears that they also have complete and utter ignorance of things being dynamic versus static, especially when it comes to movement in and out of different income classes (this makes sense, they have little movement, almost none once they’ve gained tenure, they secure their job and are almost unfireable, thus, the ‘1%’ of professors is static, this is very untrue for the economy, especially in more free economies, which is important).

That last point was a revelation, and one I didn’t have on my own (I’m obviously not that smart), but one I got from, of all places, a book.

From Skin in the Game, by Nassim Taleb:

Static inequality is a snapshot view of inequality; it does not reflect what will happen to you in the course of your life.

Consider that about 10 percent of Americans will spend at least a year in the top 1 percent, and more than half of all Americans will spend a year in the top 10 percent. This is visibly not the same for the more static – but nominally more equal – Europe. For instance, only 10 percent of the wealthiest five hundred American people or dynasties were so thirty years ago; more than 60 percent on the French list are heirs and a third of the richest Europeans were the richest centuries ago. In Florence, it was just revealed that things are even worse: the same handful of families have kept the wealth for five centuries.

The point is that movement doesn’t just come from the bottom, up – which happens much more in free market societies that make starting businesses easier due to fewer regulations – but by making the acquisition of wealth a risky proposition, and have movement from the top, down – which, again, can only happen with fewer regulations as less wealth is secured and still prone to volatility.

The Anger

My anger and confusement with the self-proclaimed intellectuals isn’t just because they’re wrong, or that they don’t live in the real world, or that they’re jealous of people they look down upon for doing better than them – though that all pisses me off – I’m angered because of what people do with the false information that professors spew.

They are the reason that there’s a rise in communism among millenials. They’re the reason why more people who were educated in these modern indoctrination camps called colleges move more toward socialism and oddly see capitalism as an evil system, ignoring the hundred + million people that communism killed.

…Or the fact that a government in the modern sense can’t gain power unless they move more toward socialism and communism.

Hence, Hitler was a socialist, and had to be a socialist if he wanted to gain power. You don’t gain power by decentralizing your government, which is what the founders of America did, something that’s constantly being undone, slowly being turned around so the government in Washington has far more control than it was ever intended to have.

My anger stems from the axiom:

Those who can’t do, teach.

These intellectuals are not valuable in our society. They give nothing, they don’t form self-reliant, free-thinking individuals like they once did. No, they demand everyone thinks the same thing. They demand a less of a merit-based structure, and more arbitrary movement of capital, taking from those who have earned and giving it to those who have not.

They are not producers, inventors, workers, builders, garbage men, security guards. They do not produce, and they’ve become people who form adolescent minds that aim to decay our society.

You’re Going to Be in the Top 1%

Before I ever got angered by these intellectuals, I was happy, optimistic to read that paragraph, and many others in the book mentioned above.

Movement to and fro the 1% is not only possible, it’s likely, it’s constant, and the better you are both at what you do, how you invest, and what you produce, you’re going to spend more time in that 1% than less.

That’s so bloody motivating.

That movement isn’t taught. We’re taught that the 1% is a static group that meets annually to keep the rest of us down.

The reality is that this 1% is us, at some point in our lives we’re likely to be there. We’re good people. So are they. We are they. Hard work, works. Discipline, works.

And even as important, there is no us vs them battle. We’re all the same people trying to get to the same place.

There’s no need for envy or malice, for anger or resentment.

We’re all in this bastard of a life together. Let’s help one another make the most of it.

…Partially by voting for people who aren’t hell-bent on regulation, who aren’t looking for money after they leave office, even people who’ve already made their nut and shown some competency in the real world, not in the bubble that is the education system or government.

A career politician that leaves office only to get a nice 40 million dollar paycheck doesn’t sound like someone who’s in it for public service. A career politician who makes $100k a year and yet lives in one of 3 multimillion dollar mansions, doesn’t seem like they’re true, truthful, honest, or after what’s best for those of us willing to work hard.

Just a thought…

Always err on the side of freedom, not just for yourself, but for others, too. The more control we give to those who govern the less control we have over our lives, how we want to raise our kids, what we do with our money, and how we earn money.