On Facebook Envy

Russian Joke, from Hedrick Smith's "The Russians", supposedly told by Russians about themselves:

An Englishman, a Frenchman and a Russian rescue a genie and the genie gives them one wish each. The Englishman wishes to be the richest man in the world–and “whoosh!” he is. The Frenchman wishes to be the world’s great lover – and “whoosh!” he is. The Russian thinks hard and says “Most of all I want my neighbour Ivan’s cow to die”.

For anyone who thinks he understands envy, wealth redistribution, or the motivations behind either, that joke is a real knee-slapper....

Here's something about envy from the Reuters News Service.  It's about Facebook and envy:

A study conducted jointly by two German universities found rampant envy on Facebook, the world's largest social network that now has over one billion users and has produced an unprecedented platform for social comparison.

The researchers found that one in three people felt worse after visiting the site and more dissatisfied with their lives, while people who browsed without contributing were affected the most.

"We were surprised by how many people have a negative experience from Facebook with envy leaving them feeling lonely, frustrated or angry," researcher Hanna Krasnova from the Institute of Information Systems at Berlin's Humboldt University told Reuters.

"From our observations some of these people will then leave Facebook or at least reduce their use of the site," said Krasnova, adding to speculation that Facebook could be reaching saturation point in some markets.

Researchers from Humboldt University and from Darmstadt's Technical University found vacation photos were the biggest cause of resentment with more than half of envy incidents triggered by holiday snaps on Facebook....


"Passive following triggers invidious emotions, with users mainly envying happiness of others, the way others spend their vacations and socialize," the researchers said in the report "Envy on Facebook: A Hidden Threat to Users' Life Satisfaction?" released on Tuesday.

"The spread and ubiquitous presence of envy on Social Networking Sites is shown to undermine users' life satisfaction."

They found people aged in their mid-30s were most likely to envy family happiness while women were more likely to envy physical attractiveness.

These feelings of envy were found to prompt some users to boast more about their achievements on the site run by Facebook Inc. to portray themselves in a better light.

Men were shown to post more self-promotional content on Facebook to let people know about their accomplishments while women stressed their good looks and social lives....

That's what I absolutely love and adore about my fellow Libertarians and libertarians.  They don't care how much stuff the other guy has, as long as he got it honestly.  They want everyone to have as much as the other guy has. 
I believe that most Libertarians are bewildered by Facebook Envy, and have little or no experience of the sensation.  They can look at someone else's vacation pics from Greece, and think "Good for him.  He's worked hard.  He's smart.  I hope that one day, everyone in the world can have vacations as cool as that one." 
May the tribe increase !!!
(Hit that Facebook tab to your right if you want to friend me on FB !!) 

Elizabeth ! Warren !! is back !!!!!!!!!!

Back in 2010, a writer named Brent Budowsky almost put himself in the hospital from just thinking about the nomination of Elizabeth ! Warren !! to a Consumer Protection boondoggle of some sort. 

Most of the rational world had a great time with his piece, an editorial in which Budowsky imagined peace in Israel, justice in this life, the lion laying down with the lamb, the Democrats rallying behind Obama, and other unlikely scenarios - all from the nomination of Elizabeth ! Warren !! to a bureaucracy. 

Elizabeth ! Warren !! is back, and she's running for the Senate.  Here's something she had to say a few days ago at a political rally:

There is nobody in this country who got rich on his own. Nobody. You built a factory out there — good for you!


But I want to be clear. You moved your goods to market on the roads the rest of us paid for. You hired workers the rest of us paid to educate. You were safe in your factory because of police forces and fire forces that the rest of us paid for. You didn’t have to worry that maurauding bands would come and seize everything at your factory, and hire someone to protect against this, because of the work the rest of us did. Now look, you built a factory and it turned into something terrific, or a great idea — God bless. Keep a big hunk of it.

But part of the underlying social contract is you take a hunk of that and pay forward for the next kid who comes along.

Ok, let's look a little closer.....

Tax units in the lowest quintile (20%) pay 0.4 percent (of the total tax burden), while those in the second, third (or middle), and fourth quintiles pay 2.3 percent, 7.7 percent, and 17.6 percent respectively.


The top quintile pays 71.9 percent. The top 10 percent pays 55.9 percent while the top 0.1 percent pays 12.3 percent.

What it boils down to is that some very rich people have a lot of money, and Elizabeth ! Warren !! wants more of it.
Here's the pic that's currently making the rounds on Facebook, which I think sums up the situation nicely:

But wait !!!    It keeps getting better.  I found this parody here. 
Enjoy. 

Ron Paul on Envy

I'm trying to finish Ron Paul's latest book "Liberty Defined".  The difficulty, for a Libertarian, is that some of his sentences, paragraphs, and chapters are so outstanding that I stop and re-read them over and over just to internalize what the man is trying to tell us. 

The book is a collection of 50 short essays on topics ranging from Abortion to Zionism.  The bibliographies alone (which follow each chapter) make the book worth purchasing. 

Here's the chapter on "Envy". 

Envy is the painful awareness of another's good fortune.  It is usually associated with the desire to bring an end to that good fortune through some means.  Thus is it worse than jealousy, which is wanting what another has.  Envy seeks to take away what another has out of spite and hatred, and is driven by the desire to destroy.  It is an extremely destructive emotion, one that cannot bring personal happiness and is sure to bring social harm.  the exercise of envy only ends in satisfying a kind of lust for bad to come to others.  All the world religions condemn the impulse.  It is one of the seven deadly sins.  It is something we train our children not to feel.  No good can come of it. 

I raise it in this context because envy is one of the driving forces of redistributionist politics in the United States, an emotion and motivation endorsed every day on the editorial pages.  It is the secret motivation behind the unrelenting attacks on the rich heard every day inside Washington, a town whose population includes some of the most well-to-do people in the entire country.  The emotion that is behind the attacks on the justly rich, and the emotion that such attacks seek to stir within the population, is envy. 

Envy is sometimes called the green-eyed monster.  Many religious traditions have given rise to charms and methods for warding it off.  That's because the envious will stop at nothing in order to achieve their goals of harming those who succeed, even when achieving that goal is itself personally harmful.  Policies driven by envy, such as the progressive income tax and inheritance tax, do not help society.  They gather revenue but arguably less than would be gathered if all taxes were low and friendly to overall production.  But such policies do accomplish the goal of harming people who are rich and successful. 

There are dangerous social consequences to the private exercise of envy.  People fear driving a nice car or living in a nice home because these behaviors might elicit reprisal.  So it is in public policy.  Policies rooted in envy discourage the accumulation of wealth, punish success, and cause people to pull back from doing great things.  People who might otherwise pursue wealth think twice, knowing full well that the force of law stands waiting to crush success. 

To hate is always injurious to the soul.  To hate because another person or class of people has done well for itself compounds the injury.  But that is precisely what policies that survive solely to punish people for making money, or for living well, are really all about.  It's been going on for a very long time.  It strikes me as a form of institutionalized immorality.  Under ideal conditions, our law should elicit from us the best that we have to offer, always appealing to the highest impulses of our nature.  Policies that harm people solely because they are winners in life appeal to the lowest impulses in our nature. 

It is hard enough for people to come to terms with success, especially in a market setting in which superior traits such as foresight and prudence and good judgment really to lead to profitability.  we should learn the virtue of celebrating success or, as the ancient philosophers said, learn to be inspired by the success of others.  We should try to emulate success, not punish it.  This is the American way and a major reason for the wealth and success of Americans. 

It is the same with international politics.  We don't have to be number one and we sure don't have to regard every country that does well (think China here) as a threat to be kicked and punched.  In a true market economy, gain does not come at anyone's expense.  We can all win together, provided we keep the green-eyed monster at bay. 

Almost every essay in Dr. Paul's book is at good as the one above.  I hope you'll buy it. 

The Envy demotivational poster came from here.  The pic of the little green monster came from here.  The cartoon of success being punished came from here.   

Update:  Shortly after laboriously pounding this chapter into the internet, I discovered that THIS BASTARD beat me to it.  I hope he's taxed within an inch of his life.  I hope the government spreads his wealth of readers to "the less fortunate".  Especially me. 

Are you better off than a Vanderbilt?

Bryan Caplan, of the Library Of Economics And Liberty, just returned from the massive Biltmore estate, George Vanderbilt's massive North Carolina palace.

But how many  (of us) would actually want to trade places with George? Despite his massive library, (pipe) organ, and so on, I submit that any modern with a laptop and an internet connection has a vastly better book and music collection than he did. For all his riches, he didn't have air conditioning; he had to suffer through the North Carolina summers just like the poorest of us. Vanderbilt did travel the world, but without the airplane, he had to do so at a snail's pace.

Caplan goes on to write that Vanderbilt died at age 51 because of complications from an appendectomy.  Yeah.  An appendectomy.  He continues:

Vanderbilt clearly had it better than most of the people in his era. But the world has improved so much that, all things considered, the average American is now better off than this prince of the Gilded Age. I can't be sure, but I bet that George would have agreed. How much do you think he would have paid to live for a single day in your shoes?

Here's Radley Balko, commenting on his own trip to the Biltmore estate a few years ago....

Hackneyed libertarian observation: I couldn’t help but think that in most ways the average American today lives better than a baron like Vanderbilt did just a century ago, even by Biltmore standards.

Okay, so I don’t have awesome mountain views and milion-dollar tapestries in my one-bedroom Alexandria apartment. But much of what made the Biltmore so modern for its time — a swimming pool, a bowling alley, plumbing, a “fitness room,” elevators, refrigeration — most all of us at least have access to today. There aren’t many periods in human history when you can say that within a hundred years, that average man will live as “royalty” does.


Let's combine that with some census data about what the poorest Americans own:

% Households with:	Poor 1984	Poor  1994	Poor 2003	Poor 2005	All 1971	All 2005
Washing machine	58.2	71.7	67.0	68.7	71.3	84.0
Clothes dryer	35.6	50.2	58.5	61.2	44.5	81.2
Dishwasher	13.6	19.6	33.9	36.7	18.8	64.0
Refrigerator	95.8	97.9	98.2	98.5	83.3	99.3
Freezer	29.2	28.6	25.4	25.1	32.2	36.6
Stove	95.2	97.7	97.1	97.0	87.0	98.8
Microwave	12.5	60.0	88.7	91.2	1.0	96.4
Color TV	70.3	92.5	96.8	97.4	43.3	98.9
VCR	3.4	59.7	75.4	83.6	0.0	92.2
Personal computer	2.9	7.4	36.0	42.4	0.0	67.1
Telephone	71.0	76.7	87.3	79.8	93.0	90.6
Air conditioner	42.5	49.6	77.7	78.8	31.8	85.7
Cellular Telephone			34.7	48.3	0.0	71.3
One or more cars	64.1	71.8	72.8 (2001)		79.5

These numbers were compiled by The Austrian Economists.  Here are more observations from The Austrians:

I think these data largely speak for themselves. The only categories where the poor have become "worse off" are in freezers (likely due to more being built into fridges) and now telephones, which is, of course, explained by the gains in cell phones. Stoves are down slightly, but that too could be due to swapping regular stoves for microwaves or even toaster ovens. In any case, it's a pretty small decline.


The overall lesson is clear: lives for Americans below the poverty line continue to get better in terms of what they are able to put in their households and have to make use of everyday. And do note that the average American household in 2005 was doing much better than its 1971 counterpart. MUCH better - and this doesn't even count medical advances and the like. So whatever one hears about stagnating wages and the like, the bottom line is ultimately what we can afford to buy and have in our households to improve our lives. By those measures, life for the average American is better today than 35 years ago, life for poor Americans is much better than it was 35 years ago, and poor Americans today largely live better than the average American did 35 years ago. Hard to square with a narrative of economic stagnation or decline.

What the current policy regime holds for the future remains, of course, to be seen. But to use Pete's terms: as long as the Schumpeterian horse of innovation and the Smithian horse of the gains from trade outrun the Government horse of stupidity, the winners will continue to be you, me and our children and grandchildren, even if the stupid horse is running a bit faster than it used to.

So the next time one of our government employees starts talking about the widening gap between the lowest 20% and the highest 5%, remember this.....

1) With every new innovation, somebody got to own it first.  This applies to iPads, microwaves, video cameras (once the $35,000.00 Christmas gift in the Neiman-Marcus catalog), televisions, cell phones and plumbing. 
2) You can't prevent the top 5% from owning something without slowing its eventual use by the bottom 20%.
3) Free Market Capitalism has done more to improve the lives of more people than any Statist scheme ever devised. 

But that's not fair ! ! !

The wealthiest 1% of the nation pays ____ % of the taxes.
The wealthiest 5% of the nation pays ____% of the taxes.
The wealthiest 25% of the nation pays ____% of the taxes.
The wealthiest 50% of the nation pays ____% of the taxes.

The Corner on National Review Online has a story featuring the current % breaks.

Discuss amongst yourselves....vote accordingly. You're going to hear a lot about this next November. And if you work for Uncle Sam, why not just tell the people in the brackets above that "this is the amount of tax you're going to pay. It's what you paid last year WITH all your deductions. We've done the math, and unless you really screwed up, it's what you'll pay this year WITHOUT any deductions. You don't have to give any more of your money to the Tax Shelter Priesthood, or make any last minute donations of your husband's underwear."