Ignore the Poison; Give Me the Bandaid and Shut Up

After the bailout passed I remained concerned about the role of envy and its exploitation by politicians and business in building the blocks that led to this crisis.

So I did a search to find any stories or editorials that dealt with it. I found NOTHING recent.

But I did stumble upon Henry Hazlitt's On Appeasing Envy first published in 1972.

Tocqueville went on to quote at length from the mutual recriminations of the king, the nobles, and the parliament in blaming each other for the miseries of the people. To read them now is to get the uncanny feeling that they are plagiarizing the rhetoric of the limousine liberals of our own day.

All this does not mean that we should hesitate to take any measure truly calculated to relieve hardship and reduce poverty. What it does mean is that we should never take governmental measures merely for the purpose of trying to assuage the envious or appease the agitators, or to buy off a revolution. Such measures, betraying weakness and a guilty conscience, only lead to more far-reaching and even ruinous demands. A government that pays social blackmail will precipitate the very consequences that it fears.

I hesitate to add my own poorly worded insights in order to update this clear thinking. Maybe later. Meanwhile, read the whole thing and pray that others (or you) can build a strong following who will demand an end to such madness.

Starting a new discussion might flush out the role played in all this by the exploiters of envy, jealousy, and covetousness all the while increasing their own powers and paying no personal price for their misdeeds.

Should we fail to shed light on this poison and bleed it out, but only accept the current palliative to get us past the pain of the current wound, it will remain in our system. Its ill effects are certain to return and then much worse.