Pay Up

There is an article in The Guardian that found its way into my social media feed: The bad behavior of the richest: what I learned from wealth managers. The piece is subtitled: “The habits of the wealthiest mirror the supposed ‘pathologies’ of the poor. But while those in poverty are called lazy, the rich are dubbed bon vivants.” It’s not a very long read, and it’s pretty much what it says on the tin, a lamentation of the double standard that the author, Copenhagen Business School Professor of Economic Sociology Brooke Harrington, sees in the way we view “bad behavior” on the part of the wealthy versus the impoverished. The point is driven forcefully home in the conclusion of the piece, which a reader had copied into their social media post as the “money quote.”

It is as if the right to move around, to take up space, and to direct your own life as you see fit have become luxury goods, available to those who can pay instead of being human rights. For the rich, deviance from social norms is nearly consequence-free, to the point where outright criminality is tolerated: witness the collective shrug that greeted revelations of massive intergenerational tax fraud in the Trump family.

For the poor, however, even the most minor deviance from others’ expectations – like buying ice cream or soft drinks with food stamps – results in stigmatization, limits on their autonomy, and deprivation of basic human needs. This makes life far more nasty, brutish and short for those on the lowest rungs of the socio-economic ladder, creating a chasm of more than 20 years in life expectancy between rich and poor. This appears to some as a fully justified consequence of “personal responsibility” – the poor deserve to die because of their moral failings.

So while the behavior of the ultra-rich gets an ever-widening scope of social leeway, the lives of the poor are foreshortened in every sense. Once upon a time, they were urged to eat cake; now the cake earns them a public scolding.

It’s a point well taken. But it is also a point narrowly made. And like most discussions of rights, it leaves out something that many of us don’t often think about. The statement “everything has a price” is a cliché, one that we expect to hear from the obnoxiously materialistic character in a movie who is seeking to crassly trade mere money for something priceless out of an inability to see true worth. But it is, when viewed another way, a simple fact of life. Perhaps a better way of putting it would be that “everything has a cost” in that everything requires some input of energy and or resources to continue. All life in our Solar System is powered, directly or indirectly, by sunlight. Were the Sun to somehow suddenly pack its bags and head off for parts unknown, the end would come for everythng. There are some places were the heat of the Earth could keep things going for a time, but it would only be a matter of time before the cold and dark did everything in.

The “right to move around, to take up space, and to direct your own life as you see fit,” like the rights to “Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness,” require some expenditure of resources. And the simple declaration of these things as rights does not alter that. Instead, they become commitments, created or aspired to, to lift those costs from the shoulders of individuals and spread them among everyone, such that the requisite price is paid, regardless of the wealth or poverty of any given person. But for all that the authors of the Declaration of Independence believed that all men were “endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights,” said Creator was nowhere to be found when the bill came due. And so it was either left to others to pony up, or the debt went unpaid; and settling it often took the form of those rights being repossessed.

Accurately or not, most societies feel that the wealthy, or even the modestly well off, pay for their vices from their own pockets. Were I to walk into a grocery store and stagger out under the weight of an unhealthy amount of soft drinks and ice cream, there would likely be little in the way of public scorn. Not because of my sneaking out under cover of darkness, but because if I pay with cash or card, the money for those purchases is assumed to be mine. Likewise if, after consuming all of that fat, sugar and artificial flavoring, I wound up in the hospital, as long as I paid the bill, I could expect to left alone by most. But if there were an idea that I was spending the public's money, and not my own, that acceptance would rapidly evaporate.

Whether the very wealthy are truly spending their own resources on their extravagances and leisure is an open question, and one that I am flatly unqualified to answer. But I would presume that the public understands that they are spending their own money, even if some of that money was only available for them to spend due to tax fraud. And I would also presume that many people believe that the world is a just enough place that very wealthy people are deserving, however they might understand that, of being very wealthy. And in that sense, the bad behavior of the wealthy doesn’t feel like a taking in the way that the behavior of the dependent poor does.

It’s also worth noting that accountability imposes costs as well. And one of the reasons why the poor tend to feel the lash more frequently is the perception that punishing them is less expensive than punishing the better-off. If Judge Kavanaugh is deemed worth more than the rest of us because of the high level of investment that has been made in him, and holding him accountable for his actions in high-school risks that investment, it makes some sense why, in the end, it didn’t happen. The same could be said for any number of people. This, of course, creates yet another bitter pill for the poor; the overall lack of investment in them gives them nothing to trade for forbearance, while the wealthy often purchase forgiveness with the resources that we showered on them.

In order to understand human rights as things that are the birthright of all people, simply by virtue of their birth, there has to also be an understanding that the resources to pay for those things are readily available to the point where they won’t be missed. I don’t understand most of any given society, let alone humanity to be at that point. I’m not sure that any sizable number of people will ever get there.