Green Is Not Always Good

When we hear “green” these days, most of us get a good feeling. We think of lovely vegetation, green building standards, the Green New Deal. But then, there is “green with envy.” I wondered why envy has always been associated with a pleasant color like green. Thanks to Google, I didn’t have to wonder very long. In ancient medicine, green was associated with illness – in particular, the accumulation of excess bile.

I admire Elizabeth’s Warren’s passion for fairness, but when she starts in on wanting to slam more taxes on the wealthy just for having stuff, she starts to lose me. I’m not a fan of luxury taxes. Unlike a house, a Rembrandt on the wall doesn’t consume public services (and no, I don’t have one on my wall). Anyway, Senator Warren doesn’t strike me as an envious person, but she is tapping into people out there who feel that the wealthy only got that way because of some unfair advantage. I think luck has a lot more to do with it than most of us want to admit.

Were you born in the United States? Are you able-bodied? Is your skin white? Did daddy and/or mommy leave you something? Did a billion-dollar idea come to you? As for the last, why did it come to YOU?

You may say, I deserve my wealth, it was my idea, and I worked hard for every penny. Congratulations. But even then, there are circumstances. The value of what you had to offer still had to come to people’s attention or get to market, and the timing had to be right. I had a relative who had great ideas and worked hard for them, but his timing was often not so great. Decades ago, he opened a nightclub in San Diego. Business was promising the first week. Then Pearl Harbor was attacked. There was a war on, and the Navy needed his building.

I thought God was supposed to be fair. But maybe he or she (and pardon me for this binary gender thing) is more like a dealer in Vegas who gives you a little house money to play with and says, “Here, kid, see what you can do with this.” Yup, some are given more than others.

Let me be clear: I don’t have a problem with taxing the wealthy more on their income. We used to tax rich people’s income at a much higher rate a long time ago, and they survived. True, some wealthy people are so consumed by greed that there is never such a thing as enough. That usually undoes them.

The key is humility. If you are wealthy and you understand that good fortune itself played a part in you acquiring your good fortune, then sharing some of it may not be as much of a problem. If you’re not wealthy right now, you can either choose to be a permanent victim of circumstances, including difficult ancestry, or, like the dealer said, see what you can do with what you have. I’m an optimist – I like to think that if we look through our cards, we can all find at least one we can play.