Morality and Money Are Not Best Friends
I mean, they’ve met a few times
Morality and money might nod to each other on the street, but they’ve never been over to the other’s house for a backyard barbeque.
They don’t have much of a relationship. That doesn’t mean people don’t try to get them together – just that the two of them seem to have very little in common.
What I’m trying to say is that whether people have money or not has nothing to do with their morals. Good people can be rich or poor. So can bad people. Or morally ambiguous people (which is most of us).
Most of us know this
Yet, we persist in assigning moral values to people based on their financial situation. There’s a whole prosperity gospel movement that claims God blesses deserving people with wealth, but that’s clearly ridiculous. We should all know better.
But there’s a lot of tacit acceptance – codified in our laws, policies and societal norms – of the idea that the poor are lazy scammers who can’t be given much help because if we do, they’ll just take advantage. We will be enabling them, you see.
On the other hand, it’s fine to set up all kinds of advantages that serve the investor class. We can trust them to do the right thing. They’re rich! They’re job creators! They are Good People.
System-scammers are all over the socioeconomic spectrum
Most people are fairly honest and decent, but yes, there are some people who will take advantage of every loophole and bend every rule to the breaking point.
Some of these people are welfare recipients but others are CEOs.
Tax evasion, insider trading, corporate fraud, diversion of company assets for personal use – these are the rich man’s version of trading food stamps for cigarettes or not telling your caseworker that your boyfriend has moved in and started helping you with bills.
Keep in mind that all the rules are made by the people with enough money to pay the rule-makers. It’s a lot easier to win the game if you get to keep changing the rules to suit your own circumstances.
Read Thomas Piketty
Capital in the Twenty-First Century explains that we have set up our monetary systems to concentrate more and more wealthy among a few people. This isn’t some natural thing that just happened on its own or a consequence of some people being harder workers or more clever with money. It’s the predictable result of the wealthy and powerful people setting up the tax structure a certain way so they could benefit from it.
You can do that, if you’re wealthy enough.
The best example of the poor (or at least non-rich) trying to arrange things for personal benefit might be to say, “Look, we want to unionize and withhold our labor unless you pay us a better wage.” But when they do, they are roundly criticized for being greedy.
They’re not only greedy, but they threaten the wellbeing and profitability of those juicy companies that are benefiting everyone. Supposedly.
The double standard
It’s OK for the wealthy to arrange things for their financial benefit. That’s just good business. It’s also OK for the wealthy to maneuver to arrange taxes for their own benefit. After all, they are the job creators. They earned their wealth. Even if they inherited it.
Any attempts by the lower classes to make changes in taxes, benefits, labor laws or anything else are a sign of greed.
Not everyone falls for this, but clearly plenty of folks do – which is why we still lack things like universal healthcare that would benefit everyone. We are terrified that somebody somewhere might end up with a benefit they don’t deserve.
For years, I struggled to comprehend how anyone could be against programs designed to feed hungry people, educate children, provide affordable health care and higher education and do something about the housing crisis.
Very few people are really so heartless as to not care about a hungry child. But a lot of people truly believe things like free school lunches and SNAP benefits transform poor people into baby birds that sit back and open their mouths, expecting to be fed.
In my book, The Trailer Park Rules, a couple of characters illustrate this. Jonesy has done a newspaper interview with Angel, a single and very irresponsible mother on welfare – she’s the type of person who will find a way to take advantage of any well-meaning social program. When conservatives talk about the undeserving poor, they’re talking about people like her. Jonesy is speaking to another character, Lori, about money and motivation:
“The system wasn’t really designed for people like you and me,” Lori said, as she chopped an onion. “It works great for people who really want to make a lot of money. It doesn’t work for people who are motivated by other things. I can tell you,” she said with a laugh, “I didn’t choose teaching for the money.”
He laughed, too, but for a different reason. She seemed to assume they were more or less in the same financial boat. He didn’t want to admit how close he was to sinking.
“Aren’t you worried about turning the masses into lazy freeloaders living off breadlines?” He picked up a baguette and pointed at her with it. The bread and the bottle of wine had been his contribution to tonight’s dinner. It was more than he’d usually spend on dinner, but he reasoned that he could tap what would have been his smoking fund.
“Not at all. Lots of people work hard without being paid all the time. My mother worked her tail off raising six kids and keeping a big garden. Mom was even less motivated by money than I am.” She tipped the chopped onion into a skillet shimmering with hot olive oil and began stirring.
He suspected she’d never known anybody living in real poverty before, except maybe for him. He loved the idea of a system in which everybody worked hard for all the right reasons; it was how he’d always operated.
But he knew the world would always have to contend with people like Angel. So he said nothing. The water in the stock pot had started to boil, so he added a sheaf of pasta, then busied himself poking at it with a fork until all the pieces were submerged.
“I don’t have the answer,” he finally said.
And then we have Nathan, a man with plenty of money and power who is just as reprehensible as Angel but in a completely different way:
He looked at those poor fools in the trailer park and wondered how they could endure such a life of privation, but then he looked at the engineers he managed in much the same way. Did these people not have an appetite for all that the world offered? It was so, so easy to take what you wanted. Why didn’t everyone do it? What made a person content with such a limited life?
That would never be him. He saw no reason he shouldn’t keep striving for more. The C-suite beckoned. And once he had that, he’d be able to help himself to just about anything he wanted.
How do you arrange society to deal with the Angels and Nathans of this world? Jonesy has pondered this all his life and has no answer. I’d love for him to have offered a suggestion, but since he was born in my brain, he doesn’t have one.
As I see it, we have four kinds of people:
Some people feel a calling and work their tails off doing work they care about, even if it keeps them in the working or lower class. Your social workers, journalists, clergy and the like are in this category. Jonesy is one of them.
Some people are content to perform routine work as long as it gives them a reasonably comfortable standard of living. This includes a good chunk of society.
Some people are willing to do whatever it takes to amass or keep a fortune, including crushing competitors, bending/breaking laws or buying a senator or two in order to make the rules work in their favor. Nathan is one of these folks.
Some people are not willing to lift a finger if they can avoid it. They’ll take advantage in any way possible. Angel is a prime example.
How do you set up a society to curb the worst excesses? I agree with Jonesy.
I don’t have the answer.
About Michelle Teheux
I’m a writer in central Illinois. If you like my work, subscribe to me here or on Medium. My new book is The Trailer Park Rules.
Thanks for this essay. I try to fit into a category of a wealthy person with a moral code and a feeling that I must give back. I'm trying!
One thing I have repeatedly noticed looking at the history of television animation is how often they make episodes based around conflict between monied classes and the less affluent. In many cases, it involves the former trying to remove from existence a very obvious public-funded resource (e.g. a park, a swimming pool, a summer camp, etc.) in favor of a private project benefitting their greed. Logically, and particularly since the protagonists are of this group, the latter faction ends up putting a stop to that. Repeat that outline enough and you've got kids like myself who grew up thinking big business was immoral and continue to hold that belief as adults.
Another Substack I read is from a couple who run heritage walking tours in Los Angeles, and they regularly bemoan the fact that the City Council favors monetary gain over history by allowing historical buildings to be neglected or otherwise destroyed. So this happens in real life as well- but it's much harder to stop in real life.