WHY KLAUS HAS A
POINT!
James R. Fisher, Jr.,
Ph.D.
© September 16, 2014
REFERENCE:
My exchange with
Klaus, and my apparent empathy for his concerns, has generated a bevy of
comments registering surprise. This is
typical.
A READER WRITES:
I read and enjoy
following your postings and conversations.
Surprised that when
agreeing with Klaus on the statement below that you agreed without some
clarifying comment. Klaus wrote:
"if you tried to make everyone economically equal, we would all be
living in a cardboard box and have one shoe"
I submit that there
would be a lot fewer folks living in a cardboard box with one shoe right this
moment, if the playing field were a bit more level.
It seems that even
modest attempts to do so (in the US as of late) are soundly defeated, tabled or
otherwise thwarted.
I know,,,,not new in
word history, but this is the first time I have seen such a coordinated and
"successful" political goal placing assurance of failure of a sitting president as the top
party priority.
DR. FISHER RESPONDS:
Thank you for your
comment. It will not surprise you that I
have gotten an avalanche of responses to the exchange between Klaus and
me.
Klaus is a thoughtful
man, who worked hard as a high school art teacher, and as you can imagine,
never made a lot of money, yet is passionately committed to people carrying
themselves and not expecting the government to do so. He writes:
I have met some of my
students many years after they graduated and who are from various economical
and racial backgrounds and they were all doing well . I did not remember their names most of the
time but they continued to work hard just as they did in my art classes.
I remember one
student who was of Mexican ancestry. At
the end of one year he talked to me about how many people are prejudice and
look down on others. I responded by
saying that if you let your life be guided by the prejudice of others that will
be the idea that will control your life and since he told me he was going back
to Mexico for the summer to visit relatives, I told him to read some of his own
history.
When he returned that
fall the first thing he said to me was that I was right.
Years later I ran
into him along with his wife and two children
and he was doing well. As a
teacher I never made a lot of money and we lived within our means. I never thought about or envied the
rich.
I suggest that the
person who told you to tell me that he just wants the rich to pay their fair
share should spend his time thinking of something that will make a lot of money
and then he can fulfill his desires by employing people and giving all his
money away.
I would guess this
person is like all those other people who protested on Wall street. I always wondered where they were getting
their money that provided them the time off while the rest of us were working. I wonder if they are making any contribution other
than running their mouths.
Just for
clarification, he wasn't responding to your memo but to comments I had
previously made to him. I, like him,
have never envied the rich. I've never
put the rich on a pedestal either, finding it very boring to be obsessively
compulsive about money in the first place, and to glory in its accumulation in
the second.
I have known rich
people, in fact, very rich people, and I have on occasion enjoyed the
hospitality of their opulence.
I must say I found
them equally interesting and equally boring, equally brilliant and equally
ignorant or dull witted, equally know-it-alls and equally humble. In other words, much like the rest of us only
with more money. I have not found them
happier or less paranoid than we are; nor have I found them more or less honest
or interesting.
I found them
constantly needing to move money and their investments as they were preoccupied
with money, frantically taking respites from their money in vacations that to
my mind were exhausting rather than rehabilitating or renewing.
My ex-CEO at
Honeywell, who was my president when I worked for him as a director in
Honeywell Europe is seemingly on a continuing holiday, sending pictures and
commentaries of his activities like teenage Facebook enthusiasts, why, is
beyond me.
He is into leisure, I
suppose, because he can afford it, but perhaps also because he wants people who
know him or have worked for him to know he is having such a grand time with his
multi-millions from his Honeywell retirement.
For me, he is like
the "Flying Dutchman" without a country, or without a contributing
vocation after retirement. I don't envy
him. I feel sorry for him.
My sister and I from
our working class family, now in our dotage, are still working, not because we
have to, but because we want to.
Work has been a
privilege; work is what we know; and work is what we do. Work justifies our taking up space on this
planet.
I have friends such
as William L. Livingston IV, author of several books, who has been working
daily, and I mean daily, on his magnum opus for years, not to make a lot of
money, but to leave something of lasting value to society.
Klaus uses the
metaphor of equality being tantamount to us all living in cardboard boxes.
I find it not too
wide of the remark, actually. If people
didn't have a passion to create wealth, there wouldn't be schools, churches,
businesses, jobs, especially jobs for the rest of us.
Politicians and
pundits, crusaders and malcontents, make wealth creators easy targets.
They always have and
they always will.
Klaus mentions the
"Occupy Wall Street" crowd. My
BB has a niece that was part of that crowd, a person now in her forties who has
never been nailed down to a regular job or career, and who has wandered the
world for decades attempting to find purchase.
She had a lot of company with Wall Street protesters who were so busy
bad mouthing the one percenter that they apparently didn't have a clue as to
why they were one percenters, and what that meant to and for the rest of us.
That said I have an
equal contempt for the "Tea Party" and its belief that government
should do nothing.
Just as there are 10
percent that pay most of the taxes while 90 percent of us pay what we consider
huge in terms of percentage of our income to that of the wealth creators, there
is a contingent of about 10 percent of society that cannot carry themselves,
and need society's assistance. That is
the role of government.
My problem is with
the 80 percent in between these extremes that will just as well be on the dole
as on a job, just as well think a job is a right rather than a privilege and
believe their employers owe them a living.
I have worked more
than sixty years from a student to a laborer in a chemical-food plant, to a
chemist and then chemical sales engineer, to a corporate executive, again as a
student, then as a consultant and adjunct professor, then as a corporate
psychologist, again as a corporate executive, now as an author of fiction and
nonfiction books, lecturer, essayist, and philosopher.
I plan to do this
until my mind and body protest too much, and I no longer can.
In that long experience,
I have found 15 percent of the workforce are what I call "foot
draggers," looking for what they can get, not give, 70 percent are
followers and go with the flow, showing up for work, doing what they are told,
and little more, which is most of us, and then there are the "hard
chargers," people who lead and see over the horizon, and keep the company
in the black.
Put another way, 80
percent of the work done in any situation is likely to be completed by 20
percent of the workforce, no matter what the industry or commerce, activity or
operation.
So, yes, we could all
be in one of these refugee camps with dirt floors living in tents or cardboard
boxes on the street if the drive of a small segment of our society was not
willing to put forth the effort, take the risk, work and scheme to create
wealth to show the way despite the difficulty.
You may think Klaus is angry. I
think he is disappointed at the collective lack of appreciation of the American
born for his adopted country.
* * *
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