THE WORLD IN DISORDER -- WHY KLAUS HAS A POINT!

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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