Capitalists Are Not the Root of All Evil

Guilt makes for a good story but doesn't solve anything.

Christmas is here and it's been awhile since I've expressed myself. Like everyone else, I've been busy but not on Christmas shopping as I would have liked. My husband lost both his grandparents this year so I've been out on the coast helping his mother. I cleaned out a 3000 square foot house in November and I'm still tired. But, I digress.

It's no secret that I'm a capitalist. In so being, some of the news I've seen from the United States has made me shake my head. Watching a union activist punch a political commentator was eye opening. I know liberals and left wing activists can be... vocal, but this was insanity. It made me sit back and consider what's been going on over the last number of years. I've asked with other incidents, if a conservative did that, it would be called assault/racist/blame throwing. Why is it when a liberal does something like this, there isn't a witness in sight and the conservative is blamed or the incident is justified away, like Benghazi? I then asked the questions why the outrage about this union law change? Why the protests? Why the demands of eat the rich in general?

UNEDITED UNION ASSAULT FOOTAGE! - I subscribe to Steven Crowder's YouTube channel. Go take a look.

I also saw a picture online that actually made me laugh. The picture shows a protester holding up a sign that says “you can still be rich, just not that rich.” So many questions came to mind with this one picture. How rich can I be? Who determines the limit? What happens to MY money if I make too much? And so forth. One more question did come to mind: has this person ever held a real job in her life?

I begin to wonder about the mindset of so many of these people with an entitlement complex so big it doesn't fit into the average gymnasium. Why is it okay to demand money be taken from those who make it to be given to those who don't wish to work? What right do they have to say “you have more than that person therefore you should give more, pay more, lose more because you can?” I don't mind giving to those who truly need it, I resent being forced to give to those who simply want it, or those who feel I should have less just to have less.

From what I've experienced, so many of these demanding, self-entitled individuals feel the rich are exploiting them in some fashion and should be punished. Why on Earth would capitalists want to exploit the type of person who demands higher taxes for him for no other reason than he has more money? Why would a capitalist want to exploit someone who wants more for doing less? The feeling of exploitation is imaginary because this person would have nothing the capitalist wants.

A capitalist wants someone who is willing to work for their salary. A capitalist wants, shockingly, a budding capitalist in their employ, not someone who will do as little as possible to earn their way to their next paycheque then complain they didn't get a Christmas bonus.

Now don't get me wrong, my husband and I don't fall into the category of “rich” yet. We're still working on it. I wish to become a world famous photographer, the likes of Yousef Karsh... so I built my husband's website and did some of his simpler IT stuff. I also do the occasional bit of research for him. I go to business conferences and talk to people. Not one of them do I talk to about photography.

My husband works hard for his success. To achieve his success (present and future), he doesn’t take away from anyone, in fact, he’s increasing the wealth of those around him. Not only that, he's raised money for, and ridden in, the “Ride to Conquer Cancer” and I drove as his backup.  Many years now, including the upcoming year, he's ridden in the MS Bike Tour. Much money and effort has been raised for the MS Society between my husband, his friends and his colleagues. He also shows newcomers how to raise money for their rides. How is this all a bad thing? It's his capitalistic mindset that have granted him these abilities and achievements. Wanton exploitation of the poor would do him no good, it would lose him time and money in the long run and he knows it. Any good capitalist knows this.

The irony here is, Adbusters exploited the poor when they began “Occupy Wallstreet.” With “We are the 99%” they used so many images of homeless people and the underprivileged, I was amazed. The only thought that came to me was “instead of using all this time to show me all of this destitution, why not do something about it?”

Then the occupiers tried using the poor as a way to force governments to change and to steal money from those who had it. The time and effort the occupiers put into it was wasted. What the occupy movement accomplished was millions of dollars in destruction, assault, and lots of crying about how the sky is falling. In Calgary, the Occupiers wanted access to free electricity to use their laptops! No change was made except to show me that activists, the poor, and unsuccessful would rather camp in the park and complain about how much their life sucked than do something about it. Guilt makes for a good story but doesn't solve anything. It seems easier to hate those who work for their happy lifestyles and try to have the government take it away from them, than to try to become one of them. The problem they faced was, the actual working class didn't want to give their stuff up, nor should they have to; they earned it.

There is a lot of complaining about how the poor get poorer as the rich get richer. I found a perfect quote to describe why. “The only difference between a rich person and a poor person is how they use their time.” Robert Kiyosaki said this and it's so true. My husband and I both spend a lot of time working on his company. He works with his clients, I do some of the administrative/IT bits. He has meetings, I put together marketing. We don't have time to protest the inequities of the world. When he's not making contacts/consulting/analyzing, we're on vacation. Even then, we find things that would work in his businesses. Our last vacation felt like 70% vacation, 30% “you know what I could do with that in development?”

Who knows, maybe the poor are getting poorer. I could be wrong about the whole thing. I just have a really hard time believing this sentiment, especially after I passed a beggar on the streets of downtown Calgary a couple of weeks ago who had a better smart phone than me.