Tweet [1]
… is Mark Twain’s response [2] to someone who asked him how he could be friends with Standard Oil vice-president Henry H. Rogers [3], whose immense fortune was falsely believed – simply because it was chiefly earned as a result of Rogers’ work at Standard Oil – to be “tainted”:
His money is tainted, it taint mine and it taint yours.
DBx: It’s a damn shame that this civilized respect for others’ property is today not more widespread. Rather than, like Samuel Clemens, respect and not envy other people’s unusually great material prosperity, today Americans read books, articles, and columns by Ivy League credentialed academics that actively encourage envy and covetousness of that which one hasn’t earned. And too many Americans cast ballots for politicians who solemnly promise to pillage the earnings of peaceful people.
This institutionalized envy and pillage is called “Progressive.” Measuring differences in monetary incomes and wealth, and explaining how the god-state will “redistribute” it all, seems oh-so advanced and scientific. Indeed, many people convince themselves that such “redistribution” is positively humane. Or so I gather it appears to many.
Well.
This attitude from top to bottom and from back to front, in full, disgusts me. And it should disgust every civilized human being.