"No one can serve two masters. Either he will hate the one and love the other, or he will be devoted to the one and despise the other. You cannot serve both God and Money." Matthew 6:24
Conservative, republican and libertarians worship of the rich is such an odd phenomena. Today the right looks up to money as in the past people worshiped totems. And if you question how they got all this money you are labeled with some stock word that only has meaning in the world of money worship. No longer is America the 'can do' place, today it is the look to big money place and they will save us. Salvation now resides with the rich. Eighty years of propaganda has so modified the circuits in the minds of the right wingnuts say something negative about the power of money and the winguts all scream in unison.
"On moral grounds, then, we could argue for a flat income tax of 90 percent to return that wealth to its real owners. In the United States, even a flat tax of 70 percent would support all governmental programs (about half the total tax) and allow payment, with the remainder, of a patrimony of about $8,000 per annum per inhabitant, or $25,000 for a family of three. This would generously leave with the original recipients of the income about three times what, according to my rough guess, they had earned."
UBI and the Flat Tax
As far as the super rich, they only make those enormous sums because of the state, so they are only morally entitled to an enormous sum, but not an absurd sum.
The Conservative Nanny State
The Empathy Ceiling: The Rich Are Different — And Not In a Good Way, Studies Suggest
The 'Haves' show less empathy than 'Have-nots' by Brian Alexander
The Empathy Ceiling: The Rich Are Different
"Many conservatives and libertarians defend the current levels of income inequality on the basis of merit. They claim the rich got rich because they worked harder, longer or smarter than the rest. However, researchers have conducted a vast number of empirical studies on what factors contribute to success, and in what proportion. A classic example of one of these studies is the 1972 book Inequality, by Christopher Jencks. (1) And these studies show that the meritocrat's position is not just arguably wrong, but clearly wrong."
The rich get rich because of their merit.
"Here we begin to see the real consequence of all this getting and spending. It’s not that campaign money has direct power over the public mind—that one advertising dollar can be counted upon to yield one vote. Nor is it true that the public is invulnerable, that we judiciously weigh these messages and see through the lies. The problem is that by putting such a price tag on the White House, we have imported market logic directly into our politics. Yes, even the village socialist will still get to vote, not to mention the village idiot. But in order to be a candidate—to be the kind of person who can make those calls to billionaires and get them to “double down”— Americans will have to undergo a far more rigorous process of ideological winnowing and executive training. And anyone who isn’t an absolute zealot about maximizing shareholder value will fail to make the cut." Thomas Frank Harper's 04/2012
"Core morality tells us that people have a right to what they earn by their own efforts freely exercised. It is this part of core morality that Ayn Rand objectivists, libertarians, and other right wingers tap into when they insist that taxation is slavery... The trouble with such arguments is that nothing is earned, nothing is deserved.
Even if there really were moral rights to the fruit of our freely exercised abilities and talents, these talents and abilities are never freely acquired or exercised. Just as your innate and acquired intelligence and abilities are unearned, so also are your ambitions, along with the discipline, the willingness to train, and other traits that have to be combined with your talents and abilities to produce anything worthwhile at all.... We don't earn our inborn (excuse the expression "God given") talents and abilities. We had nothing to do with whether these traits were conferred all of us are not. Similarly, we didn't earn the acquired character traits needed to convert these talents into achievements. They, too, were the result of deterministic processes (genetic and cultural) that were set in motion long before we were born. That is what excludes the possibility that we earned or deserve them. We were just lucky to have the combination of hardwired abilities and learned ambitions that resulted in the world beating a path to our door....No one ever earned or deserved the traits that resulted in the inequalities we enjoy -greater income and wealth, better health and longer life, admiration and social distinction, comfort, and leisure. Therefore, no one, including us, has a right to those inequality. Core morality may permit unearned inequalities, but it is certainly not going to require them without some further moral reason to do so." Alex Rosenberg 'The Atheist's Guide to Reality'
