What is it with rich people and their greed? Obviously it takes some sort of love of money to make someone work so hard at accumulating material wealth. But they lose sight of the bigger picture: Life. You really see that when they bitch about taxes. Oh, the poor rich guy who makes $300,000. He's going to lose half of it to taxes. Oh boo-hoo. That's only $150,000 left. How can he live on that?

    Tax moaners, especially on the right, give lip service to the founding fathers. Back then, there were no income taxes. And that is about as deep as the right will go in looking at how things were back then. But a lot has changed since then. The change-over from an agrarian society to an industrial and now information society has changed the face of our nation. On the family farm, two, even three generations of Americans lived in the same household. If someone got sick, the other family members took care of him or her. When they grew old or were injured, the other members of the family made up for the loss and took care of that individual. And if times were tough, well, you wouldn't starve because each farm was largely self-sufficient.

    Not too many Americans live on a family farm. In fact, not too many Americans share their home with 2 other generations of their family. In an industrial society where 95% of the population lives in an urban environment, those workers don't have someone at home who can necessarily take care of them if they get sick or injured or grow old. But companies still need those workers.

    The well kept secret of the right is the Achilles heel of their tax bitching argument, they need that bottom 90% of society to make them rich in the first place. Bill Gates isn't writing Windows, thousands of his minions are. Steve Forbes doesn't write, manufacture, and distribute his uppity magazine, his thousands of drones do. And those drones, to be effective, need a great deal of infrastructure underneath them to be as productive as they are. Without social security, without Medicare, without those other programs the right complains about, millions of Americans would not necessarily be sick and dying. Instead, companies would be burdened with greater requirements for retirement, healthcare, and so forth. Either that or more Americans would be sick and dying on the streets. In the former case, costs would be higher because individual companies lack the clout of the federal government, in the latter case the American work force, the bulk of it made up of only somewhat killed labor, would be less effective at best or looking for a new government at worst.

    The next time you see some rich guy complain about his taxes, remind him that while he may not personally be benefiting directly from what those taxes do, his minions are and it isn't he that is creating his wealth, it's his minions that are. Rich people too often delude themselves into thinking that they are the wealth creators. They aren't. It's the people doing the actual labor who are creating that wealth. The rich guy is merely the one directing it. Crucial no doubt but well compensated for that cruciality. They need to be reminded who is America and that our government, of the people, by the people has evolved based on the changing dynamics of American society.