P. J. O'Rourke: The Virtue of Sharing

Other people’s money, that is.

A few nonpartisan (or, at least, not very political) observations can be made about redistribution. When any authority of any kind undertakes to redistribute goods and services we can be sure we'll be told that "what goes to the poor" has "come from the rich." Those who are indignant at the rich say so; the indignant rich do too. But who's rich? You are.

To someone who lives in the slums of Karachi you're rich. I don't care if you're driving a 1990 Geo Tracker, haven't had a job since Cher was a babe, and your trailer home just burned down because your wife's boyfriend's meth lab exploded, you're rich. You're farting through silk as far as that person in Karachi who's looking for a job as a suicide bomber is concerned. Accusing someone of being rich is like accusing someone of adultery in the Gospel of St. John. Let he who is without anything anybody wants cast the first vote.

We all praise the virtue of sharing, but perform the following thought experiment about the sharing process. Imagine that your family is matched, by lot, with five other families and that the resulting half dozen familial units must pool their resources and come to mutual decisions about how those resources are to be allocated. For a brief moment that sounds like an intriguing combination of reality TV and the 1960s. Then we recall what an awful combination reality TV and the 1960s would have been. The Real Housewives of Charlie Manson.

It stinks in your hometown. How is it going to smell nationwide?

Since we've already determined that you're rich, let's institute a requirement that the other five families be poorer than yours. And why is a small bad idea like this supposed to get better if you make it bigger? It stinks in your hometown. How is it going to smell nationwide?

Nor does the idea improve if you shrink it. How small would that pool of resource sharers need to be to make it practical, sane, and unstupid? Even within our immediate families we don't share our resources fairly (as my children are totally fond of pointing out). And in most families collective decision making doesn't rise above the level of hamster purchase. (My dogs favor having the hamster—with a side of fries.)

What if the shared resource pool is restricted to only a married couple? Surprise divorce filing! And your spouse's lawyer just called to say you're rich.

Another rule of redistribution can be extrapolated from a family circle: Never do anything to (or for) a stranger that you wouldn't do to (or for) your bum brother-in-law. (I'd like to note here that I have a perfectly respectable set of brothers-in-law: an engineer, an industrial designer, a medical researcher, and a deceased career military man. So it's your bum brother-in-law we're talking about.)

You can't let your sister and her five kids by six different fathers starve, but you can try to make her husband get a job.  And you can (at least in my state) run him off at gunpoint if he beats her. Or say your brother-in-law isn't a bad guy, just drunk and crazy and high on drugs. He's living on the street and talking to people who don't exist. Do you pick him up by his collar and belt, heave him in the back of your car, and get him some help?  Or do you respect his civil rights and let him freeze in doorways and get run over by a bus? Yeah, I'm for the bus myself. But you know the kind of fit your sister is going to pitch at the funeral, screaming and yelling, and that will get your mom started and you'll never hear the end of it.