Lesson 59 from The Hard Knocks School of Life

Since jealousy and greed are related closely, jealousy must obviously be a source or root of evil.

I am not so much interested in defining evil as identifying the cause of evil, these I have boiled down to greed, envy and jealousy. Indeed I believe that envy and jealousy are actually aspects of greed. Behind any behavior that could possibly be considered evil is the root of greed and its expression as naked greed, or greed disguised as envy or jealousy.

Sometimes of course greed is difficult to identify, for example when many people (including BHO in my humble opinion) start to talk about giving to the poor they rarely intend that they should give to the poor but are somewhat more like Judas Iscariot who had his hand in the money bag of Jesus. I say that even if they may not be stealing money for their own enrichment, for when they use the power of the government to take money from one person to give to another in order to appear to be generous they at minimum steal the accolade that would go with such a gift if they had not stepped between the ‘donor’ and the ‘recipient.’

However since BHO is running the money through the government chances are that at more than one level there are people who are diverting some of it to their own enrichment. This is on top of the fact that government ‘charity’ rarely does anything other than to increase the dependency of its recipient. While the increasing control this gives stokes the appetite of the government for ever greater power (which is one objective of some strains of greed) over all aspects of life.

© 2012 Vic Jones

Lesson 58 from The Hard knocks School of Life

Evil seems to me to be made up of three basic behaviors: greed, envy and lying.

Greed may be (I believe is) the underlying disease for the behavior for which envy is the motivation, and most of the time greed is also the motivation for lying.

The only motivation I have ever seen for lying other than greed is fear. This then brings up the question of whether or not fear motivated lying is as evil as greed motivated lying. Another issue that muddies the all lying is evil is the fact that at times lying can be very necessary to stop someone from carrying out an evil act. An example of this is those people who hid Jews from Hitler’s SS during world war two. These people obviously lied and did good. Thus lying became not only a necessary evil at that time but became an actual active good.

© 2012 Vic Jones

Lesson 57 from the Hard Knocks School of Life

Socialism (or communism) seems to me to be systems of government based on greed and fueled by envy.

Communism and its child/sibling socialism are philosophies that are often hard to discuss rationally because people get heavily emotionally involved in these belief systems. Perhaps the reason for this is that so many people have invested their ‘treasure’ both in worldly goods and belief in these ideas and if anyone refutes these ideas they are devaluing the treasure that has been invested in them.

Yet when one takes the time to examine the idea that everyone should have the same stuff, (goods and services) without all of the emotional baggage, it becomes very evident that communism is childish or infantile at best and evil at worst. The reason for this is that not everyone wants, or needs, or deserves the same things in life. For very young children it may only seem fair that Johnny doesn’t have a cookie when Timmy doesn’t have a cookie. But adults can easily understand that if John works every day he has the goods and services he earns while if Tim refuses (not cannot) to work then he should likewise have what he has earned which is poverty.

© 2012 Vic Jones

Lesson 54 from The Hard Knocks School of Life

Let not him who is houseless pull down the house of another; but let him labor diligently and build one for himself, thus by example assuring that his own shall be safe from violence when built. Abraham Lincoln

Let us paraphrase this for the modern era: Let not the poor man steal (whether with his own hand or by government action) from the rich but rather let him learn to become rich and build his own wealth thereby assuring that his wealth will be safe from the greed of other men.

Greed is without a doubt at the heart of wishing to have what you desire without work. But greed always leads to everyone having less goods and less security.

© 2011 Vic Jones

Lesson 51 from The Hard Knocks School of Life

Self interest is not evil. Taking away people's incentive to win is evil!

Self interest is often conflated to be greed which is then seen as evil. I find no difficulty in identifying greed as evil. What I do find difficult is to separate honest and reasonable self interest that is survival oriented for both the individual and society from greed which is not survival oriented.

Perhaps the best way to define greed is as a hunger that cannot be sated and that grows greater the more it is fed. In extreme cases this sort of hunger destroys not only the individual but the society of which he is a part.

Taking away a person’s incentive to win  is evil because this is an abrogation of his self interest which as I noted above is good not only for himself but for everyone around him.

© 2011 Vic Jones

Lesson 50 from The Hard Knocks School of Life

Jealousy and greed are interrelated; if I am jealous of my neighbor's car I am actually practicing covetousness which is a form of greed. If I am jealous of my wife or husband it is because I think of them as possessions rather than as people.

Some people think that self-interest is the same as greed I do not think that self-interest is the same as greed nor is it (self-interest) evil. Yet because it puts your welfare above other people’s welfare it is easy to mistake self-interest as greed.

Greed (and I’ll define it more in a later lesson) is insisting that you should be the only person to have possessions. It (greed) is not wanting more possessions than you currently have unless by having more things you seek to deny possessions to your neighbor.

© 2011 Vic Jones

Lesson 45 from The Hard Knocks School of Life

The only way that everyone can (or will) have the same amount of goods and services is if no one has any goods or services.

Of course even in the most aggressively socialistic or communistic countries it is evident that not everyone has the same things or the same services rendered to them. For example consider North Korea. Most of the population of North Korea lives in abject poverty while the ruler of the country (an absolute dictator) lives in luxury that would embarrass anyone with a sense of morality. The same can be seen in Cuba where the Castro brothers have lived in luxury while their people starved. Thus when anyone puts forth the idea that fairness consists of everyone having the same amount of goods and services it is well to ask whether he is willing to divest himself of his goods so that he can live up to his rhetoric.

© 2011 Vic Jones

6000000 tax payers?

P. Obama has defined rich as making more than 250,000 dollars. So with that in mind I did a little research and found that about 2% of people filing income tax paperwork made over this amount. Therefore if (and trust me this is not true) every person filed an income tax return the number of persons making more than 250,000 dollars in the USA would be around 6,000,000 (this assumes 300,000,000 population). But a great number of people file jointly (I didn’t look up this statistic) and a certain number of people are exempt from filing as well as a certain number who will not file for other reasons.
Therefore we must ask a serious question: what sort of person would in essence destroy (because the end result of taxation is destruction) a resource like people who are ambitious enough to make an income that is higher than others?

Some have suggested that P. Obama is incompetent. I think this is untrue, he has said he will fundamentally transform the USA. All of his activities seem to be trending in that direction with no fumbles at all. So no I do not think he is incompetent. Anything he does that is destructive to the USA is deliberate.

© 2011 Vic Jones

Lesson 35 from The Hard Knocks School of Life

Some people will try to tell you that making a profit is evil; this is not true. What is evil is trying to take a man’s labor without compensating him. Taking labor or goods without compensation is what people who say making a profit is evil are trying to do.
In some ways this lesson is a reiteration of lesson 34. But it is well to remember that those who would steal by making you ashamed of making a profit will use most any method of beating you down so that they don’t get their heads handed to them when they break the laws of God about theft.

© 2011 Vic Jones

Lesson 32 from The Hard Knocks School of Life

A greedy man wants to be the only one making a profit.
Making a profit is not evil; indeed it (making a profit) is necessary to continued living. There are those who would say otherwise of course; but most of them can actually be counted as among the greedy. They want to be able to take the profit from those who invest their time and ingenuity to gain goods or make new ideas a reality.

It seems to me that often the most greedy person is the one who tries to convince the doers of society that their profits on their efforts are evil.

© 2011 Vic Jones

Lesson 28 from The Hard Knocks School of Life

There is a difference between expecting to make a profit on your product or labor and being greedy.
I would define being greedy as trying to keep anyone else from entering into competition with you.

It seems to me that many people who are complaining about others making undue profits are those who have inherited their wealth or who have been taught that money rather than greed is at the root of evil.

No one can or should try to define what is an appropriate profit or income. That type of behavior is what leads to tyranny.

© 2011 Vic Jones

Lesson 25 from The Hard Knocks School of Life

If someone says he wants to punish the rich because they are greedy you should ask what that person has to gain in the transaction they propose. You also should ask yourself if the person proposing to punish the rich is actually greedy…
People who are earning high incomes are called rich by our current government yet they may or may not have actually accumulated much wealth. Conversely many people who have much wealth (either inherited or accumulated) often have low incomes (or at least low earned incomes) because they have most of their assets stored in government preferred investments whether they be municipal bonds or T-bills or some project the government wants accomplished.

High income earners are the achievers of society and punishing (or taxing them) is like making fun of nerds in school.

© 2011 Vic Jones

Lesson 21 from The Hard Knocks School of Life

Greed is at the root of all evil.

I find it hard to enlarge on the simple truth of this statement. I will however say that it is not really my work but a distillation of St Paul’s instruction to early Christendom to the effect that the love of money is the root of all evil.

I will also state that nothing in my life experience has made me doubt this truth. There may be other presenting issues that seem to be driving evil but in the end if you dig very far beneath them you will find greed. Or at least that has been my experience.

© 2010 Vic Jones