Let’s say you have two apples and someone else has five apples. Now let’s say that other person gets three more apples. How many apples do you now have?

That’s right! Two!

Now let’s say you have two apples, but someone else has a thousand apples — way more apples than you. Now let’s say he gets ONE HUNDRED MORE APPLES on top of the many many apples he already has. How many apples do you now have?

That’s right! Two!

Now let’s say you have two apples, and once again someone else has a thousand apples. Now let’s say you get another person to take one hundred apples away from him. How many apples do you now have?

That’s right! Two!

Some people seem to have trouble with this mathematical concept –especially when dollars are involved instead of apples. They get really worked up at the idea of a lot of people having more than them, like there’s some sort of gypsy curse that more calamities befall them the more rich people prosper. Of course, logically then, the better
solution than raising taxes on the rich is to hunt down the gypsies that cursed you.

It’s an immutable fact that for the middle class to get a dollar more, rich people are going to get ten. Rich people own and are invested in all the businesses out there, so they’ll prosper extra when everyone else is doing well. Some people find that hard to stand, but if you can’t feel good about rich people doing well then at least you can recognize it doesn’t actually hurt you.

Still, if we really want to, we can all hunker down, many of us going with less or losing our jobs, and hurt the economy so much that rich people suffer as well, having to buy only two sports cars in the next year instead of three. It will take a lot of sacrifices for everyone else, but we can marginally discomfort the rich.

But if we do want our economy to prosper, we need people to not whine about other people’s incomes that don’t affect them. If you remember back in the eighties just before the economic boom, President Reagan rounded up all the whiners, locked them in big chests, and threw them in the ocean. Not hampered by whining, the economy soared. One of the biggest factors in a bad economy is useless whining, so to do well again we have to put the whiners somewhere out of the way. And the ocean is very big.

Frank J. I blogs at IMAO.us and sometimes writes columns. He is also on the Twitters.