'O, beware, my lord, of jealousy;
It is the green-eyed monster which doth mock
The meat it feeds on."
— William Shakespeare.
Most people of all political temperaments during the holiday season focus on enjoying family and good cheer. However, there is a lower-order genus of liberal — admittedly a minority — seemingly simultaneously bent upon moral self-congratulation and mean-spiritedness. Moral self-congratulation takes the form of a tireless attempt to draw universal significance from "Gingrich" and Dr. Seuss's "Grinch" rhyme (you know the guy that stole Christmas). The mean-spiritedness takes the form of liberal protectors searching out public places lest some creche or a menorah place unsuspecting people into an unconstitutional frame of mine. Until recently, I did not appreciate the true extent to which the liberal temperament flourishes and counts upon the worst in us.
Liberals love to employ the metaphor of family and suggest that the operating ethos behind conservatism is greed. Conservatives, they argue, attempt to gain political advantage by appealing to avarice. Conservatives appeal not to the generous spirit, but to the spirit of selfishness, the Scrooge in all of us. Wanting a tax cut is a moral failing. Liberals, by contrast, are compassionate; concerned about lifting people from a Dickens-like destitution. Recently, Paul Krugman, a well-respected Liberal economist revealed, perhaps inadvertently, how the liberal temperament caters to and nurtures jealousy.
In Slate, Krugman followed the absolute living standards of families from 1950 to the present. He concluded that:
"Take into account improvements in the quality of many . . . products, and it does not seem at all absurd to say that the material standard of living of that poverty-level family in 1996 in as good as or better than that of the median family of 1950."
But, as Krugman explains, "People don't just care about their absolute level — they care about their level compared to others." The primer mover of contemporary liberalism is the desire to equalizing outcomes. Jealously is an enduring part of human nature. Hence, the redistributionist tendency would exist even if there were no poor in any absolute sense.
Who can doubt that little jealously in all of us for those who have done better. It eases our own self-doubt to suggest that anyone who has done materially better is just lucky or, at worst, nefarious. To those who view the virtue of charity as taking from some and giving to others, nurturing jealousy and class envy is politically
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