Anyone see this Kickstarter for potato salad? (If you’re not familiar with Kickstarter, it’s basically a crowd-funding platform that’s pretty cool.) Some dude in Columbus wanted to make potato salad. So, he put it on Kickstarter. As of now, it’s almost amassed $60,000 from donors.
I’ve seen people complaining about that, however. They say, “Kids dying of cancer, homeless veterans, famine, war, etc., and people are funding fucking potato salad.” First things first, most backers of the project have donated no more than $10. Secondly, just because someone does X doesn’t mean they don’t care about Y. I get called on this a lot. I’ll be talking about X, so people assume I don’t care about Y. Here’s a novel concept to consider: We’re humans and we’re able to care about both X and Y.
Money isn’t a pie. Humans are wealth-generators. Giving X amount of monies to potato salad doesn’t detract from monies given to Y amount of cancer research.
Also, there’s something else at play here, too. And this goes beyond Kickstarter. If you care so much about “paying more in taxes” or if you think the richest 1% shouldn’t have that much wealth, since this is all arbitrary, why don’t you donate more to the United States Treasury? Here’s a link.
Let’s say you’re making $60,000 a year, but could adequately (a favorite word of these types) live on $40,000 a year, then why aren’t you? There’s a lot we “could” do in terms of sacrificing and reallocating our monies to so-called better causes every day and some do this, but that indignation seems misplaced to me.
And the idea that the rich for some reason aren’t allowed to have that much money goes back to the idea of the pie and inequality. Inequality seems to carry favor with the progressives of the day, but it’s odd. Bill Gates is currently worth $76 billion. That’s a lot of money. (It’s also worth noting he’s given away $26 billion of that to various causes.) But him having $76 billion does not in any way take away from me. That “income gap” does not hurt me. Bill Gates doesn’t have half the pie and the rest of us peons are to fight over the leftovers. There are issues to be concerned with, but I don’t see income inequality as one of them.
That’s my rant for the day.
Milam's Musings 