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| First Person: Money & Meaning |
Class Conscious
Chuck Collins
04/01/2005
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I did not give them that check, but very shortly after that, I did write a check—and gave my $500,000 inheritance to a couple of foundations. Someone recently pointed out that if I had held onto the money, I would have $6 million today, and think of what I could do with that. I say, “Think of what it did then.” If you cross the class line with an open heart, and you do not embrace an ideology that says these people get what they deserve because they have some deficiency, then it is very hard to sit on a pile of money that you didn’t earn and feel that it belongs to you.
American Apartheid
Fast forward to today. I live on my paycheck as associate director of United for a Fair Economy (UFE), a nonpartisan organization that draws attention to the dangerous consequences of growing income and wealth inequality in the United States. UFE has under its umbrella Responsible Wealth, a group I cofounded in 1997 to address ways that the wealthiest 5 percent of Americans can help others share in economic prosperity. My wife is a minister, and we have an 8-year-old who goes to public school. My beliefs stem partly from a notion of stewardship that cuts across religious denominations—that there is a social mortgage on capital. I gave away my money, but I still have the benefits of my upbringing, which includes a sense that I can make things happen.
There was a responsible wealth movement during the first Gilded Age. Andrew Carnegie and Teddy Roosevelt believed adamantly in an inheritance tax. Now, in the second Gilded Age, there seems to be a group with enormous wealth that feels almost entitled to it by birthright. The Mars family, with a net worth of more than $10 billion, is bankrolling the campaign to permanently abolish the estate tax. What are they worried about? We have a number of people who believe they are somehow better equipped to control the vast treasure than the rest of society. I think many people who hit the lottery at birth think of themselves as prime movers of society, like those depicted in Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged, when all they really did was win at ovarian roulette.
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