Question on happiness

Dennis Robert Redmond dredmond at efn.org
Fri May 4 12:55:51 PDT 2001


On Fri, 4 May 2001, Jacob Segal crossposted:


> Robert Samuelson in this week's Newsweek:
> Since 1979 only about a third of the increase in income
> inequality reflects the faster-growing wages and salaries of the
> well-off, estimates economist Gary Burtless of the Brookings
> Institution.

Due no doubt to the fact that the truly rich don't need salaries, they derive their wealth from stocks, bonds, and financial claims on those of us with salaries (a small matter of global financial claims worth around, oh, 75 trillion EUR). The incapacity to cognize the world as it really is, as dominated by capital, recoils into hatred of those who protest against the violence of capitalism. Heiner Mueller had a great description of Capital's Samuelsonesque house clowns -- er, intellectuals -- in "Life of Gundling":

GUNDLING "Observe, my learned gentlemen students, the majesty of the firmament. And let this be of consolation: this too shall pass. Humanity is an accident, a malignant growth. And what we call life, my majestic sirs, is something akin to the measles, the teething-troubles of the universe, whose true existence is death, nothingness, the void. Forwards, Prussia!" FREDERICK WILLIAM sternly: "Gundling, is he getting ideas."

-- Dennis



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