Now, clearly, this person is, unfortunately, dealing with some emotional issues. I am not claiming that any emotionally healthy people actually advocate this. But the mindset that it exaggerates is a baffling common one: that there is something evil about "the rich".
There are lots of reasons for this mindset (and undoubtedly have been many attempts to explain it one way or the other; I'm hardly the first to have commented on this), but sometimes I come back to a common theme: that "money" distorts people's thinking. To illustrate, consider the following thought experiment:
Bill Gates is rich because he has lots of money. According to the above mindset, there is nothing at all wrong with taking his money, because he has way too much of it and it should be redistributed to poorer people. That is not "theft", it is "taxation". As we know, Bill Gates got rich selling copies of MS Office and MS Office (for the most part; let's just leave it at that for the purposes of our thought experiment). That is, many times over, he exchanged a product to a consumer that judged the product to be of more worth to them than the $200 or so that they paid for the product. Imagine now that Bill Gates never sold those copies of software: he produced them, in prodigious quantities, but stockpiled them in a warehouse. At this point, he doesn't own a single dime, but he's sitting on an amount of product worth a fortune. Is he rich? And if he is, would it then be ok to just go in and take his *product* - the product he hasn't even sold - and call it "taxes"?
I maintain that the typical anti-rich person would be conflicted with doing the latter, even though it is the exact same. What is the difference between waiting for Mr Gates to sell a copy of the software and then taking the money that was paid for it from him, and just taking the software in the first place? (Assume zero transactional costs, since that is not at all germaine to the thought experiment). But the "anti-rich" person is going to have a hard time with their kneejerk rich-hating *if the victim doesn't have a nickel to his name*.
Somehow there's a cognitive mistake being made: people don't treat "money" as just a proxy for "stuff". Stuff, they understand: you can't just take stuff. But money? Money isn't "real", so taking it is purely an abstract act.
I can't help but imagine that part of this cognitive mistake is a function of fiat currency: it literally *isn't* real. No wonder it seems like an abstraction: it is. The government's constant manipulation of currency just exacerbates this impression. It's yet another mark against fiat currency and the Fed, though hardly the only one.
I'll end with a "pithy saying" of my own invention, relatively devoid of any real meaning like most pithy sayings and only distantly tangentially related to this post, but still kind of fun to me:
It is often said that "money is the root of all evil." It has always struck me that, in fact, it's a *lack* of money that is the root of all evil.
