ABSTRACT
It is no doubt the case that at some level we believe that these things that separate us from the Golden Rule have a payoff: they allow the accumulation of wealth while making the idea that we’re responsible for others not so much wrong as irrelevant. And so it’s all right if 60 percent of the nation’s wealth is owned by the top 4 percent of the population. And apparently it’s all right if very little of that wealth is spread about as generosity, or caring, or even as a tax write-off for charity. As the Newtithing Group (a philanthropic research organization) reported in December 2005, the least generous of all working-age Americans are those who make in excess of $10 million annually. This group had on average $101 million in investment assets and made charitable gifts equal to 1.5 percent of their assets. So what’s trickling where? Ask Richard Grasso, former head of the New York Stock Exchange, who left his job with a multimillion-dollar payout. Greed begets more greed. Nothing ever really trickles down except suffering, and suffering can trickle a very long way. (That’s globalization!) The idea that capitalism ultimately works in everyone’s interest is but one in capitalism’s extensive repertoire of scams. Like an original sin, this assumption is capitalism’s original con. Worse yet, we have bought into this malign logic in spite of its real and visible results. This, again, is the condition that Kant described as “radical evil”: even though we wish individually to be people of goodwill, because we 70lack ethical principles to unite us, we behave as if we were “instruments of evil.”
