I won’t mention Mark Zuckerberg by name. But, honestly, young man, you’re thirty-five years old, worth $72 billion, and you’re wearing what a preschooler would wear the first time he’s allowed to dress himself.
Yes, I’m also going around in an untucked “My Kid Went to College and All I Got Was This Lousy . . .” But I’ve earned it. Or, rather, I haven’t. I can’t afford a Savile Row morning suit, Turnbull & Asser dress shirt, Hermès cravat, and pair of bespoke John Lobb oxfords. And—taking out the trash, gassing up the car, and ordering an Egg McMuffin at the drive-through window—I wouldn’t be comfortable wearing them.
But Mark Zuckerberg in his Fruit of the Looms seems too comfortable. And this makes us mad.
There was a time when wealth was distributed far less equitably, but we weren’t as resentful of the rich. We resented our poverty, but we were relieved that we didn’t have to put on striped pants and spats to have breakfast.
Being rich looked very uncomfortable. Rich people’s clothes were stiff and starchy and they wore lots of them. Rich men were choked by tall collars and pinched by high-button shoes. Rich women were corseted to the point of kidney failure, constrained in so much crinoline and brocade that they might as well have been wearing off-the-shoulder burqas, and encumbered by bustles large enough that they couldn’t turn sideways without knocking over a footman and the parlor maid.
Now we have Jeff Bezos in a New Kids on the Block bomber jacket, Bill Gates outfitted in Mr. Rogers sweaters and Gloria Steinem’s old aviators and cutting his own hair, Elon Musk smoking pot on TV, and Richard Branson looking like the guy at the end of the bar muttering lines from The Big Lebowski. That’s not counting the various plutocrats caught in Us and the Star wearing nothing much at all.
If rich people start getting any more comfortable police will be shooing them off park benches.
Rich people are also having fun—flying their own rocketships, sending lewd selfies, buying private islands (Manhattan, for example). Having fun was something rich people didn’t used to do, at least not as far as we poor people could tell.
They went to the opera. It was like Vaudeville except without the tap dancing, acrobatics, magic tricks, and jokes. (If opera did have jokes they were sung in a foreign language and nobody got the punch lines.)
Rich people—and there were supposedly only Four Hundred of them—gathered in Mrs. Astor’s ballroom. They waltzed like sticks in the mud to music that would put the dead to sleep and ate and drank tiny things from tiny plates and glasses. They never knocked the bung out of the beer keg, danced a polka, or sang
Your baby has gone down the drain hole,
Your baby has gone down the plug,
The poor little thing was so skinny and thin
He should have been bathed in a jug!
Being rich meant living in a big drafty house with no privacy because the footman and parlor maid you clobbered with your bustle were always poking around. The rooms had odd names, such as “conservatory,” “lavatory,” “butler’s pantry.” (Was the butler in there panting? What was he up to that caused him to be short of breath?)
You had to wait to eat dinner until 8 p.m. Table manners were complicated. Which knife do you use to eat peas? And strange foods were served—terrapin soup (boiled turtle), shad roe (eggs that not only weren’t fried but came from a fish), and pheasant under glass (dangerously breakable).
Rich people trying to have fun didn’t look like much fun either. They got soaked in their yachts, broke their necks on their polo ponies, and wore themselves to a frazzle walking all over tarnation hitting things with a stick for no reason in a game called golf.
Even when relaxing they had to get dressed up according to strict social protocol. If you showed up to a yacht race wearing plus fours and a tam-o’-shanter Commodore Vanderbilt would dunk you.
These days rich people are behaving just like the rest of us. Or just like the rest of us would if we were rich. The trouble is we can’t afford to be rich slobs the way rich slobs can. They’re not satisfied with having all the money. They want all the fun too. And that’s not fair.
Let’s make rich people uncomfortable again. Maybe tax the dickens out of them. But somehow taxation never enriches me. Let’s require everyone with a net worth over $100 million to wear a top hat at all times. This does nothing to fix income inequality but what a swell target for snowballs, brickbats, and rotten fruit.
Negative Rights vs. Positive Rights
It’s Positively Confusing
There’s a reason why so much political thinking starts out in the neighborhood of Idealism, crosses Naive Street, and winds up in Stupid.
The reason is confusion between “negative” rights and “positive” rights. We all agree that rights are wonderful and we’ve got a lot of them—at least in this country—and we should get a lot more.
But there are two kinds of rights: Getoutta Here Rights and Gimmie Rights. Or, as they’re called in political theory, Negative Rights and Positive Rights.
Negative Rights are our rights to be left alone—to do, be, think, say (and buy and sell) whatever we want as long as our behavior doesn’t cause real harms. (Microaggressions don’t count unless you were somehow infected by a salmonella microbe in the process of being brushed off at the food co-op for not bringing your own re-usable shopping bag.)
Positive Rights are our rights to real goods—our right to get things. The right to education. The right to health care. The right to a living wage. Et cetera.
Negative Rights are front and center in the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence: “certain unalienable rights . . . Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness.” All ten rights in the of Bill of Rights are Negative Rights (except, maybe, the Sixth and Seventh Amendment Positive
