The left in NZ have a term for those who they consider rich. They are not called the 1%. They are called rich pricks. The threshold for this is an income about twice or three times the average wage (which is around 20k in NZ) — think 60K.
I’m well over that. The current Labour party is talking about increasing taxes and minimum wages… which will increase unemployment. Well, I pay a third of my wages in taxes already. In the meantime, son one has enrolled in his university course for next year. I need to find around 13K a year for his tuition, and I have another son who is thinking of the same thing.
The people who are called “rich” are not that rich. They really rich are another group — the modern definition is not having a million dollars in assets but a million dollars income a year. Most of us are not there.
And some of the rich are evil. But note what this is about — it is robbing your servants and employees. It is exploiting the poor.
4:13Come now, you who say, “Today or tomorrow we will go to such and such a town and spend a year there, doing business and making money.” 14Yet you do not even know what tomorrow will bring. What is your life? For you are a mist that appears for a little while and then vanishes. 15Instead you ought to say, “If the Lord wishes, we will live and do this or that.” 16As it is, you boast in your arrogance; all such boasting is evil. 17Anyone, then, who knows the right thing to do and fails to do it, commits sin.
5:1Come now, you rich people, weep and wail for the miseries that are coming to you. 2Your riches have rotted, and your clothes are moth-eaten. 3Your gold and silver have rusted, and their rust will be evidence against you, and it will eat your flesh like fire. You have laid up treasure for the last days. 4Listen! The wages of the laborers who mowed your fields, which you kept back by fraud, cry out, and the cries of the harvesters have reached the ears of the Lord of hosts. 5You have lived on the earth in luxury and in pleasure; you have fattened your hearts in a day of slaughter. 6You have condemned and murdered the righteous one, who does not resist you.
People forget that prosperity is not inevitable and continuous. It is something that one generation may have, even two: and it can be destroyed by the issues of the day.
And here I have some irritation. For the same left that talks about a living wage — which is one of those things that does not “just happen” because a business has to make enough money to make the wages, and should (and in NZ, must) pay their staff first, at times leaving them out-of-pocket — is that many on the left want to be precious about how one makes money. Mining, oil drilling, fracking: off the table . (Those jobs pay workers enough money that the left start calling them rich pricks)
Because, without a job, without employment, men struggle. They become dependent, dispirited, and increasingly poor. The benefit is not a living wage. Yet all to many who are rich are prepared to ally with the unions and greens: keeping jobs well, paid, green and rare. Telling about a fifth of the adult population that they are without use.
And I think the lost jobs and lost hope screams at the throne of God as much as the exploitation that happened on the latifunda, those ancient plantations that James described, did .
