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Entry: Greenspan's Gambits Link: http://www.takimag.com/site/article/greenspans_gambits#5819 Post contents: I don't really care what vices or follies a person like Paris Hilton engages in as long as she does so with her own money. It's none of my business. When someone's vices and follies become chargeable to the taxpayer, then I care, because it is an expense to me. Instead of an inheritance tax there is a much older and surer way of penalizing the frivolous rich. It is summarized by the maxim, a fool and his money are soon parted. People like Paris Hilton are products of the modern egalitarian state in which the upper classes are not taught the duties appropriate to their station in life. "Noblesse oblige," to be sure, but noblesse can only obligate when it is recognized as noblesse. A levelling social policy, which we have had for several generations, destroys the sense of obligation. I can recall, as a child, the days when newspapers had 'society pages' and when it was said that a lady's name should only appear in the paper on three occasions: her birth, her marriage, and her death. If the conventions to which society once adhered were still around, such people as Paris Hilton would be ostracised rather than admired. BTW, Adriana, I did a little research on your claim that the welfare state was made necesssary by the dissolution of the monasteries. It is true that the first English poor laws were passed after the monasteries were dissolved, but correlation does not necessarily imply causation. Your argument is a classic piece of pot hoc, propter hoc reasoning. I hate to cite so obvious a reference as the Encyclopaedia Britannica, but here is what it has to say on the issue, s.v. "Poor Law": "The cycle of boom and slump had come to add a new element of instability to the economic life of England. Of less importance in the creation of Tudor poverty is that cause which loomed so large in early accounts of the origin of the poor law, the dissolution of the monasteries... The legend that hordes of monks and nuns were turned adrift to beg their bread has not been substantiated by later research. This new type of poverty was not confined to England; it as appearing in all of the more economically advanced countries of Western Europe." For your argument to succeed it seems to me that you would have to show that poverty in countries where the monasteries were not dissolved was more generously relieved than in England. Do you really believe that the lot of the poor was better in the Spain of Philip II, France under the last of the Valois, or the papal states under Sixtus V, than it was in the England of Elizabeth I? Evidence, please! And of course you still haven't responded to my point that since tax-supported monasteries never existed in British North America, the American businessman can hardly be said to enjoy some ill-gotten advantage from their dissolution. Sent at: 2008 11 22