Over the course of this series of essays, we have been exploring why it is that people object to an unequal distribution of wealth. We saw in the first essay, that the objection is not limited to concern for people living in poverty. In the next two essays, we saw that while there are related complaints about the sources of great wealth, such complaints are not well-grounded. So, what is it? Is it that wealthy people are inherently more wicked?
Once again, we turn to literature to guide us. Consider Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol. If one is looking for an exemplar of the despicable rich, one can do no better than Ebenezer Scrooge. The first description of him is “a squeezing, wrenching, grasping, scraping, clutching, covetous, old sinner!”
If this portrait of Scrooge is underneath the complaints about unequal wealth, it is not hard to understand the problem. Do people like him really deserve to be the wealthiest people in town? Why should Scrooge be able to lord himself over his clerk, the impossibly charming Bob Cratchit? In the depths of winter, Bob is working next to a fire that amounts to nothing more than a single coal because Scrooge refuses to let him add another. The entire set-up of this story is designed to raise the complaint about the horrible distribution of wealth in Victorian England.
But, Dickens is clever. As everyone knows, A Christmas Carol ends on such a happy note that it can only be described as Dickensonian. After the ghostly visitors, Scrooge is a reformed man. The final description of Scrooge: “He became as good a friend, as good a master, and as good a man, as the good old city knew, or any other good old city, town, borough, in the good old world.” You would love to know this reformed Scrooge; you would enjoy having dinner, even Christmas dinner, with him.
What is so clever about this ending? Scrooge is every bit as rich at the end of the story as he was at the beginning of the story. If the Scrooge at the beginning of the story is the example of what is wrong with wealth inequality, then why doesn’t the story end with Scrooge losing his wealth?
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