A simple truth: It is people who ask for something for nothing that are greedy, not people who have worked hard for what they have and do not wish to turn their wealth over to others to satisfy the desires of people they have never met, do not know, and have no idea of the real state of their need. If you really felt there are some people in genuine need, you would dig deeper into your own pocket. That is true compassion.

You confuse money with virtue, which is exactly the problem. The rich must be more virtuous than the working poor, right? How Calvinistic of you. How American. I'll tell you what buddy, you come on to my house and I'll show you what real work is. What you obviously haven't met are people like me. I've worked all my life since I was 13 years old growing up on a farm. I've done practically every kind of work in my life that you can name: farm work, burger flipper, factory work, bookstore retail, building houses, egg farm, multinational shipper and copy shop, and housekeeping, including a 17 year stint in a multinational advertising agency in NYC at the corporate level. I have a college degree. I don't drink, do drugs, smoke. Rarely do I eat out, I cook most of my own meals. I don't lie, cheat or steal. I don't hurt others. I've been lied to, ripped off, made empty promises, underpaid, exploited by employers and corporate owners at every step of the way. Whatever I earned, I earned it honestly and without whining. And I'll let you in on a little secret, I'm mad as fucking hell at a society and a government that exploits, and allows to be exploited, the labor and intelligence of people like me, and there are 100's of thousands of us, and I want what I've earned. I haven't had health or dental insurance for the past 10 years because I can not afford it. And I don't give a rat's ass whether the greedy lying slime heads I've toiled for all my life give it to me, or the government gets it for me. This society, the rich fucking bastards who own this fucked up society, owes me, big time, you twit and you can take your obnoxious horseshit about "deserving" and "earning" and "compassion" and stick it where the sun don't shine.

BTW, I am by no means rich. One reason I'm not, is I have to pay taxes to support people like you

You can't read. And you can't comprehend the meaning and implications of your own words. You're just spouting ideology. No more of your taxes have gone to support me than my taxes have gone to support you. I've paid taxes all my life and those tax dollars are no more or less "wasted" than yours. It's that I understand, and you don't, that the largest benefactors of tax dollars are wealthy people, either through their deductions and adjacent mechanisms for procuring income and through direct action of the government on their behalf via the corporations they own. You're entire post is full of nothing but moralizing philosophy (wealth equals virtue) and judgmental statements ("evidently did not establish family and other relationships that you can lean on in times of trouble") about people you do not know. Your ignorance and pretentious sense of superiority is fairly appalling.

I want better countrymen.

Stripped of facts, your conversation partner will soon turn to unscientific terrain, claiming it is immoral to "steal" and "redistribute" income via taxes. Of course, he will be specifically railing on "stealing" for stuff like healthcare, which he insists gets "redistributed" only to the undeserving and the "lazy" (a classic code word for "minorities"). But he will also say it’s OK that government sent trillions of dollars to Wall Streeters.

You called it right Mr. Sirota. Some of the posters on this column walked right past the data you sited as to what the effective tax rate is for the wealthiest Americans to spout their ideologies and whine about being "robbed" and the horrors of "redistribution" and how much taxes they pay to the alleged lazy working class without a peep for how much has been paid to the people they are or dream of being.

...the best way to do it is to have a broadly prosperous, broadly fair, educated society. Real self interest consists in building that society, and chipping in to do so, especially since those riches were built on the contributions of everyone else.

Exactly. I'm a capitalist. I've no philosophical beef with a free enterprise system, one that is appropriately regulated by the government to ensure that groups of ambitious and amoral people do not come to inflict economic ruin or exploitation on vast segments of human society. In American society, the truly galling aspect of that kind of rapacious behavior, accomplished by the few with their hired help in the U.S. Congress, is that it's done in the name of "freedom" and "democracy". It makes any genuinely freedom loving person want to vomit.

The redistribution of wealth over the past 30 years has trended upward, with more wealth and power collecting in fewer and fewer hands.

As a capitalist, my capital is my brains and my labor. And believe me, I've helped make more than few richer than they were before I went to work for them and the reason I didn't get rich in the process is because they refused to pay me a living wage despite me telling them, "I can't live on what you're paying." And if I can't get what I've earned from the truly wealthy on my own, then I want the government to act on my behalf, for a change.