You want mirrion dorrar?

I clicked on this NYT blogpost on income inequality in the US, read the first few paragraphs, then closed it.  Reading more would have made me upset, and I'm trying to go for emotional stability these days. 

Why are we addicted to self-sabotage?  Is it because Americans love to identify with the rich, and while they're eating their Hamburger Helper and slugging a Natural Ice they imagine how they'll spend their future riches? Because they're cowboys that play by their own rules, and cowboy code prevents them from accepting "hand-outs," especially from the Government? Everybody, stop deluding yourselves!  You're never gonna be mega-rich.  Most of you will never even be sorta rich.  So increasing taxes on the rich will only benefit you.

I tire of the usual rose-tinted argument that the rich have a moral duty to pay more in the spirit of human solidarity etc.  Does anyone really buy that?  And even if you do, the rich always have a nice charity they can point to, as proof that they've already contributed more than their fair share to society.  This is a scam.

So let's unshackle ourselves from the slave-ideology that tells us what we "deserve" or "don't derserve."  No! Let's tax the rich the most possible for one simple reason: it benefits YOU.  Call it the tyranny of the majority if you want.  I'll call it altruistic egoism (collective egoism that benefits the whole), and it's certainly better than the pathetic self-flaggelation that the american poor and working-class seem to prefer today.

I know these are complicated economic problems, but when the mega-rich, an increasingly vocal group of economists, and, well, all of Europe think that considerably raising taxes on the rich is a good idea, maybe we can at least give it a try.