Forbes has come out with its annual billionaires’ list for 2017, this year numbering over 2,000 names. That’s a lot of moolah, collectively worth nearly $ 7.7 trillion, or more than a trillion dollars higher than the previous year.
Predictably, the top name on the list was again Microsoft’s Bill Gates, for the fourth year in a row. The Harvard dropout is worth so much ($86 billion) that he had to give up his job and start working full-time on giving his money away. Evidently, he hasn’t been too successful at doing that.
In our country, retailer and real estate developer Henry Sy was again the only Filipino in the top 100 (ranked 94th) with a net worth of $12.7 billion. “Tatang” is quintessentially low-profile, attracting remarkably little controversy. It’s helped that his large brood of kids are likewise as discreet as they are dedicated to the family fortune.
Thirteen other Filipinos were also worth over a billion dollars each, ranging from “Mister John” Gokongwei in second place, down to newcomer “Edjap” Sia who’s easily moved on from fast food to property development.
On the other hand, noteworthy this year was the absence of the aristocratic Zobel de Ayala scions. Also perennially missed is the very high- profile Manny Pangilinan, who must be employing some pretty good personal accountants.
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Lists like this tend not to go over too well in this country, where chronic enviousness happily co-exists with all sorts of soak-the-rich ideologies. In the US, billionaires are generally regarded as aspirational models (“Someday I can be up there like them.”) Here, they’re viewed as target-shooting practice (“Right now they should be like me down here.”)
The term “oligarch” has thus recently acquired an unwelcome new connotation. Properly, it should refer only to rich fellows who’ve succeeded through unsavory methods, like cut-throat business practices or even criminal behavior. But these days, it’s also used to describe anybody who’s deemed “too rich” regardless of how their wealth was earned.
Now how is it possible for anyone to become “too rich” per se? The best-known exponent of that point of view was PNoy, who during his term canceled a big infrastructure project earlier promised to Pangilinan, with the comment: “Masyado nang mayaman si Manny.”
Except for Mr. Gates and his later-in-life fellow philanthropist Warren Buffett, I don’t know of anybody—myself included, PNoy not excluded—who at some point would start turning wealth away as being “too much.” But this standard that anyone would rightly reject for himself, he evidently is allowed to judge other people, or the rest of society, by.
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So there it sits, class envy, a noxious swamp that discourages the growth of the middle class and breeds populist unrest among the underclass. Examples abound in our country, of which here are a couple:
The amiable Labor Secretary “Bebot” Bello is so congenial to the Left that he keeps getting assigned to head the government panel in the on-again, off-again peace talks in Oslo (now Rome). But even he came under attack, by non-militant as well as militant unions, for promulgating a compromise on the “endo” issue that only banned “labor-only” subcontracting.
In vain did Bello point out that the law itself doesn’t allow him to go farther than that. What the unions wanted was nothing short of preventing employers from seeking out the cheapest labor contracting arrangements they can find.
In other words, the unions wanted to do away altogether with an open labor market. That’s how class envy can addle your mind. Evidently they forgot that you’ll need political commissars to make an entire market disappear.
The militant urban poor group Kadamay, after forcibly occupying empty housing projects in Bulacan, have spread like locusts to nearby Rizal where they tried to pull off the same stunt. By singling out projects originally intended for soldiers, policemen, and firemen, they’re cleverly setting themselves up as future victims of “uniformed agents of the fascist state,” who in reality will be nothing more than dispossessed homeowners trying to recover stolen property.
Admittedly, you have to wonder why those projects have not yet been turned over. If the delay was caused by “corruption and criminal negligence” with public housing funds, as Kadamay has charged, it’s well worth looking into—for the sake of our men in uniform who’re the rightful homeowners, and only for that.
But when Kadamay justifies widespread and blatant law-breaking by claiming a “universally recognized right to housing,” one’s eyes have to roll.
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Three centuries ago, a fledgling American state recognized only three universal rights: to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. Since then it’s all gone downhill, with the list of universal rights growing ever longer. And the longer that list gets, the wider the culture of entitlement becomes, and the deeper the swamp of class envy.
Unchecked, it can get to the point where obeying the law is no longer obligatory, just optional. After all, there are so many human rights that are being trampled by this or that law—and human rights, as everyone knows, are more important than pretty much anything else.
This is why the law is being ignored by Bello’s critics, and flagrantly flouted by the home invaders of Kadamay. And the more that happens, the farther away we will be getting from what ought to be our objective: a predominantly middle-class economy and culture that is possible only if, when, and because we are rules-based.
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