You may have heard about the kerfluffle related to Paul Ryan, budget cutter man, eating out with a couple of his friends at an upscale restaurant. He was espied by an inebriated leftie, who took him to task for the price of the bottles of wine they had (over three hundred clams a bottle), and that leftie then made a little Internet tempest over it. This was an unreasonable price for the bottles of wine, or so it was claimed, as opposed to the 80 cucumbers per bottle price that the inebriated leftie had.
The whole thing was an attempt to turn Paul Ryan into a Marie Antoinette figure (“let them drink two buck Chuck”), grinding the faces of the poor whilst he himself was flying high.
But the event illustrates, as little else could, the power and potency of envy. “Wrath is cruel, and anger is outrageous; but who is able to stand before envy?” (Prov. 27:4). In the face of envy, it doesn’t matter if you are being reasonable. It doesn’t matter if you are making sense. It doesn’t matter if you are grateful to God for His good gifts — envy assaults you anyway.
Envy has caused us to invert the moral order. Because no coercion was involved, it ought to delight us that there are upscale bistros like this one, that they have customers, that there are high end vintners to supply them, and so on, all the way through the menu.
But because of envy (and for no other reason), it is possible to get people snarling at all of this. Then, at the same time, the snarlers advocate (in the name of compassion), a small army of tax collecters with block letters on the back of their windbreakers, fanning out across the republic to collect bubillions of dollars at the point of a gun . . . so that what? Well, among other things, so that we can buy three hundred dollar bottles of wine for jitney dictators of glorified shantytowns.
In other words, for the lefties, the pricey wine is not their problem. The liberty is their problem. Spending your own money without some functionary signing off on it is their problem. Buying your own wine without some bureaucrat getting a piece of the action is their problem. Their problem is that they don’t have their hooks in all your stuff yet.
In short, in the face of envy, we have lost the distinction between meum and tuum. We have lost the concept of private property. Spending your own money on your own dinner — heartless beast! Whooping trillions of dollars not yet extorted at the point of a gun from your great grandchildren — what a paragon of compassion!
“A sound heart is the life of the flesh: but envy the rottenness of the bones” (Prov. 14:30).