These investigations usually involve an interview, with those suspected of transgression asked to adjust their behaviour or face fines. In The Metaphysics of Morals, Immanuel Kant defined envy as a propensity to view the well-being of others with distress, even though it does not detract from one’s own. [It is] a reluctance to see our own wellbeing overshadowed by another’s because the standard we use to see how well off we are is not the intrinsic worth of our own well-being but how it compares with that of others. [Envy] aims, at least in terms of one’s wishes, at destroying others’ good fortune. Such investigations are the bizarre product of a world in which technological developments speed ahead of regulatory ones. From tax treatment of online multinationals to the regulation of industry disruptors such as Uber and AirBnB, tensions regularly emerge between long-held principles and the realities of the modern world. The president and Congress are seeking a solution to the worst economic recession since the Great Depression. Lurking beneath President Obama’s economic agenda are campaign promises and political appeals that call for societal change on a grand scale. For example, on the eve of Martin Luther King Jr. Day, the incoming president stood at the civil rights leader’s historic pulpit and spoke of the need for unity. Americans must unite, Obama demanded, to end the country’s moral deficit. "CEOs are making more in ten minutes than some workers make in ten months," he said.

What can we do to turn this ship around? I don’t know. Instinct tells me that serious changes are needed in our public school systems. Civics and History need to be taught. Our students must learn how our country was founded and why. That won’t be enough, though. Moral decay is rotting society from the inside out. Personal responsibility is a foreign concept to a large chunk of our population. For Nietzsche, the end result of the modern egalitarian politics that has grown out of ressentiment will be what he called the “last man” – the most contemptible of human beings, who is devoid of all noble aspiration and values only comfort and a bland sameness with everyone else. They are all men of ressentiment … insatiable in outbursts against the fortunate and happy and in masquerades of revenge and pretexts for revenge: when would they achieve the ultimate, subtlest, sublimest triumph of revenge? Undoubtedly, if they succeeded in poisoning the consciences of the fortunate with their own misery, with all misery, so that one day the fortunate began to be ashamed of their good fortune and perhaps said one to another: “it is disgraceful to be fortunate: there is too much misery!” (p. 124)Now, I’m no economist and not great at mathematics, but even I know that poorer people spend every single dollar they get in their community. Which is good for the economy, particularly small business. So, raising Newstart would not only give these people some dignity, allow them to have a roof over their head and feed themselves, it would also give them the opportunity to probably update their wardrobes to try to get that job or get out of the trap they are in to move elsewhere for better job opportunities. It would be a win for the Government and the economy. We can see this by considering the views of two giants of Western thought who wrote at length on the subject – Thomas Aquinas and Friedrich Nietzsche. These thinkers couldn’t otherwise be more different. Indeed, Nietzsche deployed hisown account of envy in a critique of the Christianity represented by Aquinas. In fact, Nietzsche’s target was a crude caricature of Christianity, though explaining how is a topic for another time. What matters for our purposes is that the accounts these thinkers gave of envy itself (as opposed to their applications of these accounts) are compatible and complementary. And they both clearly expose the contemporary obsession with equity as rooted in vice rather than virtue. He kept cutting off all the tallest ears of wheat which he could see, and throwing them away, until he had destroyed the best and richest part of the crop.

Moreover, there is a great deal of movement in and out of the top income groups. The Treasury data show that 57 percent "of households in the top 1 percent in 2005 were not there nine years earlier." The rich sometimes get richer, but they get poorer as well. The study also reveals that income mobility has increased, not decreased, during the past twenty years. For example, 47.3 percent of those in the lowest income quintile in 1987 saw their incomes increase by at least 100 percent by 1996. That number jumped to 53.5 percent from 1996 to 2005. What they don’t mention is most people are virtually guaranteed to see their energy bills climb even higher, despite the cap and regardless of whether they switch. As Ed Miliband has noted repeatedly, a price cap is not the same as his price freeze. The cap is reviewed twice a year by Ofgem and, if costs facing suppliers are up, up goes the cap. The regulator did exactly that recently with its specialist “safeguard” tariff. This is the attitude of the individual who doesn’t want to lift himself up but, instead, wants to pull everyone else down to his level.Bandow was prescient about the growth of government and the envy that has driven it. He would not be surprised that the secular atheist ideology that has grown over the past two decades distorts our understanding of reality. Those distortions work to hide the true goal of politics under atheism, which is, of course, power. Once God is banished, we become creatures not of God but of society politics, and we then have the choice either to rule or to be ruled. The stakes can be no higher because, for the secular atheist, man is the highest thing, and so power among men is the highest good. That is why everything is now political and why people lose their minds over elections. Bandow understands that there will always be a significant portion of the population who will vote for the candidate who promises to take away the most wealth — and sometimes the very freedom — from the greatest number of “undeserving” people. But the 2016 election of President Donald Trump disproved the theory that promoting the envy of the rich helps to win elections. Rejecting progressive promises to destroy the rich and the powerful, voters awarded President Trump with the presidency because he reassured them that America can again be the “envy” of others if we are willing to change course. President Trump knows that most of us do not envy the rich — we admire them. We may even want to emulate them. President Trump understands that for most of us, our dreams are not to hurt those who have more than we do. We just want to have good jobs that pay us enough to support our families and make us feel secure. The competition watchdog has written to some social media “influencers” as part of a probe into whether they have breached consumer laws by promoting products without disclosing fees for doing so.