I have no problem with rich people, as long as they aren’t keeping the workin’ man down, like some kind of newspaper publisher or something.

We really do need rich people, to hire us to wash their cars on weekends, so we can subsidize our newspaper columnist addiction. Without rich people, no one could afford to park at Fenway on game days and the streets would be even more jammed than they already are.

Rich people need our compassion right now, as they are being abused from coast to coast by tax-hungry legislators and Congressmen who want to “tax the millionaires,” or make Big Pharma pay its fair share, as an alternative to shutting down all the nursing homes and putting Grandma out on the street.

It’s enough to make you appreciate the plea in the Book of Proverbs, “Give me neither poverty and riches, provide me with my daily bread; that should be good enough to keep me below the radar so I don’t have to relocate to the Cayman Islands or somewhere like that.”

This all sort of began with Thorstein Veblen’s often-cited, but seldom read, 1899 book, “The Theory of the Leisure Class,” in which he specifically made fun of subdivisions in Brookline, complaining that “the substantial canons of the leisure-class scheme of life are a conspicuous waste of time and substance and a withdrawal from the industrial process.”

And thus began a progressive income tax war against the rich, to slash their conspicuous consumption and divert the money to labor union folks who promised to vote Democratic and were largely in the employ of various government jurisdictions that, really, really needed the money.

Much of this remains fairly academic and esoteric. The rich still seem pretty rich and the columnists are still living on bugs and berries and holiday tips from grateful readers. But, in the midst of the federal debt ceiling street theater and the state-by-state struggles to at least pretend to meet pension liabilities, the class-warfare debate is alive and well in a way not usually seen anywhere beyond a dreamy sociology class.

Posting Thoughts

Gov. Deval Patrick got in on the fun with a June 30 essay in the Washington Post. (If he had run it in The Boston Globe, everyone would have moved to New Hampshire by now.)

The Republicans are bad, bad children, Patrick wrote, because they are obstructing efforts to raise taxes on those rich folks and the corporations, to balance some of the budget-whacking. Deval doesn’t have a budget limitation on hyperbole. If the GOP succeeds in protecting the “marginal benefits of the most fortunate,” here’s what is going to happen:

“We stop paying our soldiers or supporting our veterans. We stop feeding the neediest children and families. We stop providing nursing-home care to seniors. We stop inoculating schoolchildren. We stop helping young people go to college. The unemployed are on their own. Roads and bridges continue to crumble.” And don’t forget our “creditworthiness.”

In Washington, they call an argument like that, the “Washington Monument Argument.” If things get tough and the budget is tight, threaten to close the Washington Monument.

The “large corporations and the very rich” are the beneficiaries of the grumpy budget-cutters, the governor explained, but then, who will be around to put out the fires or answer 911 calls?

To be sure, throwing out the raw rhetorical meat to the teeming masses is a lot more fun than a macroeconomics lecture. You don’t want to sound tepid, even if you’re right. From one of the classiest public intellectuals on the conservative aside, Richard Epstein, professor of law at New York University and senior fellow at the Hoover Institution, came this low-key wisdom recently: “In the end, it is growth, and only growth, that can cure the national malaise.”

At the federal level, a default would be an ugly thing; the boys and girls may settle on a bit of a tax hike and a big-ol’-ugly GOP-inspired budget whacking. The states may have a harder time, with a lesser problem. Consider Massachusetts. Our governor says high taxes are “the price we pay for civilization.” That sounds like trouble.