Category: Envy

Celebrating Others’ Good Fortune

When you learn of someone else’s good fortune—some positive development in their lives—what’s your honest first reaction? Are you genuinely happy for them or do you feel a twinge of envy that the good fortune isn’t yours? Everyone can relate to the latter, even if it isn’t always the case. That sense of envy is…


The Lesson of Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer Is Terrifying and True

Commentary The story of Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer was written in 1939 by Robert L. May. It first appeared in a coloring book printed by the department store Montgomery Ward. It only later became a song and eventually part of the Christmas story all over the English-speaking world. But how often do we consider its…


The Pandora Papers

Commentary “The rich put cream on their berries; the rich drive shiny black cars.”—(from the Broadway musical “Carnival!”) The Pandora Papers, “an exposé of the financial secrets and offshore dealings of dozens of heads of state, public officials and politicians,” writes CNN, could not have come at a better time for congressional “progressives” who are…


COVID Ushers in Stimulus. The Taxman Follows.

A crisis is always an opportunity and whatever happens, someone benefits from it. John Maynard Keynes pointed out long ago that rapid inflation always puts the financial boot on different feet: creditors lose and debtors gain. This in turn can have profound social and cultural consequences. Conduct that was once deemed prudent becomes imprudent, and…