Remember “Queen of Mean” Leona Helmsley? She was the New York woman who married into money — her husband Harry was a billionaire — and later got convicted of tax evasion. Her most famous line was, “Only the little people pay taxes.” She also terrorized employees and extorted bribes from suppliers. Some of her money-grabbing (and tax-ducking) schemes were astoundingly petty for someone as rich as she was. Leona Helmsley was a victim of money addiction. It ruined her life and put her in jail. Don’t let the same thing happen to you!

We spend beaucoup tax bucks fighting drugs. Some people say we shouldn’t do this because drug use is a “victimless crime.” I’m not in the mood to get into this debate today. All I want to do right now is point out that a drug addict can only do a limited amount of harm to others because the human body can only handle a limited amount of any intoxicant before it shuts down. Smoke too much marijuana or shoot too much Heroin and you go to sleep. Snort too much meth or coke or smoke too much crack, and you’ll conk out. Drink too much booze and you’ll fall asleep. You may build up a tolerance to your drug of choice so that it takes progressively more of it to feed your addiction, but there will always be a limit to how much you can handle.

In other words, drug use is self-limiting. Based on friends’ experiences and “street” reporting I’ve done over the years, I suspect that most drug addictions cost between $5000 and $15,000 per year. A modest amount of theft or prostitution or a half-decent, middle-class job can easily finance this level of expenditure.

Money, on the other hand…

Let’s go back to Leona Helmsley. When she was avoiding income taxes, it wasn’t to keep from being thrown out of her Park Avenue penthouse. Her fortune was more than adequate to afford multiple homes, multiple limousines at each home, plenty of servants, a corporate jet or two, and all the designer clothes she could ever wear — and all this could be done if her money was only earning bank savings account interest, without touching the principal.

There is no end to the lust for wealth. Note that the people who complain loudest about taxes are already wealthy. But this isn’t enough for them. They are affronted by the idea that they can’t hold on to every dollar even though they already have millions. And surely you’ve seen the recent push in this country to free industry from “burdensome regulations” like the mine safety rules that, when loosened, made it easier for miners to die.

Apparently, in the mine owners’ minds a little extra profit is worth a few deaths. And even in the face of several recent fatal mining accidents, mine owners have not stopped lobbying against safety regulations. They’ll pay off the families of the dead miners and go right back to their main business: Slurping up money (and ducking taxes) no matter who they hurt or kill in the process.

Remember, once the drug addict is stoned or in a stupor, he is satisfied. The money addict rides an endless, “more, “More, MORE,” treadmill.

Drug addicts don’t throw retirees out of their little trailer park homes. Greedy Florida developers do it all the time.

We throw drug addicts in jail or try to get them into programs that might cure them.

Greed (also called covetousness) is a deadly sin. But the the Republican Party and the “Christians” who claim its tenets as their own now seem to cherish greed as loudly as they decry drug use.

Jesus preached against greed (but never said a word about drug addiction).

Other religions also have (negative) words to say about greed.

Considering the harm that unbridled greed is doing to our economy, not to mention the environment, I think it’s time for our goverment to slow down its “war on drugs” and start fighting a “war on greed.”

I’d even encourage support of faith-based programs in this effort. Indeed, they should be at its heart.

No Christian — not even George W. Bush — could possibly argue against an effort to put some of Jesus’s strongest exhortations into practice in America today.

At least, one would like to think they couldn’t….

This entry was posted on Saturday, March 11th, 2006 at 9:03 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.