Writing more than a decade before most of the world had ever heard the name Barack Obama, our dear, departed friend Robert Bork noted that President Bill Clinton had proposed raising taxes on “the rich”—not further defined. Taxes would go up even though credible analyses showed that raising them would not increase government revenues.
As Judge Bork ruefully admitted, he had taught Bill and Hillary Clinton constitutional law at Yale Law School—although to hear the Judge tell it, he was teaching while they happened to be in the room. Well, President Clinton may not have been much of a constitutional scholar, but he did have an acute understanding of the public mood and the political moment.
He knew how to read a poll.
In this instance, polling indicated that a substantial portion of the public favored higher taxes on high-income earners even if imposing them would not help anyone else—instead, it would merely take high earners down a few pegs. Since the only motivation for this could be envy, one of the seven deadly sins long thought a cause for shame if publicly revealed, Bork realized it might seem “surprising that so many people would admit harboring that emotion.” But he found the answer to this paradox in the work of Helmut Schoeck—an Austrian sociologist who saw envy as the driving force of social behavior in the West. As Schoeck put it:
Since the end of the Second World War . . . a
