Liberals do not characterize the rich as evil, Leftists do. And the criticism isn’t so much that there is some innate immorality or sociopathy that all rich people share, it’s a characterization that hoarding wealth is effectively hoarding both power and depriving resources from people who need it (especially with forms of wealth that are not numbers in a bank account such as owning multiple homes when there are so many homeless people).
The thread of it is: it’s pretty easy to fix, give up your money (and this means direct it and a large portion of your income to other places, not just “buy/invest in more things”). Not all of it obviously, you can live comfortably! Nobody is going to bash you for being comfortable or providing for family, but IMO it’s a moral imperative to use wealth beyond what you need to be comfortable to help others. I realize this is thorny because people have different definitions of “comfortable” and for some people that may be a yacht, so yes, there is some prescription of what “comfortable” means (general it’s thought to be in terms of someone who can live without any real fear of a sudden financial emergency), but I feel it gets the gist across.
Note that the likes of, e.g., Bill Gates do do some of this, giving a significant portion of wealth to good causes as more than just a tax writeoff, but in the end Gates is still hoarding a lot of wealth, and his charity foundation is, while well meaning, is more than a little colonialist. I don’t think he’s a bad person, nor do I think it’s bad his charity is sending the money where it does, but the way it grades communities and tries to shape them in a direction that the foundation deems as “correct” is in essence not much different from John Stuart Mill declaring the Indians should not be allowed to run India until the British teach them how to run it “properly”.
I know I will often refer to “the wealthy” as a kind of shorthand, but of course there is a difference between benign successful people and the kind of people who use their influence to ensure that Congress never acts or even speaks about climate change, force tax cuts for themselves regardless of what is best for the country, push laws that allow dangerous pollution at the public’s expense, push massive disinformation, and so on.
I get the feeling that there is a set of malevolent wealthy/corporations that manipulate and pervert the system for their own ends. That’s different from the guy with the successful internet startup who maybe has an extravagant wealthy life but doesn’t behave much like a public menace. When I make offhand comments about “the wealthy” though, that distinction probably doesn’t come through. Maybe I should start saying “malevolent wealthy” or something to be more clear.
And Septimus, Wrenching Spanners is averaging something like 9 posts a year. Give him more time to respond.