When I was younger, I dreamed of being a fireballing right-handed pitcher for the Mets. However, what I quickly learned from hours of backyard practice was that I found it difficult to consistently get the ball over the plate and throwing fastballs turned my arm into a gigantic cramp. 

Perhaps with some grim persistence devoted to the task I might have developed some passable skills, but the likelihood is that I would have expended a great deal of effort to fall far beneath the mediocre because my natural talents did not tend toward that direction. The Rolling Stones probably put it best when they sang the following: “You can’t always get what you want.” We can, of course, overcome the limitations of our inborn abilities and inclinations to a certain extent, but we are what we are—and need to live with that reality. 

Unfortunately, it is also a reality that the wide variations of human potential are prone to produce anxiety, frustration, and anger. This, unfortunately, puts a fair number of people on a path to dissatisfaction because jealousy naturally pops up when some are successful—and others are not. This human failing can cause a good deal of misery for both the individuals involved and those around them, and it has provided the plot lines for centuries of drama and trauma immortalized on stage, screen, and in literature—while enriching psychiatrists, psychologists, and therapists the world over.

If this were the end of the story, we could survive quite well. We could all continue to benefit from, or be entertained by, the wildly overachieving few among us. However, two problems inevitably crop up because of this extraordinary variability of mankind’s natural talents.

First and foremost, extraordinary disparities in wealth have caused societal friction throughout the course of history. The solutions to this never ending problem have ranged from the guillotine and the bullet during the French and Russian revolutions to the more benign alternative of progressive tax brackets in modern Western democracies. Nonetheless, the tension between the supremely fortunate “haves” and the often despairing “have-nots” continues to be a flashpoint in America and throughout the rest of the world.

In addition, the privilege and power (not to mention the physical separation from the vast majority of humanity) that wealth provides breeds resentment that is sometimes unfair—but sometimes not. The gulf, for example, between the healthcare, educations, and housing available to those struggling to survive in every corner of our nation and what is available to the rich and famous grates on our egalitarian sensibilities and prompts cries for some kind of redress. Whether we today resort to chopping the most accomplished down to size with scurrilous gossip or a demand for more onerous taxes on what is deemed unjust abundance, the urge to punish the wealthiest is growing across America.

Envy is an ugly emotion, but the feelings of those now being crushed by the escalating cost of living, cast aside by technological innovations, and cut to the quick by the daily cruelties of life go beyond mere envy. It is no accident that Marxism, a political and economic philosophy that has stained our planet with blood for close to two hundred years, is now ascendant in many parts of our nation. With so many avowed Marxists (although they prefer the gentler moniker of “Socialists”) now occupying elective and appointed offices throughout America—and with more seemingly on the way—the question of where we are going as a country as we attempt to meet our present needs while trying to repair the fiscal wreckage left behind by 50 years of insane government borrowing and spending is likely to lead a collision between world views that are both irreconcilable—and violently opposed to one another.

The push me-pull me between those who sell the fantasy that taxing the rich down to the bone will solve all of our problems (it won’t) and those who want to cut government spending down to the bone (which is certain to infuriate many) will be the defining battle of the next decade. 

Because their predecessors accustomed Americans to unending government largesse covered with our collective credit card, the next generation of our leaders are going to be profoundly unpopular due to their enforced stinginess. Awkward and unwise fiscal compromises will abound as we try to climb from a debt hole of unimaginable proportions that combines both the “official” National debt and unfunded mandates that will constrain us for the next few decades. 

Throughout it all the Red banner will be held high by those who are more interested in power than arithmetic, and their appeals to envy and anger may well teach an unwanted lesson to today’s crop of incendiary Socialists: Attacking those whose hard work and talents create the wealth that politicians so love to squander will cause more problems than are solved because mob emotions are impossible to restrain once they are foolishly released.