It is grand sometimes to sit by the fireplace with a glass of wine and some good friends, well into the night, theorizing about what could be done, and what ought to be done, and why, and by whom. Almost everyone has their own pet "theories", and most of them have loved debating them as long as they can remember. Some of the people who propound them, though, tend consciously or subconsciously to exempt themselves from the supposed truthes in their utterances.

A personal favorite at cocktail parties is the "bleeding-heart liberal", an enthusiastically discredited target for the incisive repartee. The scene usually opens with one of the stale bromides about the "poor", the "homeless" or the innocence of the benighted street thug.

Imagine that speaker, crystal goblet of Pouilly Fuisse 1978 in hand, explaining to some pretty young undergraduate thing, that the problem with the poor is greed, that we Americans are too caught up in decadent mindless materialism to spare a decent living for the victims of today's "social problems".

Did you suppose, for a minute, these exalted examples of the milk of human kindness are going to herd down to the polling places to vote to increase their own taxes for special food and shelter handouts for the poor? Are they going to donate time to work with, or educate, those children they adulate as "culturally handicapped"? Are they going to sell their possessions, or sacrifice the education of their own children, so the fellow on the other side of the railroad tracks can have a "decent chance" at life?

No, they'll do none of these things. They'll vote to increase corporate taxes of the hated greedy American businesses which employ them, perhaps just at a time when one of those corporations was considering investing half a billion dollars in research to find a better cure for cancer or the new AIDS. Perhaps they'll vote to legally expropriate your relative's property, and his neighbor's, at fifty cents on the dollar of fair market value, to build a park to house the tents of those whom earlier generations dismissed as bums and hoboes.

If they can entrench themselves in administration of these funds and projects at exorbitant salary, they'll do that too, all in the name of compassion for others who very rarely see much of the funds personally.

But if no one at the cocktail party will say this, or admit to it if accused, perhaps they're all very clever at looking out for their own welfare, not on the merits of their own productive contribution to society, but at the expense of others. And so it is that the bond becomes permanent, between the very poor, who have been trained to become utterly dependent on taxation of the productive, and the very compassionate, who are trained to depend on the existence of guilt to justify their views and/or livelihood.

The entire conversation at the party hinges on the fact that everybody present agreed that we are all "products of our environment", a very old theory which in turn hinges on even older theories.