RUSH: We have Jeannie on the phone from Houston. Hi, Jeannie. I’m glad you called.

CALLER: Hey, Rush. What an honor to talk to you.

RUSH: Thank you.

CALLER: I’m so happy to be on the program.

RUSH: Thank you very much.

CALLER: I just wanted to call in after the call yesterday and let you know that I am a nurse and a doctor, and I didn’t become a doctor by working as a nurse for 20 years. I wanted to shed a little light as to what that doctor’s doing that they referred to yesterday that “rounds” for an hour and then —

RUSH: Let me set this up.

CALLER: Sure.

RUSH: It’s probably 95% of people listening now heard that all yesterday, but there might be some people listening today that didn’t hear this. We had a guy call in the third hour of the program yesterday. His nose was bent out of shape at the unfairness in America and the inequality in America. His basic point was we have all these nurses, and they’re the ones doing all the work in the hospitals, and doctors don’t do diddly-squat.

(summarized) “The doctors show up once a week, and then they run around, play golf or whatever while the nurses are doing the work. You know, the nurses ought to be the ones that are called doctors. The nurses ought to be able to become doctors. The nurses are doing all the work, and the doctors aren’t doing diddly-squat, and nurses aren’t making what the doctors make — and it really isn’t fair!”

He wanted to know what I thought of it. So that led to paralegals getting to feel like they’re getting gypped, and it became a discussion on how mean and unfair America is. So now Jeannie from Houston is calling to weigh in on this. You say you’ve been a doctor and a nurse. You were a nurse first, but being the nurse did not lead you to becoming the M.D.

CALLER: No. They’re two different ways to treat the patients. The nurses are at the bedside. But as far as making patient-care decisions, that’s a little bit different. So, for instance, that doctor that maybe comes in the nursing home for an hour a week, the rest of the time you run your own practice, which is maybe 60 hours a week. You have to see patients that are in the hospital or in the nursing home before or after your regular practice. Your regular practice is running a small business.

RUSH: Okay. Now, see, I made the point yesterday that a lot of people do not see anything other than the end point of someone’s success track. You see a doctor, and you see him once a day at the old folks’ home, but you don’t see what it took to get there. You don’t see what he’s doing the other hours of the day when he’s not at the old folks’ home, and this is what Jeannie is trying to illustrate here.

CALLER: Yes. So my undergraduate degree was as a nurse. In order for me to “round” for that one hour in the nursing home, I had to go back to school for eight more years. I had to take out loans for $300,000.

RUSH: Yeah, but isn’t that unfair? Because this guy’s point was you already knew enough to be a doctor —

CALLER: No.

RUSH: — by being a nurse all those hours; that’s what was unfair about it

CALLER: Well, Rush, no, because, you know, you can do something over and over again a thousand times but, as we know, that doesn’t necessarily increase your knowledge. And at the end of the day, when somebody’s sick, do they want to see a nurse or do they want to see a physician that’s fished their training as a physician?

RUSH: Well, it depends whether you’re talking about a low-information guy or you’re talking about somebody else.

CALLER: Well, I think most of your listeners would want to see a physician. But there’s a lot involved — and there is a lot of animosity, I think, between nurses and doctors. But I did just want to inform your listeners —

RUSH: Quickly.

CALLER: — that there’s a lot more that goes on that they don’t see that that doctor is doing.

RUSH: And you’ve seen it from both sides?

CALLER: Yes, sir.

RUSH: You’ve been the nurse —

CALLER: — I have.

RUSH: — and now you are a doctor.

CALLER: I am.

RUSH: And you weren’t promoted to doctor from nurse; you had to go back to school. That’s okay. See, to me this makes perfect sense. Total sense, and I also… Look, I don’t know. Jeannie, thanks. I gotta take a break.

BREAK TRANSCRIPT

RUSH: All right, folks, I’ll tell you what’s going on out there. Envy. Envy and jealousy. It’s happening more and more, and in social media it’s being said that that’s perfectly fine. It’s being excused. Totally justifiable.

BREAK TRANSCRIPT

RUSH: Look, folks, this doctor-nurse thing, there’s no reason we need to make this complicated. It’s nothing new, all right? Most people’s historical perspective begins the day they were born. Most people’s knowledge of history is when they’re alive. This envy, wanting what somebody else has, thinking whatever somebody else has they don’t deserve and that you are more entitled to it, you are working harder than they do, that they have gamed the system, there’s nothing new about it. What is new is how that kind of envy is now being justified.

JOHNNY DONOVAN: And now, from sunny south Florida, it’s Open Line Friday!

RUSH: I mean, there’s all kinds of bad behavior that’s always gone on. What’s happening in America now, for whatever reason, is the bad behavior’s being justified, and we’re being told to understand it and to try connect with the people and how they feel. You can understand why they’re envious and jealous, because they have a right to be, blah, blah, blah.

So here we are at Open Line Friday, Rush Limbaugh, at 800-282-2882. The e-mail address, ElRushbo@eibnet.com.

Okay. To set this up, out of the blue yesterday, we got a guy call on the phone, and I was a little slow on the uptake because what I thought he was going to talk about was entirely different, so I got kind of caught up short. It took me awhile to figure out where this guy was coming from. He starts out by saying he’s a big conservative and so forth, but there was nothing conservative about what he was talking about. Whether he knew it or not, he was advocating pure socialism.

He was upset, by the time I stripped everything away, this guy was upset that doctors don’t work very hard and get all the money and nurses are doing all the work and don’t get jack anything, and after being a nurse for 30 years, damn it, you ought to be a doctor. You’re doing everything the doctors are doing; you know everything the doctor’s do; the doctor’s not doing diddly-squat, telling the nurse to do it all, the nurse is doing it, and still the nurses don’t make anything the doctors make. So I finally figured out we just got a simple case of envy here, simple case of jealousy.

I forget whether this guy was a nurse or his wife was a nurse or his daughter was a nurse or he hated his doctor, I don’t remember what it was that inspired all this, but it’s simple envy. Now, we’ve always had envious people. We’ve always had people among us who want somebody else’s lifestyle. And we’ve always had people around us who think that successful people really don’t deserve it. They cheated somebody, or they inherited it, or they got lucky. Nothing new about that. There have always been people who think they’ve been screwed. There have always been people who think they’re the ones doing all the work and getting none of the credit and nobody pays them any attention.

Those people are a dime a dozen. It’s human nature. What’s changing is the envy and the jealousy, we’re now being told is understandable and it may be justifiable, and it may be legitimate. This entire proposition, shall we say, is explored in a piece in the New York Post. “AmericaÂ’s Ugly Epidemic of Social Media Envy.” And it’s by Karol Markowicz.

“When did envy become OK? IÂ’m constantly hearing or seeing not-very-guilty admissions of being jealous of a friend for, say, something seen on Instagram. Whether itÂ’s eye-rolling at a friendÂ’s exotic trip, snarking on someoneÂ’s great seats at the ballgame or commenting about an acquaintanceÂ’s restaurant-every-night life, jealousy is in.

Have we become a culture of green-eyed monsters who (in the parlance of hip-hop) ‘hate on’ our friends and acquaintances for all they have and we donÂ’t? Maybe itÂ’s social media. Study after study shows that our jealousy spikes with our use of social sharing sites.”

That’s what she says here. Study after study shows that our jealousy spikes, increases as we use social media. “People you know take more luxurious vacations than you do, their relationships are closer and more loving, their children better behaved and cuter — and the evidence is right there on the Web,” because they’re posting pictures of all of this. “A University of Michigan study released in August found that, the more people use Facebook, the worse they feel about their own lives.”

Now, if I might, this was one of the major concerns I had when all of this social media exploded, because there’s two things happening. One is this endless quest for fame. Everybody is just telling everything about themselves. They’re not protecting any privacy. They think that’s what fame is. They want everybody to know who they are and what they think and where they’ve been and where they are, and where they’re going, and how long it’s gonna take ’em to get there. People are tweeting and four squaring, “Yeah, I’m 10 minutes away from the restaurant. I’m five minutes away. I just got here, where are you?” All of this is happening, real time, social media.

The second thing about social media is everybody lies. I’ve always worried that this was going to lead to actual depression, in the sense that because people are just who they are and they’re gonna brag about their kids, they’re gonna post their pictures and the vacation and all that, they’re gonna create more insecurity out there than otherwise would be. They’re gonna create illusory lifestyles. People are going to brag about how well they’re living and how much fun they’re having, when they may not be. But it’s gonna look legit ’cause it’s there. They got pictures of it, and they’re writing about it, and it’s gonna create all this insecurity and jealousy and envy, and it appears this is happening.

And now, again, what’s noteworthy about this is that all this jealousy and envy is somehow okay now. It’s justifiable because it’s being caused. The haves are braggarts now. The haves and the successful are lauding it over everybody and they’re making people feel bad about themselves. And so the jealousy, we as a society have to try to understand it. And that’s the point here.

Now, the author here again is Karol Markowicz. “But is it just social media that makes us so envious? Or some deeper change that social media facilitate? IÂ’m thinking of Karen Paperno, the owner of Park Slope baby boutique Boing Boing, who raged in a Huffington Post piece about the growing affluence of her neighborhood and her difficulty in keeping up with the Joneses. In this example of off-line jealousy, The New York Times picked up the story and detailed the difficult life of a middle-class woman in a rich neighborhood.”

And, see, that just validates the envy. The New York Times comes along and does a story (sobbing), “Oh, look at how unfair! Look how unfortunate,” and it validates/justifies the person who’s feeling jealous and envious. Oh, “It’s easy to feel sympathetic to Paperno, who works hard at a neighborhood business and whose husband’s illness forced her to close a second business location. At least, it is until she admits to stealing ‘spices, honey, coconut oil, granola; expensive things that I wanted’ from a store near her home, even as she derides the materialism of others.

“The Times called the market ‘one of the many emblems of the new, consumerist Park Slope’ but it’s most likely a small business just like Paperno’s. Should its owners be allowed to steal from her shop, too? … Never before have so many had so much while still wanting more. There’s nothing new about jealousy and envy, of course,” the story says. “What’s new is our cultural acceptance of it. In a world where we talk about ‘inequality’…” Hello, President Obama and the Democrat Party!

“In a world where we talk about ‘inequality’ as the greatest problem we face, of course we support each other’s need to have as much stuff as our friends and neighbors.” Of course it’s not fair somebody has more! This is pure socialism what’s happening here, and it’s exactly what leads to socialism: The “unfairness.” The “unequal distribution of resources.” It’s not fair, and so this guy that called yesterday is just simple jealousy and envy.

Let’s just say, for the sake of the discussion, he was the nurse, and he just doesn’t want to do the work the doctor has to do to become a doctor, and he thinks he’s justified in that. So raising taxes, for example, to redistribute wealth becomes justifiable. In fact, it becomes moral. Taking from people who have more than you have becomes moral because it’s justified to be jealous and envious, because it isn’t fair. Now, I’ll tell you who’s responsible for this.

You can blame it on social media all you want. There’s a political party that is living off of this kind of mentality. They’re promoting it. They’re getting votes based on it, and they claim they’ve got a solution to it — and what is their solution? They’re gonna punish the achievers. They’re gonna punish the “haves.” So all of this talk about the widening gap, rich and poor — all this talk about growing inequality, income inequality, lifestyle inequality — all of it is political.

Now, these people in this story haven’t the slightest idea about any of it is. To them it’s just human interest. They have no idea that they are being used.
They have no idea they’re being exploited. They have no idea that all these ideas are being put in their heads. Well, not that, because envy and jealousy are common in the human condition. Again, what’s different about it is that that is being justified.

The envy and jealousy is being almost rewarded, and there’s a political party out telling all those envious, jealous people, “Vote for us, and we’ll punish those people that you hate! We’ll get even with ’em for you, because we agree with you. They shouldn’t have all that. You should have it. The rich have all that stuff ’cause they’ve taken it from you!” People say, “Yeah, yeah, man! Yeah, man! I want to have a lot without having to do anything for it, too, man. Yeah. Cool.”

Again: “Never before have so many had so much while still wanting more.” Never before have so many had so much and been so unhappy at the same time, and I’m telling you — and I’m not… Folks, I have this story. This was not even at the top of the Stack. I wasn’t even gonna go into this until we got the call today from Jeannie in Houston that kept the call from the jealous male nurse from yesterday alive.

So this was not even something I’d spent any time thinking about. But just reading this story and now understanding that the ugly epidemic of social envy is justifiable, there’s gonna be one reason for it. It’s politicized. The effort to capitalize on this politically is really quite brilliant. This is the old class envy thing. The Democrats have been working on this for 50 years, and they’ve finally introduced something new to the argument, and that is class envy makes sense.

Class envy is rewardable. “Class envy is exactly what you should have, because you are being mistreated! You are being screwed, and these people who have more than you don’t deserve it. These people who have more than you do, they came by it in ways that screwed you to get it — and we, the Democrat Party, are gonna fix it.” Now, for those of you who might be hearing this and thinking I’m all wet on this being political, I want to ask you to think about something.

Don’t doubt me when I tell you that this has been a political strategy that has been employed by socialists, Democrats, leftists forever. It is how they have gotten to power. I want you to honestly search the world. I want you to find for me any country or society where the redistribution of wealth, punishing the achievers, has resulted in you getting what they have. I’m here to tell you, it never does.

The government will never do it.

They’re not even gonna really try.

They just want you to think they are. The government will never make you a doctor if all you are is a nurse, and they will never take what that mean doctor has and give it to you. They’ll make you think they want to, they’ll make you think they’re gonna try to (and they may raise the doctor’s taxes), but they are not going to change your standard of living. They are not going to make you rich.

In fact, they’re not even gonna get rid of your envy.

How many years have you been voting Democrat and you’re still jealous? How many years have you been voting Democrat and you’re still envious? How many years have you been voting Democrat and you’re probably more envious than ever? How many years have you been voting Democrat and you’re probably angrier than you’ve ever been? So how’s it working out for you, voting for all these people who are gonna make everything fair? They can’t.

They’re not even really trying.

What they’re doing is making everybody poorer, and that’s how they get to their precious equality. They don’t elevate you. They will take from the people who have more than you, but you’re not gonna get it. They do. It goes to the government. It’s not gonna come to you. All that’s gonna happen is everybody is gonna get poorer, and I challenge you. Don’t believe me. Try to find anywhere in the world where politicians promising to fix what you think is wrong has made you richer or anybody richer or happier or more equal or what have you.

It hasn’t happened.

The best thing you could do is stop with the envy, stop with the jealousy, stop being angry at others for what you don’t have and figure out a way to go get it yourself.

BREAK TRANSCRIPT

RUSH: A little KC and the Sunshine Band in the bumper rotation here at the EIB Network.

Ladies and gentlemen, the three great political pathologies of modern times were all based on envy. Not political movement, pathologies. The three great political pathologies of modern times were all based on envy: Nazism. Nazism preached envy toward the rich and exploitative Jewish people, communism preaches envy toward the rich-exploitative bourgeoisie, and Muslim terrorism preaches envy toward the rich-exploitative West.

The roots of this have been taking hold in this country. What do you think outcome-based education was? It’s based on envy. What do you think not grading a paper with a red pen was all about? What do you think not having winners and losers in extracurricular football in high school is all about? What is all this stuff all about? It’s all about envy and not having any.