Sean Hannity: Lazy Pope Francis Doesn’t Understand the Virtues of Hard Work

It’s opposite day again on Sean Hannity’s show, and he’s going to let us know that anyone who has money worked really, really hard for it — and that the Pope doesn’t understand the virtues of hard work.

Because Pope Francis advocates for the poor, Sean Hannity claims he’s sticking up for lazy, worthless people who don’t understand the virtues of hard work.

“And it’s like now we’re creating the resentment of those who get up, make decisions, they go to school, they develop marketable skills, they decide to work, they make intelligent decisions . . . and now, all of a sudden, they’re being hated,” Hannity said on his radio show, discussing the drive for income redistribution. “And they’re being called greedy, and selfish. And they’re now being condemned. And we’re celebrating mediocrity, or laziness. Because if you think about it, who are we going to take the money from?”

He went on:

I don’t know any Kennedys. I know people who have money. I know people that are comfortable . . . that are struggling . . . that are poor . . . that have come from nothing to make money in their lives . . . And in every case of everyone that I know that has money, with the exception of one person that used to work on my TV staff that was born rich, he’s the only person I know. Every other person I know . . . that has anything decent in their life, . . . everybody that has something, earned it. I don’t know anybody that has gotten something through ill-gotten gains. We are the sum total of every decision we make in our lives.

I’d hazard a guess that the reason Hannity doesn’t know anyone who has gotten anything through ill-gotten means is because he doesn’t know anyone born into extreme wealth. He goes on to rant about taxes — you know, those things that you pay in order to gain and use public roads, public schools, government science funding, police, fire, and other utilities — and finishes off by warning us that these “hard workers” will “go Galt” on us if we don’t stop demanding that they pay their fair share to society.

Hannity seems to think that having a skill set honed to providing a service is all it takes to being a millionaire or billionaire, since that’s how those millionaires and billionaires got their money. I have a few questions I’d like to direct at Hannity and every other Libertarian thinker: Are you a billionaire? If not, why? Because you’re lazy, perhaps? If it worked for them, why shouldn’t it work for you? The only excuse, then, by your own words — by Hannity’s own words — for not making billions of dollars is that you’re just flat out lazy.

Or, you could acknowledge reality — they didn’t work for their gains, and they got that money by gaming a broken tax system, and rigging the system in their favor at the cost of everyone else.