IF YOU HAVE REAL CLASS, YOU DON'T NEED MUCH OF ANYTHING ELSE

What is class? Class never runs scared. It is sure-footed and confident in the knowledge that you can meet life head on and handle whatever comes along.

Jacob had it. Esau didn't. Symbolically, we can look to Jacob's wrestling match with the angel. Those who have class have wrestled with their own personal angel and won a victory that marks them thereafter.

Class never makes excuses. It takes its lumps and learns from past mistakes.

Class is considerate of others. It knows that good manners are nothing more than a series of petty sacrifices.

Class bespeaks an aristocracy that has nothing to do with ancestors or money. The most affluent blueblood can be totally without class, while the descendant of a Welsh miner may ooze class from every pore.

Class never tries to build itself up by tearing others down.

Class is already up and need not strive to look better by making others look worse.

Class can walk with kings and keep its virtue, and talk with crowds and keep the common touch. Everyone is comfortable with the person who has class, because he is comfortable with himself.

If you have class, you don't need much of anything else. If you don't have it, no matter what else you have, it doesn't make much difference. The EDGE

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The richest businessmen: In 1923 a group of our greatest leaders and richest businessmen held a meeting at the Edgewater Beach hotel in Chicago. Among them were Charles Schwab, head of the largest independent steel company; Samuel Insull, president of the world's largest utility; Howard Hopson, head of the largest gas company; Ivar Krueger president of the International Match Co., one of the world's largest companies at that time; Leon Frazier; president of the Bank of International Settlements; Richard Whitney, president of the New York Stock Exchange; Arthur Cotton and Jesse Livermore, two of the biggest stock speculators; and Albert Fall, a member of President Harding's Cabinet. Twenty-five years later nine of them (those listed above) ended as follows. Schwab died penniless after living for five years on borrowed money. Insull died broke living in a foreign land. Kreuger and Cotton also died broke. Hopson went insane. Whitney and Albert Fall were just released from prison. Fraser and Livermore committed suicide.

I doubt if anyone can say what really happened to these men. If you look at the date, 1923, it was just before the 1929 market crash and the Great Depression, which I suspect had a great impact on these men and their lives. The point is this: Today we live in times of greater and faster change than these men did. I suspect there will be many booms and busts in the next 25 years that will parallel the ups and downs these men faced. I am concerned that too many people are focused too much on money and not their greatest wealth, which is their education. If people are prepared to be flexible, keep an open mind and learn, they will grow richer and richer through the changes. If they think money will solve problems, I am afraid those people will have a rough ride. Intelligence solves problems and produces money. Money without financial intelligence is money soon gone.

Most people fail to realize that, in life, it's not how much money you make. It's how much money you keep. We have all heard stories of lottery winners who are poor, then suddenly rich, then poor again. They win millions and are soon back to where they started. Or stories of professional athletes who, at the age of 24, are earning millions of dollars a year and are sleeping under a bridge by age 34. In the paper this morning, as I write this, there is a story of a young basketball player who a year ago had millions. Today he claims his friends, attorney and accountant took his money, and now he works at a car wash for minimum wage.

He is only 29. He was fired from the car wash because he refused to take off his championship ring as he was wiping off the cars, so his story made the newspaper. He is appealing his termination, claiming hardship and discrimination and that the ring is all he has left. He claims that if you take that away, he'll crumble. Robert T. Kiyosaki in "Rich Dad Poor Dad", best-selling book

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Wealth gap follies: Confession: I feel guilty about my contribution to America's wealth gap. Quarter by quarter it grows. Twenty years ago I was a poor, unpublished writer, tooling around Silicon Valley in a 1964 Ford Falcon with the trunk tied down by a jump rope. My dress shoes were a gaudy pair of hand-me-down, patent-leather slip ons, appropriate only with a zoot suit. But when it came to wealth gaps, I was as pure as a lamb. I had no wealth. Today I'm a dirty, rotten wealth-gapper. I own a house, two cars, a 401(k) plan, shares in a few companies and shoes to fill a closet. It's unconscionable.

I look at my peers, and they too are widening the gap without remorse. My college roommate is worth at least $2 million more than when he was in college and had to wash dishes for tuition. Boo on him. Then there's Bill Gates. Where to begin with this Alexander of wealth-gappers! Winston Churchill said history is replete with "ifs." The big Bill Gates "if" (which brings wistful tears to contemplate) is that if Bill had only stayed at Harvard, graduated and gone to work as a software writer at Wang Labs, America's wealth gap would be measurably lower today. America would be in much finer moral shape.

Then America's wealth gap would be a trifle instead of the national cancer it is becoming. Did we say cancer? Nay, a plague, a spreading pox on the American house. As one looks around, one sees nothing but wealth, wealth, wealth and giant, yawning wealth gaps breaking out everywhere.

Take Marc Andreessen. He cofounded Netscape when he was 22 and today is worth more than $80 million. He's a dangerous, one-man, wealth-gapping Hercules. That's bad enough, but it gets worse. Recently Marc launched himself into a new career. What's his goal? To do the humanitarian thing and reduce wealth gaps? No. To fund them. He puts money into startups. He writes checks of $1 million at a pop to starving entrepreneurs who heretofore have not known sin. These innocents have lived their lives for 25 years or more and have not added a whiffle to America's scandalous wealth gap. They are as blameless as kittens. Then along comes Marc, and suddenly he's writing checks to the babes like Lucifer throwing candy ropes from hell. Some of these startups will grow up, and their founders will grow rich, extending the wealth gap even more. Where's the crying and gnashing of teeth? Isn't anyone outraged?

Something must be done. Yes, the wealth gap must be narrowed. Some boffo wealth-narrowing proposals are flying around think tanks and op-ed pages these days. All have merit. We need only summon Our Collective Will, at this late hour of necrotic wealth-gap sickness, and collect these proposals into a kind of Manhattan Project of Wealth Gap Reduction. Specifically:

* We must immediately hike the capital gains tax to 98 percent. This won't shrink the extant wealth gap, because sneaky old wealth-gappers will shift their wealth into nonproducing assets like gold, country estates and art. But this measure promises to kill baby wealth-gappers in the crib and rouse the American conscience from its long slumber. It's a start.

* We must get tough on bankruptcies. Just when we have these dirty losers under our boot and humiliated, we let them up. Many will keep rising to create more wealth gaps.

* We must completely ban immigration, particularly for those people with technical skills, ambition and guts. The nerve of these Indians, Israelis and Taiwanese-coming to America-and adding to the wealth gap. Raise fences now.

Now, to the trade gap crisis ... . Rich Karlgaard, Forbes magazine

~Gary Rust is president of Rust Communications, which owns the Southeast Missourian and other newspapers.