This was the best monday I've had this year, and I got out of the hospital after spending a week in the ICU on a monday.

Hoping the ICU experience is long behind you now!

The first half of that is pretty good reading, until it degenerates into self-congratulation.

On the other hand, Jesus was fine with vineyard owners paying their workers a fair wage, Samaritans giving away their money to help people, and fathers being generous to their prodigal sons even after they didn't "deserve" it.

My read on it is, Jesus is unambiguously against rich people allowing people around them to suffer and starve. But the owning of property doesn't itself seem to be something Jesus objects to.

Then of course there is the question of how you can remain rich as long as there is a single poor person in the world: don't you owe it to your principles to give everything away until you have nothing more to give? For that, I say we can go back to the days of Moses, where the Lord's instruction was that, if everyone as the Lord commanded, there would be no poor. That's what Jesus was alluding to with his "the poor will be with us always" -- in effect, responding to Judas with "don't blame me personally just because society considers greed a virtue".

So yeah, most of the rich need to step up and do more ... but the rest of us are obligated to do what we can as well.