cross posted from MarstonChronicles.info One only has to look around to see that some people have a great deal of wealth and some people are desperately poor. Is this fair? After all, the wealthy have more money than they can ever use so why not take some of their excess money and give it to the poor who need it so much? Since the wealthy clearly do not give enough to charity, why not harness the power of the federal government to force a more equitable distribution of the wealth? Before we can answer that question we need to determine why some people have more money than other people in the first place. In order to justify seizing this "excess" wealth which Obama thinks should be making more than $250,000 a year, we need to determine that the wealthy came by their wealth unjustly. We need to determine that they stole it directly or indirectly by taking unfair advantage of other people. Most of all we need to determine that everyone is equally talented at making money as everyone else. If the explanation is that for the most part, the wealthy simply are better at managing money than poor people then even if we take their excess money and give it to the poor, in a relatively short period of time, the more talented people at making money will soon be the wealthy people again and the poor people will revert to being poor once they have spent the money the government gave them and be no better off than they were before. This in turn forces us to look at the uneven distribution of talent in general among our population. Some people are more athletically talented than others and make the big leagues. Others are better singers, dancers, mathematicians, etc. Unlike money, we cannot force an even redistribution of those kinds of talents. You are either good at something or you are not. Granted you can practice and become better at most things but some people just seem to be more gifted than others at just about anything you care to name. The only way to adjust for this uneven distribution is to deliberately handicap the more talented by playing favorites with the less talented. We see this in things like little leagues and even admission to colleges where everyone gets a chance to play regardless of their talent. The technical name for this attempt to force an even distribution of talent is egalitarianism. The uneven distribution of talent we see in the real world must be compensated for in the name of simple fairness or justice. Everyone should be just as good as everyone else at everything. The question then is how this well this tendency towards egalitarianism works in the real world. A simple example will suffice to determine this. Some people are more talented at doing schoolwork than others. It may be that they are smarter or work harder or are driven just to be good at everything. Other people may be lazy or simply just not motivated enough to be good at schoolwork in addition to perhaps being less talented at doing it in the first place. Still this is manifestly unfair so let's see how we can adjust for this in practice. A new teacher comes into the classroom who is determined to right this manifest wrong. Since everyone should be equal to everyone else, he gives a "C" grade to everyone regardless of how good or how poorly a student performs. It does not take a doctorate in psychology to figure out what the effects of such a policy will have. The good students think to themselves that they busted their butts to get a good grade and all they got was a "C" so what is the point of continuing to put in the extra effort? They promptly stop trying to make an extra effort. The poor students see that they got a "C" when inside their heads they know they did not deserve it. Since they know they will get a "C" anyway, why bother to try at all? It will come as no surprise to any student of human behavior, when standardized tests are given to this class of students; they will score abysmally compared to classes with teachers who are not committed to the doctrine of egalitarianism. All that happens under egalitarianism is that everybody is much worse off than before. There simply is no workable way to use some system to "force" a correction for the uneven distribution of talent. This simple fact of life is why capitalism always wins out over communism, socialism, etc. because it employs a system of rewards and punishment to provide incentives for outstanding achievement. Communism and socialism do not provide such incentives so everyone is encouraged to "goof off" since there is no incentive to do more than just enough to get by. This can be made even worse by introducing a system where no one can be fired for poor work performance. In such a system, productivity goes out the window. This then brings us back to the question of whether money making ability is a talent that is also unequally distributed or not. There seems no reason to assume that it is any different from any other talent and that some people have a "knack" for making money and others do not. That being the case how will taxing the rich to force them to give to the poor work out any better than giving everybody a "C" in a classroom? Why should the rich bother to bust their butts to start up new businesses or expand their old ones using the capital they have accumulated when the government is going to confiscate everything over a certain amount of money per person? Their incentive to put their money to work to make still more money is destroyed. All that happens is that everyone is worse off or poorer than they were before. Are you better off now than you were a few years ago? Most of us are not. Could it be that Obama's policies have discouraged the wealthy from creating more wealth for everyone and that is why everyone but the rich are worse off than ever? Capitalism works best when the government is no more than a referee to insure that reasonable rules for fair play are enforced. Whenever it gets into the business of meddling with the mechanics of the economy in the interests of enforcing equality, it just makes a mess out of everything. Government then is in the business of picking winners and losers. Not surprisingly, the winners always turn out to be those individuals and entities that support whoever is running the government. All that happens is that crony capitalism runs wild as businesses figure out that there is money to be made by playing the game that those in power want to play by any means necessary. This distortion of the free marketplace causes a recovery from an economic downturn to be very anemic at best or even drives it back into another recession. Government always screws up everything it touches. It simply is the nature of the beast. Government is an evil. It may be a necessary evil but it is still an evil. It will always pick winners and losers because it is run by humans who want to harness the power of government to reward their friends and punish their enemies. Unlike capitalism that rewards achievers, all government does is reward ass kissers and such people are seldom wealth producers for anyone but themselves. When capitalism works freely, it spreads wealth around to everyone, It does not spread it evenly because it rewards risk takers and producers and not just somebody who has a buddy in the government. The other problem with government micromanaging everything is that it makes our decisions for us with a one size fits all mentality. All this does besides making us poorer is that we become less free as well. We are no longer in charge of our own lives because government elitists who think they are smarter than everyone else but themselves are making all of our decisions for us in the belief that we are too stupid to make them for ourselves. The fact that their policies are attempting to right "supposed" wrongs that cannot be fixed in the real world, this will not turn out well except for them. The rest of us will just get screwed, blued and tattooed and that we submit is exactly what is happening.
Redistributing the Wealth
The American Gestapo
The old saying is that if it walks like a duck and quacks like a duck then it is a duck. But the opposite is also true. If you see a duck, you expect it to behave like a duck in that it will waddle and quack like a duck does. If a gestapo should set up shop in America, we would recognize it by what gestapos do, namely shout down anyone who disagrees with their point of view. Of course, they could not get away with secret police methods right out in the open in America. They could not just kill such dissenters or throw them in jail without filing charges, at least not at first anyway. But they could get away with suppressing dissent through the time tested method of intimidation. They let everyone opposing the gestapo know what will happen to them if they refuse to agree by making an example of anyone who questions what the gestapo has decided is best for everyone.
If you ever had any doubt that we have a budding gestapo in our midst, the case of Joe Wurzelbacher, known popularly as Joe the Plumber, should have removed that doubt. So how is that Joe got squashed like a bug? Did he organize some protest movement? Did he attend a McCain-Palin rally? No, it turns out that Joe was minding his own business, playing football with his son in his own front yard. That was when he had the misfortune to be approached by Senator Obama, who while he is the one who has been chosen for us by our supposed masters, he has not been anointed quite yet. Poor Joe had the temerity to question the four year economic plan of Senator Obama. He wanted to know why Senator Obama planned to raise taxes on small business owners so that they would have no incentive to expand their businesses and hire more employees. Joe did not put it exactly that way, but that was the gist of the question.
That was when the "chosen one" made a slip of the tongue and explained that it would be better for everyone if the wealth was spread around more evenly. Joe may not have known that this is a socialist idea, but he knew a bad idea when he heard it and he said so. Other people, who heard this answer were quick to point out that this idea is just plain out and out socialism. Now socialism has a negative connotation in America if for no other reason than Communists invariably call their countries socialist republics. The most powerful of these countries, the USSR, as Russia was formerly called, crashed and burned because socialism is an inherently unworkable system. That is because there is no reward for incentive and hence growth is strangled. To adopt a policy of increasing taxes on business owners and investors when there is a recession in progress is a disaster. Since Senator Obama is also proposing to do away with free trade agreements under the guise of protecting American jobs, combining increased taxes with increased tariffs on imported goods is a sure fire way to turn a recession into a depression.
This sudden unmasking of the true motives of the "chosen one" was a disaster. Up to that point, all those who supported Senator McCain had been dismissed as a bunch of losers who were just plain stupid and racists to boot. The message had been sent loud and clear to all those disagreeing with the "chosen one" that they would be called racists because Senator Obama happens to have a skin color different from the majority of the people in America. It was hard to characterize a question on tax policy as racist so another time honored tactic was called for. The only solution was to discredit Joe and make him the object of derision so as to cover up the answer Senator Obama had inadvertently given. Thus the gestapo immediately began digging into Joe's background. What was desperately needed was all the dirt that they could find.
They were delighted when they found some. It turns out that Joe is behind on his taxes and that he could not really be a plumber because he is not licensed as one. Better yet was the possibility that he might be related to a relative of a disgraced banker from the savings and loan debacle, Charles H. Keating, Jr.. Best of all, John McCain, the leader of the opposition to the "chosen one", had been linked to that same banker. Now Joe has been thrown to the wolves and the American people have been shown what happens to anyone who dares question Senator Obama and refuses to rubber stamp his being officially anointed as our leader. The gestapo can now rest easy knowing that their "chosen one" is once again assured of becoming the leader.
Any argument that John McCain makes in favor of Joe and the question he asked is being ridiculed by pointing out what a fraud poor Joe is. Lost in all of this is that it is not a matter of who asked the question, but rather the answer that was important. If a felon just released from prison had asked the question, what difference would that make? It was the answer that gave away the deep dark secret. Of course, the point of all of this was to make the story all about the questioner so as to distract attention from the answer given. One only has to look at the blogs to see how well the gestapo's fellow travelers have implemented this strategy. It is now all about Joe, and no longer about socialism.
How is it that one of the guardians protecting our freedoms and democracy has been subverted and turned into a gestapo? That is a very good question. Once upon a time, the mainstream news media reported the news. Slowly they turned into an organ for propaganda instead of news. The people who actually own the media in America would be the very last people to allow their companies to be taken over by the government as the Communists have always done in their countries. Somehow they do not have a problem with hiring people who are perfectly willing to be propagandists for a politician clearly opposed to their owner's best interests. No doubt because these news media are owned by huge conglomerates, they only worry about profits and not about what their employees are up to. Now that the mainstream media has moved on to becoming the thought police and enforcers of lock step conformity to the leader chosen for us, one might think that alarm bells would be ringing in these huge conglomerates, but apparently not.
How has this come to pass? That is easily explained because the first American institutions that were subverted into becoming gestapos were the colleges and universities. In the now distant past, these institutions were bastions of free inquiry and forums for dissent as a necessary part of learning to think for one's self. They are now nothing but dispensers of political correctness and the administrators and professors are the ones who decide what is correct and what is not. You need a degree in journalism these days to get a job in the mainstream media. If you resist the brainwashing in journalism school, your grade point average goes into the toilet. A student wanting a well paying career in journalism soon learns to parrot the current group think according to their journalism professors. Since everyone in their class who dares question that thinking is ridiculed and dumped on, it is not too surprising that these so-called journalists soon become nothing but foot soldiers in the war against politically incorrect thinking. They become part of the movement to suppress all thought that does not measure up to what our self appointed elites consider to be the only possible truth.
The mainstream media behaves just like a gestapo would at the very beginning of when a country turns away from democracy. "By their fruits, ye shall know them." The mainstream media not only stifles dissent by labeling any protesters as racists, but also by viciously turning on those who dare disagree with them. Once this was limited to just the Sarah Palin's of this country. The media's defense is that these people are politicians so it is always open season on them. How then can they explain what they did to an ordinary American working person just like most of the rest of us? The message is loud and clear that you oppose the "chosen one" at great risk to yourself. It is equally clear that the mainstream media has turned into a gestapo in all but name.
That leaves the rest of us with only one remaining option. So far, the ballot is still secret so there is one last place where we can make our dissent known without fear of retribution. Of course Senator Obama is already supporting doing away with the secret ballot in elections to determine if workers will be represented by a union. That will allow union organizers to thoroughly intimidate the workers into joining the union or else. How soon will that be extended to all elections? How many of us are willing to exercise this last option before it is too late? It would appear that we are about to find out.
Income Redistribution Monopoly
We can all agree that there is rich people and poor people (and a bunch in between).
Let's assume we take more taxes from the rich and give that money to the poor to buy stuff from the companies of the rich. Wouldn't it be a lot easier to just give poor people these products for free? Save time by leaving out the monopoly game and transfer paper from one person to the next.
Well one might say - no that would not be fair, because after all we live in a free society and people can choose what they would want to buy!
Ok so I'm free to buy whatever I want, but I'm not free to earn however much I want.
No you are free to earn however much you want - but you have to give part of it away.
That's patriotic, you know.
Ok so it's patriotic to accept the will of a government that is fundamentally different to the original idea of America, but it is not patriotic anymore to push for a society that is free and self-reliant.
Yes it is what is called being "neighborly".
But my neighbor doesn't get the money - isn't the government getting the money and decides on who to give this money to? Wouldn't it be better if I want to give some money to my neighbor just to give it to him?
Of course not because the government is much more objective in distributing the money "fairly".
Ok but in order for me as an average rich person to still make money I will have to transfer my company outside of the US, lay some people off, or have to increase the prices for my products and services.
I will probably not be able to give any raises to my workers or offer incentives for customers. That means their income will not grow, but the prices will.
And if I can't make it - I will go bankrupt. I guess that's okay, because after all I'm a rich person ( or least I was)
But if go bankrupt, more people will have no job, less companies will offer services, less competition will bring even higher prices.
So we started with giving money from the rich to the poor, but inflated the value of money along the way, so the poor will still be poor.
So there will be still poor people and rich people.
The only difference to now is:
There will be more poor people and less rich people! (and less in between)
I guess Income Redistribution is really the Change we Need!
The Alien Patriot
