It strikes me that one has to be willfully dishonest - driven, I can only conclude, by a profound antipathy toward America - to argue that this country needs to embark on a government-enforced policy of wealth distribution.
Why dishonest? Because few things in this world are more apparent to the honest observer than that the US has proven to be the most effective wealth-redistribution system ever devised by the mind of man. No where at no time on the planet have more goods and services been spread more effectively across a broader swath of the population than in the US. It's just a fact. And it's no accident. The country's prosperity is a direct result of the limitations placed on government by the very constitution our soon-to-be president publicly disdains.
Let's not be blind or dishonest ourselves: there is still human suffering in this great and still-free country. When we can do something to genuinely assuage that suffering, we must try to do so. Where government policy traps people in poverty, we must fight to change that policy. Where government policy, union corruption, and political cynicism combine to keep people trapped in poverty, we need to fight for justice for the poor. But let's be clear: the poison policies and practices I'm talking about here are the very policies, the very medicine, the socialist doctors want to prescribe on a wider and wider scale. Only more poverty and despair will follow.
And let us also be honest and mature enough to understand that much of the poverty and despair that occur in our communities is the result of bad, selfish, self-indulgent, self-destructive choices. The result, in other words, not of a failed society but of human failings, character flaws. The problems of endemic poverty and despair will not be solved by a redistributionist government. Our trillion-dollar investment in our inner cities over the past two generations is testament to that.
Again, the US is the greatest distributor of wealth in the history of the world. If the millions of people who clamber for our shores can see this so clearly, why cannot our socialist so-to-be overseers? And again, one can only conclude they view this nation through a lens of utter animosity and desire at a deep level to see us undone, unmade, unraveled.
6 comments:
One has to wonder if people like Obama really believe in the redistribution philosophy they espouse--I mean really believe it, believe it will actually elevate people's lives and will be generally good for the counrty. Or do they see it as a mere political ploy, effective for garnering support and with the ultimate objective of gaining and holding onto power as long as posible. For what purpose? For no other purpose than experiencing the self-aggrandizing, self-inflating euphoria of wielding power.
I don't know if they really believe it; that's a good question, Dave. I think they are died-in-the-wool leftists, who reflexively and bitterly hate whoever they perceive to be "the man." They can get back at the man by rousing the "disenfranchised," the "disenchanted," who typically are ignorant or uninformed, and dependent on government. These people will eagerly flock to somebody like Obama.
The leftists also take advantage of the phony concept of "equality." We're born unequal, and we stay that way the rest of our lives. The only way you can even try to "equalize" people is to kill them or throw them into prison.
I think they do believe, Dave. These people are true believers. Their belief isn't based on logic, though. It's based on their resentments, their frustrations, their hatreds, and their fantasies. Because at the very core of leftism - especially hard leftism of the socialist/Marxist stripe - at the core of it there is a bright little adolescent who is locked perpetually at the age of about 14.
Don't you remember how you were at that age? You looked around and thought: If only all those rich people would just share what they have with the poor, things would be better for everyone. And if we'd just sit down with the meanies who give us wedgies, we could all get along. There'd be no war, no poverty, no despair. To a 14 year old, it all makes so much sense. So much sense. That's one reason so many kids - not all, but a lot - despise the adult world. Adults, they're convinced, could make things better very easily and yet they let the world go on in its flawed way.
Most people, as they grow up, understand that the reasons for poverty, the reasons for war, for despair, for anguish, reside in individual human hearts. As the Michael Caine character, Alfred Pennyworth, says in The Dark Knight, "Some men aren't looking for anything logical like money. They can't be bought, bullied, reasoned or negotiated with. Some men just want to watch the world burn."
Exactly. And as we mature we mostly come to understand that. In other words, there is evil in the world that lives beyond the ability of a government program to address. But adolescents mostly don't recognize evil. They are often sympathetic to it or even seduced by it. They are not, as they should be, afraid of it. They haven't yet matured enough to see the dark places where men's hearts can dwell.
Consider the ultimate adolescent policy statement, uttered by Bobby Kennedy: "Some men see things as they are and ask why. I dream things that never were and ask why not." You see, an adult understands that you need to understand "why" things are as they are, before you can accomplish anything. The adolescent just "dreams" of how things should be.
So I see little Barry Soetoro, abandoned by his father, lying is his bed at night, dreaming away, fantasizing about how things will be when he rules the world. Dads won't abandon their kids, Moms won't bring strange men into the circle of the family, everybody will have everything they need, and on and on and on. The dreams spin round and round, the fantasies become baroque, almost rococo. There is no connection to life as it is lived and experienced by flesh and blood human beings. The magical world becomes real.
So yes, they believe.
Great to see your picture and profile, Bill. My hockey injury has given me the opportunity to hack away on the golf course a little bit, myself.
Like so many millions (billions?) in the past, these dreamers will be disappointed.
I should put "golf" in quotes. Perhaps you understand.
You bet I do. You should've seen me Saturday. You couldn't really call it golf.
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