Say it Loud, Say it Proud

Arthur C. Brooks, president of the American Enterprise Institute, asserts in today's Wall Street Journal, "Advocates of free enterprise must learn from the growing grass-roots protests [tea parties], and make the moral case for freedom and entrepreneurship." In other words, conservatives must stop being defensive, and take the offensive. Profiting from one's useful ideas or creations is indeed moral, and it is legitimate for people to trade their labor to such a person for compensation. What is not moral is for people who have voluntarily made this exchange and benefitted from it to believe that they have some entitlement to the profits from what the entrepreneur has put at risk. And this immoral entitlement mentality is at the bottom of Obama-ism, which is synonymous with socialism, or, if you like, communism. As the great Dr. Walter E. Williams repeatedly points out, redistribution of wealth is "legalized theft." It is not moral, it is not compassionate, it is not productive. Socialism is a discredited, failed, misleading philosophy based on people's weakest impulses--not their strengths--and on false promises. Capitalism, on the other hand, is the most effective means ever harnessed for creating and spreading prosperity. Capitalism works; socialism only creates misery and unearned comforts for the elitists who peddle it. (Think Al Gore.) This is what we need to say, constantly, loudly and proudly.

Ask your liberal friends how socialism has worked out in the Soviet Union, Cuba and North Korea. Would they like to live in those places? When they bring up Western Europe, remind them that those nations have had the luxury of lavish social benefits because we, the evil United States of America, have protected their rear ends from all threats and attacks since World War II, which we ruthlessly won in a most effective way, by the way. Champion capitalism and freedom!