The futility of class warfare.

[Dan Moadus]

I try not to "cut and paste", but every now and then an article pops up that I think is important enough to deserve a minute or two of your time. I believe this is one of those.

Published Thursday in the Time Herald, February 09, 2012

Futility of class warfare

For a country that is built on private property, risk-taking entrepreneurship and respect for success, America sure produces a lot of envious people these days. Our expensive welfare state is fueled by the destructive notion that "greed" is when you want to keep your own money but "compassion" is when you want to take somebody else's.

We have a president, for example, who shamelessly appeals to the worst in us, namely, the desire to pull ourselves up by dragging others down. We're supposed to look with disdain upon those who have more and trust spendthrifts like him to seize our fair share of it, which really translates to whatever he wants to swipe and squander on his friends like Solyndra. No wonder all he can do is propose to divide up a shrinking pie -- he's never in his life shown that he knows how to bake one himself. But he's just the latest in a long string of demagogues and snake-oil salesmen.

A few years ago in America magazine, Jeffrey R. Gates bemoaned the fact that too many Americans have too little wealth. The solution, he said, was for the government to devise a grand plan, a national ownership strategy that will spread the people's wealth around according to some centrally-planned formula.

Imagine that. The same government that can't manage its own fiscal affairs, that squanders billions of other people's dollars in subsidies for corporations and foreign regimes, that wasted trillions in a counterproductive war on poverty, that blew another couple trillion on silly "stimulus" schemes to fix a financial crisis it largely caused, should preside over "a national ownership strategy" for the American people. No thanks. We're not idiots (I hope).

It reminds me of something the philosopher Henry David Thoreau once said: "If I knew for certain that a man was coming to my home to do me good, I would run for my life."

Government deficits drain off more than a trillion dollars of productive capital each year. Taxes, regulations and bureaucratic red tape keep many aspiring entrepreneurs from getting a start and employing others who need work. Welfare policies pay millions to stay in poverty. The government education monopoly spends a fortune and all too often guarantees that children are ill-prepared for a productive future. I don't know about you, but our federal government does not inspire any confidence in me that suggests it knows who ought to own what.

For starters, our "leaders" in the federal government have a knack for refusing to take responsibility for their own handiwork.

They propose A, and when it fails, they propose B to deal with the problems that A created. B, of course, is yet another crackpot scheme, and when it flops, they propose intervention C, and on and on. Enough already.

A society can either create wealth or plunder and redistribute it.

Which side are you on?