A WEALTH OF IGNORANCE

Since the beginning of the emperor’s administration he has made it clear that he is determined to rip this country to social shreds with his daily war of words condemning the wealthy in this country. His quote, “I do think at some point you’ve made enough money” is socialist lunacy.

And yet for all the moaning and sniveling —  and drum beating in Zuccotti park- almost everything that people presume about income inequality and wealth in America is wrong. It is painfully obvious that we have a serious problem with a significant percentage of the population who has no concept of the nature of wealth and how in many instances this wealth is created. Class warfare it seems thrives greatly on this ignorance about the sources of income. I can't help but believe there are those who think there is a big pile of money somewhere that is supposed to be shared equally among Americans and the rich are taking an unfiar share of it. I believe this view point stems from the misguided notion that the economy is a pie of fixed size. If one person gets a bigger portion of the pie, others then must get smaller pieces, and the role of the government is to ensure all the pieces are the same. In reality, though, the size of the pie is infinite. It is not a zero sum game. The Marxist commentators on network programming speak of millionaires and billionaires as if they are racist cretins, sexist cavemen or just plain greedy. To an alarmingly high percentage of young people, economic justice seems to mean redistributing or spreading this “pile” of money back to the rightful owners, whoever they are.

The United States of America, at least for the moment, is and has been a free society. In a free society people have the opportunity to prosper, based in large part on their personal drive, motivation, ingenuity, skill and work ethic. This country's economic expansion that we have come to expect is in large measure becuae of this inequality and would have been almost impossible without it. It would be hard to motivate most people if everyone had the same earnings, status, prestige, and other rewards. Progress and wealth must be accomplished in echelon fashion.

People with high incomes in our free society have usually demonstrated an exceptional ability to produce valuable services for their fellow citizens. Citizens that spend their own money on the products developed and produced by Microsoft, Intel, and Apple to name just a few. The people responsible for these products like Bill Gates and Steve Jobs became billionaires. They became billionaires because you and I spent our money on their product. How can anyone then justify suggesting to them they have made enough money? It is in the order of hypocrisy and selfish laziness. It is the bottom feeders of our society who will not pick themselves up, but will work feverishly to pull everyone down. A nation goes extinct in quick order when it holds the less productive up as role models and condemns the productive. The United States became the worlds most industrious, wealthy and powerful country on earth in meteoric fashion because our founding fathers took heed of the weaknesses inherent in the European system of social control and government largesse.

Thomas Edison invented the incandescent bulb and the phonograph and became wealthy. Everyone benefitted from artificial light and music. Lloyd Conover became wealthy after creating the antibiotic tetracycline and the sick benefitted from it. If they had developed the mind set of our current emperor we would have lost much of their valuable contributions to the rational that they “made enough money”. Does a free market capitalist system produce some bad apples? Absolutely. It’s not a perfect system, but it has shown itself to be the best by far. We should not throw the baby out with the bath water because of a few con artists and crooks. This country’s criminal justice system routinely lets guilty people go free in order to safeguard the rights of the innocent. We cannot demonize a tried and true economic system because of the actions of a few. Yet some of this country’s politicians seek to do just that.

Democratic Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, who is in a dead heat with Nancy Pelosi for my choice as the most addle minded politician alive, recently stated flatly on the floor of the Senate that “millionaire job creators are like Unicorns, they don’t exist.” This example of brainlessness is unexplainable. Millionaires own companies. Millionaires own property. Millionaires buy things. Millionaires invest. Millionaires create millions of jobs. I can only hope that his Fantasyland statement fails to pass muster with the voters’ basic sense of economic heuristics. Here again however is another example of the assault by members of the emperor’s administration to demonize the rich and use income inequality to impugn capitalism and free market enterprise.

Ignorant, lazy and entitled people find it comforting and somehow self affirming to view capitalism as evil and benefitting only the wealthy. This philosophy is being taught in our schools and universities by socialist professors who have zero understanding of what capitalism has done for the citizens of this county because they never left the campus and got a job. Most of what they think and know is based upon what their prior professors told them to think. Evidence disputes everything they preach. Most people in this country, including those at the “poverty level” enjoy goods and services such a radio, television, air conditioning, cable, computers, smart phones, washing machines, wash and wear clothing and cars because of the efforts of the wealthy. To label them as Wall Street is wrong and intellectually bankrupt. The emperor recently told a gym full of high school students in Kansas that the free market doesn’t work. Yes the one who is called the president of the world’s most successful free market country said that. He said the free market is not fair. This should scare you.

This begs the obvious questions for the emperor. What then is fair? Who decides how much is too much and how much is just right? How much is not enough? Who decides what is equal?? Will we eventually see a newly appointed “Fairness Czar” and a staff of 10,000 fairness bureaucrats in the White House? Will we raise taxes in order to reward the unproductive in the interest of fairness and condemn and punish the productive? What happens when the productive simply stop producing because it is not fair to them? What will we do then Mr. Emperor?

If he has his way, we may find out soon.