Posted on 09/23/2010 5:35:58 AM PDT by Kaslin
Traditional peasant societies believe in only a limited good. The more your neighbor earns, the less someone else gets. Profits are seen as a sort of theft. They must be either hidden or redistributed. Envy rather than admiration of success reigns.
In contrast, Western civilization began with a very different ancient Greek idea of an autonomous citizen, not an indentured serf or subsistence peasant. The small, independent landowner -- if left to his own talents and if his success was protected by, and from, government -- would create new sources of wealth for everyone. The resulting greater bounty for the poor soon trumped their old jealousy of the better off.
Citizens of ancient Greece and Italy soon proved more prosperous and free than either the tribal folk to the north and west, or the imperial subjects to the south and east. The success of later Western civilization in general, and America in particular, is testament to this legacy of the freedom of the individual in the widest political and economic sense
We seem to be forgetting that lately -- though Mao Zedong's redistributive failures in China, or present-day bankrupt Greece, should warn us about what happens when government tries to enforce an equality of result rather than of opportunity.
Even after the failure of statism at the end of the Cold War, the disasters of socialism in Venezuela and Cuba, and the recent financial meltdowns in the European Union, for some reason America is returning to a peasant mentality of a limited good that redistributes wealth rather than creates it. Candidate Obama's "spread the wealth" slip to Joe the Plumber simply was upgraded to President Obama's "I do think at a certain point you've made enough money."
The more his administration castigates insurers, businesses and doctors; raises taxes on the upper income brackets; and creates more regulations, the more those who create wealth are sitting out, neither hiring nor lending. The result is that traditional self-interested profit-makers are locking up trillions of dollars in unspent cash rather than using it to take risks and either lose money due to new red tape or see much of their profit largely confiscated through higher taxes.
No wonder that in such a climate of fear and suspicion, unemployment remains near 10 percent. Deficits chronically exceed $1 trillion per annum. And now the poverty rate has hit a historic high. We are all getting poorer in hopes that a few don't get richer.
The public is seldom told that 1 percent of taxpayers already pay 40 percent of the income taxes collected, while 40 percent of income earners are exempt from federal income tax -- or that present entitlements like Medicare and Social Security are financially unsustainable. Instead, they hear more often that those who managed to scheme to make above $250,000 per year have obligations to the rest of us to give back about 60 percent of what they earn in higher health care and income taxes -- together with payroll and rising state income taxes, and along with increased capital gains and inheritance taxes.
That limited-good mind-set expects that businesses will agree that they now make enough money and so have no need to pursue any more profits at the expense of others. Therefore, they will gladly still hire the unemployed and buy new equipment -- as they pay higher health care or income taxes to a government that knows far better how to redistribute their income to the more needy or deserving.
This peasant approach to commerce also assumes that businesses either cannot understand administration signals or can do nothing about them. So who cares that in the Chrysler bankruptcy settlement, quite arbitrarily the government put the unions in front of the legally entitled lenders?
Health insurers should not mind that Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius just warned them to keep their profits down and their mouths shut -- or face exclusion from health care markets.
I suppose that no corporation should worry that the government arbitrarily announced -- without benefit a law or court ruling -- that it wanted BP to put up $20 billion in cleanup costs for the Gulf spill.
What optimistic Americans used to call a rising tide that lifts all boats is now once again derided as trickle-down economics. In other words, a newly peasant-minded America is willing to become collectively poorer so that some will not become wealthier.
The present economy suggests that it is surely getting its wish.
Obama plan: Trickle-up poverty.
Zero sum mentality of the stupid ‘Progressives’.
Obama works the same way. What the bozo in Washington fails to get is that, even if your 10% of the pie never changes, increasing the size of the pie means more for everyone. This A-Rising-Tide-Lifts-All-Boats fact totally escapes him. Instead, he promote class warfare where “we must take from the fat cats” and give it to those who have less.
Really? Why? Those fat cats are the one who take risks, invest, create jobs, support charities, etc. and allow other people to earn a fair income. We need those fat cats. By contrast, what have the poor done for you lately? Sorry, but the top 10% of wage earners already pay 60% of the tax bill and the lower 40% only pay 3%. Bozo's rhetoric is totally off the mark and shows how economically ignorant he really is.
“one limited pie”
pure bs
plenty for everyone
that is how God made the world
It is impossible to introduce into society a greater change and a greater evil than this: the conversion of the law into an instrument of plunder. Frederic Bastiat 1801-1850
Yes. Under the control of the der Fuhrer 0bama's "intelligensia" and czars in Washington.
Note: It won't be pretty when the peasants decide they've had enough!
Glenn Beck had the pie lecture a week ago. He showed how progressives believe there is one pie and hou you have to divvy up the slices. Then he showed the capitalist model - make more pies. It was very compelling.
Traditional peasant societies believe in only a limited good. The more your neighbor earns, the less someone else gets. Profits are seen as a sort of theft. They must be either hidden or redistributed. Envy rather than admiration of success reigns.
Hogwash.
Traditional peasant societies pooled their meager resources purely as a matter of group survival.
"The economy" was so primitive, individuals would starve if they tried to be economically independent of the clan/tribe/village to which they belonged.
Globalism is being driven by what used to be our great American Corporations. It wasn't always policy to sacrifice all of our proud nationalism to the corporate bottom line...Si Senor? But that ok as long as we tell ourselves that we actually have free trade...
If we want America to become/remain a world-class producer of anything: e.g. cars, software, fruit, whatever, then America must reduce its internal barriers to wealth production. It must compete.
But that's not easy. Competing is hard. It's far easier politically to forget about wealth-production, and to impose tariffs and subsidies.
Tariffs and subsidies practically force Americans to buy expensive crud from feather-bedded domestic suppliers rather than cheap stuff that works from Asia. The result is that everybody gets poorer - but at least no voters had to compete in the real world.
The solution to outsourcing/foreign imports is either to compete, or to recognize that you can't compete and so move into another field of endeavor.
But using governmental fiat and protectionism to stop outsourcing/foreign imports is not a solution: it is sheer wealth-destruction: the transformation of American industry into a welfare state. It is disastrous.
Hope this was helpful.
“At every university I taught at, the College of Business faculty earned more than the Liberal Arts College.”
Boy, you’re spot on with that one - and those characters in the humanities would spend half their time p*ssing and moaning about it. No matter how much you’d tell them that sociology profs are a dime a dozen (and overpriced at that), while somebody in accounting could always make twice their academic salary doing a real job, the significance of that reality never seemed to register.
The current crop of elitists see themselves as the Neo-Nobility, who should have all rights and privileges and control over all resources,
whilst the peasants, us, live and die at their whim.
Union employees demanding $16 an hour to do simple inventory, with mandated breaks every 90 minutes, and a nasty tendency to claim back injuries whenever they were asked to pick up something over 15 lbs might have had something to do with that. And yes, I am speaking from experience.
I would advise those elitists to glance over their notes concerning The French Revolution. Peasants eventually strike back.
I haven’t had any takers on what to call our
“American Bastille Day”...
Because if the ballot box and the Tea Party fails to correct this, that’s what it will come down to.
bump
40 days until we call down the electoral thunder
People either believe that the economic system is a zero sum game or they believe that a growing economy benefits everyone.
I have often referred to Microsoft as an evil empire. But it is impossible for a corporation or and entrepreneur to capture all of the wealth created by their productivity. Bill Gates got wealthy. But he was only able to get a small portion of the value he created. The rest went to the government, his employees, his shareholders, his customers and the rest of us who benefited from the increased productivity of his customers.
The RATs, and regrettably some of the Republican “elite” wish to reduce our status to that of peasantry. They are succeeding.
That may be true in circumstances where there is no “capital” creation — pure subsistence. In the most basic agricultural sense, capital is seed. The more seed you sow, the bigger your harvest and the more available food there is.
If, instead of being allowed to sow your seed, it is taken from you and given to people to make bread, sooner or later everybody starves.
A man who has been dead for 160 years has already refuted categorically every argument progressives can make.
Long live Bastiat!
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