Posted on 11/11/2011 5:15:36 AM PST by Kaslin
Our mainstream media have discovered a new issue: inequality in America. The gap between the wealthiest 1 percent and the rest of the nation is wide and growing wider.
This, we are told, is intolerable. This is a deformation of American democracy that must be corrected through remedial government action.
What action? The rich must pay their fair share. Though the top 1 percent pay 40 percent of federal income taxes and the bottom 50 percent have, in some years, paid nothing, the rich must be made to pay more.
That's an appealing argument to many, but one that would have horrified our founding fathers. For from the beginning, America was never about equality, except of God-given and constitutional rights.
Our revolution was about liberty; it was about freedom.
The word equality was not even mentioned in the Constitution, the Bill of Rights or the Federalist Papers. The word equal does not make an appearance until the 14th Amendment's equal protection of the laws after the Civil War. The feminists' Equal Rights Amendment was abandoned and left to die in 1982 after 10 years of national debate.
When Thomas Jefferson wrote that memorable line -- All men are created equal -- he was not talking about an equality of rewards, but of rights with which men are endowed by their Creator. He was talking about an ideal.
For as he wrote John Adams in 1813, Jefferson believed nature had blessed society with a precious gift, a natural aristocracy of virtue and talents to govern it. In his autobiography, a half decade before his death in 1826, he restated this idea of the aristocracy of virtue and talent which nature has wisely provided for the direction of the interests of society.
Equality, egalite, was what the French Revolution, the Bolshevik Revolution, Mao's Revolution of 1949, Castro's Revolution of 1959 and Pol Pot's revolution of 1975 claimed to be about.
This was the Big Lie, for all those revolutions that triumphed in the name of equality were marked by mass murders of the old ruling class, the rise of a new ruling class more brutal and tyrannical, and the immiseration of the people in whose name the revolution was supposedly fought.
Invariably, Power to the people! winds up as power to the party and the dictator, who then act in the name of the people. The most egalitarian society of the 20th century was Mao's China. And that regime murdered more of its own than Lenin and Stalin managed to do.
nequality is the natural concomitant of freedom.
For just as God-given talents are unequally distributed, and the home environments of children are unequal, and individuals differ in the drive to succeed, free societies, where rewards of fame and fortune accrue to the best and brightest, must invariably become unequal societies.
In the 19th and 20th centuries, no nation achieved greater prosperity for working men and women than the United States, where all were born free, but equal only in constitutional rights.
Yet, though inequalities of income and wealth have endured through the history of this republic, each generation lived better and longer than the one that came before.
That was the America we grew up in. As long as life for the working and middle classes was improving, who cared if the rich were getting richer?
Todays new inequality is due to several factors.
One is a shift from manufacturing as the principal source of wealth to banking and finance. A second is the movement of U.S. production abroad.
This has eliminated millions of high-paying jobs while enriching the executives and shareholders of the companies that cut the cost of production by relocating overseas.
With globalization, the interests of corporations -- maximizing profit -- and the interests of the country -- maintaining economic independence -- diverged. And the politicians who depend on contributions from executives and investors stuck with the folks that paid their room, board and tuition.
Yet, behind the latest crusade against inequality lie motives other than any love of the poor. They are resentment, envy and greed for what the wealthy have, and an insatiable lust for power.
For the only way to equalize riches and rewards in a free society is to capture the power of government, so as to take from those who have, to give to those who have not.
And here is the unvarying argument of the left since Karl Marx: If you give us power, we will take from the rich who have so much and give it to you who have so little. But before we can do that, you must give us power.
This is the equality racket. As Alexis de Tocqueville wrote:
The sole condition which is required in order to succeed in centralizing the supreme power in a democratic community, is to love equality, or to get men to believe you love it. Thus the science of despotism, which was once so complex, is simplified, and reduced ... to a single principle.
When they come preaching equality, what they want is power.
All men are created equal. But that is where it ends, at creation.
If I CHOOSE to live my life as a decent, moral, law abiding citizen the man who CHOOSES to live his life has an immoral, criminal scoff law, in whatever way is NOT my equal.
Liberty has been replaced by Political Correctness. That’s Liberal Fascism. There’s a book with that as a title by Jonah Goldberg.
We already live under that Fascism masquerading as Communism masquerading as Socialism masquerading as Political Correctness masquerading as Social Justice masquerading as Democracy.
Amen....... enforced by parasitic lawyers
Theft is theft,
no matter if an individual does it,
or if 50% + 1 vote for it.
Equality ends at conception.
Marxist egalitarianism isn’t equality. It’s simply procrustean uniformity at the lowest common denominator.
Furthermore, as Russell Kirk said, the difference between liberals and conservatives is that conservatives favor liberty over equality. He recognized that in the natural world, the two are actually competing interests.
Geez, I thought the constitution demanded gov’t provide general welfare..........
Arguing that point about “general welfare” with a liberal, they just kept saying “it’s in the constitution” over and over again.
Excellent piece!
Eagerly awaiting its twin, The Race Racket. Many similarities.
The concentration of economic power in fewer hands is normal during a recession or depression. When the economy turns around it will reverse.
I realize I’m crossing over from politics to spiritual matters here, but this verse seemed appropriate after seeing the picture you posted:
“Enter ye in at the strait gate: for wide is the gate, and broad is the way, that leadeth to destruction, and many there be which go in thereat:
Because strait is the gate, and narrow is the way, which leadeth unto life, and few there be that find it.
Beware of false prophets, which come to you in sheep’s clothing, but inwardly they are ravening wolves.
Ye shall know them by their fruits. Do men gather grapes of thorns, or figs of thistles?
Even so every good tree bringeth forth good fruit; but a corrupt tree bringeth forth evil fruit.
A good tree cannot bring forth evil fruit, neither can a corrupt tree bring forth good fruit.” - Matthew 7:13-18
“Excellent piece!
Eagerly awaiting its twin, The Race Racket. Many similarities.”
This article appears to be a condensation of Chapter 6, “Equality or Freedom”, from Pat’s new book, “Suicide of a Superpower”.
Chapter 7 of same is titled “The Diversity Cult”, and you don’t have to “eagerly await” it — all you have to do is get the book.
You’d think Buchanan would bring up immigration. We are importing a new underclass and driving down domsestic wages.
“...all you have to do is get the book.”
Didn’t realize it was part of a book, thanks!
(BTW, my Road Glide is an 09. Yours?)
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