Posted on 03/27/2012 6:48:34 AM PDT by SeekAndFind
In his “Economic Scene” column in the New York Times last week, Eduardo Porter wrote, “The United States does less than other rich countries to transfer income from the affluent to the less fortunate.”
Think about that sentence for a moment. It ends oddly. Logic dictates that it should have said, “transfer income from the affluent to the less affluent,” not the less fortunate.
But for Mr. Porter, as for the Left generally, those who are not affluent are not merely “less affluent,” they are “less fortunate.”
Why is this? Why is the leftist division almost always between the “affluent” and the “less fortunate” or between the “more fortunate” and the “less fortunate?”
To understand the Left, one must understand that in its view the greatest evil is material inequality. The Left is more troubled by economic inequality than by evil as humanity has generally understood the term. The leftist divides the world not between good and evil but between rich and poor.
Because inequality is the chief moral concern of the Left, the words “less affluent,” or even “poorer,” do not meet the Left’s moral needs. It needs to believe, and to have others believe, that what separates economic classes is not merely how much material wealth members of each class have. Rather it is the amount of good and bad luck — “fortune,” as the Left puts it — that each class has.
This is how the Left justifies high taxes. Isn’t it only fair and moral that as much money as possible be taken from the lucky and given to the unlucky? After all, the affluent didn’t achieve affluence through harder work, but through greater luck.
To acknowledge that most of America’s affluent (meaning those who earn over $200,000) have attained their affluence through hard work is to undermine the fairness issue at the core of the Left’s understanding of economic inequality and justification for confiscatory taxes.
For the Left, affluence is won, not earned. Indeed, English is one of the few languages that even has or uses the word “earn,” in regard to income. In Romance languages such as French the verb meaning to earn is “gagner,” which means “to win.” In terms of language, in America, people earn their wealth while in most of Europe and Latin America, people win it.
The fact is that, except for those very few whose wealth is overwhelmingly or entirely inherited, the more affluent have usually worked harder than the less affluent. While, of course, there are hard-working poor people just as there are Wall Street CEOs who do not deserve their “golden parachutes,” in America, differences in income exist largely because of the values and the hard work of those who make more money.
In this regard, the Washington Post reported the findings of Harvard professor Daniel Kahneman, winner of the 2002 Nobel Prize in economics:
People who make less than $20,000 a year . . . told Kahneman and his colleagues that they spend more than a third of their time in passive leisure — watching television, for example. Those making more than $100,000 spent less than one-fifth of their time in this way — putting their legs up and relaxing. Rich people spent much more time commuting and engaging in activities that were required as opposed to optional.
But for the Left, it’s all about “fortune.”
Every poll about the Left, the Right, and happiness reveals that the farther left one goes, the less happy the person is likely to be. This is one of the reasons: If you really believe that people wealthier than you are just luckier than you, how can you not be angry, resentful, and unhappy?
On the other hand, there are tens of millions of conservatives who make much less money than others — yet feed their families, own a house and a car, have decent children, derive great meaning from their religion, and live in the freest country in the world — who never call themselves “less fortunate.” They call themselves fortunate.
— Dennis Prager is a nationally syndicated radio-talk-show host and columnist
The leaders of the Democrat party don’t believe these phrases. They are just weasel words designed to play upon the emotions of the unthinking. It is a mistake to think that the leaders of the Democrat party are just misguided idealogues. They are thieves out to loot the public treasury. They don’t need convincing with logic.....they need time in jail.
“Less fortunate” is a phrase intentionally defined to de-legitimize others’ earned wealth,
and therefore justify confiscating it.
Just another NYT attempts to manipulate their little world. In truth...unlike ANY other nation in the world...the “poor” in the US are principally poor in choices...not in material goods.
This is shown by the lottery winners - they’re poor again within years, if not months.
You could take every penny away from a wealthy person and give it to a “poor” person,
and in 5 years, the poor person would be poor again, and the formerly wealthy person would again, through work and perseverance, be accumulating wealth.
The American Experiment based on the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence changed that. All citizens are equal under the law, and their rights are guaranteed--not granted!--by the government. These rights include liberty and the pursuit of happiness.
Some people exercize their right by pursuing wealth. Some prefer to pursue other things.
In the United States, the wealthy tend to be hard working achievers who have made themselves wealthy. The poor tend to be people who have made bad choices or who have not worked hard and achieved.
In the Middle Ages, it made sense to transfer wealth and privileges from the rich to the poor.
In the United States it does not. It means taking wealth from those who have earned it and giving it to those who have not.
That does, indeed, describe Marxist so-called "thinking" on the topic of wealth, but it's largely irrelevant. Yes, that's what Marxists talk about, but their only interest is power. They want the power to decide who gets wealth and who doesn't. They want the power to decide who's included among the elite and who's consigned to the workers and peasants. They want the power to decide every least little thing in everyone's life. Ultimately, they want the power to decide who gets to live and who doesn't.
Ayn Rand once made the observation that a poor person who wants to win the lottery is less interested in the money than he is in being able to appear successful. That is, to pretend that he had been ambitious and hard-working enough to have earned it.
I've always tended to agree.
“less fortunate” is what Ayn Rand would term an “anti-concept,” “an unnecessary and rationally unusable term designed to replace and obliterate some legitimate concept. The use of anti-concepts gives the listeners a sense of ‘approximate’ understanding.”
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