When I heard BO talking to Joe The Plumber, saying that when we spread the wealth around, everyone benefits, I agreed with his words. Any time you help to produce or deliver products or services, you are “spreading the wealth around”. Anytime you trade products or service with another person, both parties in the transaction are “spreading the wealth around”. Any time you buy stock in a company, you help finance that company and you’re spreading the wealth around. Any time you put money in a savings plan, you’re helping to finance others, and you’re spreading the wealth around. If you hire someone, you’re spreading the wealth around. If you go to work for someone else, you’re spreading the wealth around. Even if you’re a miser and you buy gold to bury in your back yard, you’re supporting the gold mining and processing industry and all the people they employ throughout the supply chain, and you’re spreading the wealth around.
But we all know that Obama wasn’t talking about peaceable, voluntary exchange of goods and services between free citizens. He was talking about spreading the wealth around using force and the threat of force. To put it another way, Obama, and all who think similarly, does not trust you to produce they way HE thinks you should produce, so he wants to tell you how to do it. He doesn’t trust you to make your own purchasing and financing decisions, so he’s going to do more of that for you.
Obama and socialists everywhere are jealous of your abilities to produce and they’re jealous of the freedom you’ve had in spreading your wealth around. Make no mistake about it– that jealousy leads to anger and hatred.
We can look at the political struggle in this country in this way; Either you favor spreading the wealth around through peaceable, voluntary exchange, or you favor spreading the wealth around through the use of force and the threat of force.
Lest you be tempted to demand a look at history to find which method of spreading the wealth has a better record of success, I would warn you that the two sides (socialists and capitalists) have incompatible measures of “success”. You may think that success means more people living at higher standards, with more choices in life, more mobility, a better life span and so on. You’d be wrong if you think socialists will see that as a desirable outcome.
Update; Of course there is a whole lot more to participation in a free market beside “spreading” wealth. In fact you are creating wealth– something the socialists have never been able to comprehend. In the mind of a socialist, to become rich is to deprive someone else. In fact, and as with virtually all socialist beliefs, the opposite is true. In the process of building your own wealth in a capitalist market, and in the process of using it in a capitalist market, you are invariably benefiting others.
Excellent summation.
Lyle:
Gee, you mean that economics isn’t a zero-sum game? If I win, doesn’t somebody have to loose?
The very concept of “win-win” exchanges of value-for-higher-value seems to escape the collectivists. In their universe, someone is always exploiting, and someone else is always exploited.
And for the best, simple destruction of the concept of the “labor theory of value”, take another look at Heinlein’s simple “kitchen” explanation in “Starship Troopers”.
“In their universe, someone is always exploiting…”
When it comes down to brass tacks, isn’t that really the mind of a child? If you’ve ever seen young siblings fighting at the dinner table over who got the bigger piece of the pie, have you not seen the minds of socialists? (no regard for where the pie came from, who supplied the materials, why they did so, who made the pie and why they did so, who sold the pie and why they did so, who purchased the pie, why they did so, how the purchaser was able to afford the pie, who might have ownership rights to the pie and therefore the authority to dispense it at will, and why such ownership rights might exist, etc.. It’s absolutely basic in its understanding– just the sight of the pie, desiring it, seeing only one, finite pie at this moment frozen in time, seeing that there is competition for the pie, and trying any and all means possible of getting the maximum share of the pie, including all manner of subterfuge and eventually violence if left unchecked, without regard for anything else)
Spoiled, undisciplined, ignorant, selfish, spitefiul, poorly-raised children who see appeal to authority figures as the only means of “fair” acquisition and simply cannot imagine anything else. It’d be funny but for the fact that they’re so dangerous.