Income, Inequality, Insanity

By Paul Jacob

Sunday, December 15, 2013

With it now declared to be an act of racism to dare refer to the federal government’s dramatically increased and disastrous role in our healthcare as “Obamacare” — even though President Barack Obama, himself, once did so proudly, before its onerous provisions were triggered and began to explode in the faces of the American people — let’s just note that the, ahem, Affordable Care Act is . . . not.

So, unsurprisingly, President Obama desperately moves on to greener pastures: Class envy and warfare. Income inequality.

As if anyone in their right mind would choose to live in a society wherein people earned exactly equal incomes regardless of their workload or their success in satisfying customers or the importance of their labor.

Nonetheless, “An issue Democrats can win on” was how The Washington Post headlined Eugene Robinson’s column urging President Barack Obama to “demand that Congress raise the minimum wage — and not by a little but by a lot“ to fight “rising inequality and declining economic mobility.”

Progressives seem to think they can create wealth by fiat, by decree, by law. They say to businesses, “Thou shalt pay people at the entry rung on the economic ladder more money. And with their increased incomes (those not let go) the workers shall increase demand so much that our economy will hum and roar and create more jobs and more and better and better.”

Economists may disagree as to the wisdom or folly of raising the minimum wage — the calculation being: how many people can we hurt before someone notices? But any person with even a smidgen of common sense knows that wealth isn’t created because politicians command it.

In the president’s much ballyhooed speech that triggered Robinson’s cheerleading, Obama warned of “a dangerous and growing inequality and lack of upward mobility that has jeopardized middle-class America’s basic bargain — that if you work hard, you have a chance to get ahead.”

“Ahead”? Ahead of whom? My goodness, that doesn’t sound like equality at all.

The point shouldn’t be to get ahead of the Joneses. Or even to keep up with them. That’s not what the American Dream, or “America’s basic bargain,” is about.

The American Dream is to stand on your own two feet, to make your own way in this world on your own hard work and smarts and guts and perseverance. In short, to be independent.

Sort of like an individual Declaration of Independence.

To the degree we have a government that protects our rights to engage in commerce freely and fairly, each individual does have “a chance to get ahead,” to earn a living through hard work. The problem is that Mr. Obama favors a government that not only does everything for us, without some of us having to work hard (or at all), but that also stands in the way of people — especially poor folks — entering the marketplace and expressing their entrepreneurship.

Regulations obstruct us — but obstruct the poor even more. Mandates and minimums (such as higher minimum wages) require too much, prohibiting the achievable. Taxes and licenses and all other weapons of modern bureaucratic governance are going strong, too strong, even as the economy falters. The problem with recent times is not that we’ve had too much freedom in markets. It’s that we haven’t had laissez-faire at all. (To pretend, either from the left or the right, that because Ronald Reagan said he liked free markets, and because Bill Clinton said “the era of Big Government is over,” that we’ve had limited government since is absurd. Counterfactual. A fantasy.)

And over and over we hear of all the benefits we can reap if only the government taxes the rich more. This is the envy part. The malice. It is there to distract our attention away from what we can do to better ourselves.

It also tempts us to the worst elements of socialism — the mass expropriation that historically has even led to mass murder (“liquidate kulaks!”; “eat the rich!”; “kill the Jews!”) — and derails the kleptocracy from the tricky calculation of thieves’ canny wisdom: you don’t want to run out of victims. But a robust “social democratic” state can indeed run out of such folks. At least, run out of enough rich victims to satisfy the demands of a growing legion of moochers.

And, of course, the anti-capitalism of this all forgets where capital is (those who own it and invest it), and that taking it and turning it all into consumption can kill the “material productive forces” upon which we all rely. Pure socialism doesn’t work for the same reason pure thievery doesn’t work. Taking capital from the capitalists and squandering it on consumer items liquidates the capital and, in the end, makes us all the poorer for it. If not dead.

President Obama wants to assure us that he’s not a pure socialist. I sure hope so. But he’s pure something, and the something he and his followers are for is not as good as freedom and responsibility.

Stop feeding envy. Or covetous vice. We’ve a lot to gain: social peace, personal pride, greater wealth, and, yes, freedom.