By Thomas Sowell
Tuesday, May 19, 2015
In a recent panel discussion on poverty at Georgetown
University, President Barack Obama gave another demonstration of his mastery of
rhetoric — and disregard of reality.
One of the ways of fighting poverty, he proposed, was to
“ask from society’s lottery winners” that they make a “modest investment” in
government programs to help the poor.
Since free speech is guaranteed to everyone by the First
Amendment to the Constitution, there is nothing to prevent anybody from asking
anything from anybody else. But the federal government does not just “ask” for
money. It takes the money it wants in taxes, usually before the people who have
earned it see their paychecks.
Despite pious rhetoric on the left about “asking” the
more fortunate for more money, the government does not “ask” anything. It
seizes what it wants by force. If you don’t pay up, it can take not only your
paycheck, it can seize your bank account, put a lien on your home, and/or put
you in federal prison.
So please don’t insult our intelligence by talking
piously about “asking.”
And please don’t call the government’s pouring trillions
of tax dollars down a bottomless pit “investment.” Remember the soaring words
from Barack Obama, in his early days in the White House, about “investing in
the industries of the future”? After Solyndra and other companies in which he
“invested” the taxpayers’ money went bankrupt, we haven’t heard those soaring
words so much.
Then there are those who produced the wealth that
politicians want to grab. In Obama’s rhetoric, these producers are called “society’s
lottery winners.”
Was Bill Gates a lottery winner? Or did he produce and
sell a computer operating system that allows billions of people around the
world to use computers, without knowing anything about the inner workings of
this complex technology?
Was Henry Ford a lottery winner? Or did he revolutionize
the production of automobiles, bringing the price down to the point where cars
were no longer luxuries of the rich but vehicles that millions of ordinary
people could afford, greatly expanding the scope of their lives?
Most people who want to redistribute wealth don’t want to
talk about how that wealth was produced in the first place. They just want “the
rich” to pay their undefined “fair share” of taxes. This “fair share” must
remain undefined because all it really means is “more.”
Once you have defined it — whether at 30 percent, 60
percent or 90 percent — you wouldn’t be able to come back for more.
Obama goes further than other income redistributionists.
“You didn’t build that!” he declared to those who did. Why? Because those who
created additions to the world’s wealth used government-built roads or other
government-provided services to market their products.
And who paid for those roads and other
government-provided services if not the taxpayers? Since all other taxpayers,
as well as non-taxpayers, also use government facilities, why are those who
created private wealth not to use them also, since they are taxpayers as well?
The fact that most of the rhetorical ploys used by Barack
Obama and other redistributionists will not stand up under scrutiny means very
little politically. After all, how many people who come out of our schools and
colleges today are capable of critical scrutiny?
When all else fails, redistributionists can say, as Obama
did at Georgetown University, that “cold-hearted, free-market capitalist types”
are people who “pretty much have more than you’ll ever be able to use and your
family will ever be able to use,” so they should let the government take that
extra money to help the poor.
Slippery use of the word “use” seems to confine it to
personal consumption. The real question is whether the investment of wealth is
likely to be done better by those who created that wealth in the first place or
by politicians. The track record of politicians hardly suggests that turning
ever more of a nation’s wealth over to them is likely to turn out well.
It certainly has not turned out well in the American
economy under Barack Obama.
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