The right to steal
Don Quixote on Feb 17 2008 at 5:59 pm | Filed under: Uncategorized
I’ve been watching the silliness that is Berkeley and heard one of the Code Pink gals talking about the “right” to housing, the “right” to health care, etc. I think her point was that we shouldn’t be spending money defending our country when we could be spending it providing services to people.
This whole “rights” mantra has never made sense to me. What the gal was actually saying is that if I have a need for health care, shelter, whatever, and can’t pay for it, I have a “right” to get what I need and a “right” to use the power of government to steal (forcibly take) your money from you to pay for it. How have we managed to get to the point that using government as a Robin Hood, stealing from the middle class and giving to the poor, has become acceptable? Everyone argues about whether government provided shelter, health care, whatever, is a good idea, but no one anymore even argues that the whole idea of using the power of government to steal from one group of people and give to another group is, simply, wrong.
Am I a complete dinosaur here or has America completely lost it’s moral compass?
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I concur, DQ. That is a disconnect. And a critical one. It is not a matter of “rights” in the sense of individual action to secure material comforts or security; it is a collectivist reinterpretation that obligates the comfort to provide for those material “rights” and it is far afield from the basic liberties enumerated in the first ten amendments to the Constitution. The First Amendment, as many times as I’ve read it, includes no funding component. Of course, I’m sure it’s there, in latent or penumbral form, just waiting for a future Supreme Court of Obama nominees to find it. And if the Second Amendment provides for the right to bear arms, well, where’s my assault rifle? I think the government needs to give me one.
re: have we (esp. the left) lost our compass.
Yes, we have. Starts with the relativism necessary to equate all killings (BBC equating Hariri and Mughniyeh). Ends with the moral deadening required to be able to accept the tearing oout of children’s’ tongues for their saying “deliver us from evil” in the Lord’s prayer (ref: Tom Dooley documenting North Vietnamese communist party actions declared as a fitting punishment for young children as the Đảng cộng sản Việt Nam could only be goodness and light, by definition).
I have always thought that there is a connection to the education being taught, or if you will, lack of education.
When one is ignorant of the founding principals, it is a far simpler task to be misled.
The generations are being taught that government is the answer to all life’s problems.
The last few cycles to pass through the system have no idea of the amount of freedom lost since I grew up in the 50’s and 60’s.
Thus you get the belief that the separation of church and state is in the constitution.
As a country, we have indeed lost our moral compass.
If we truly were as rich as we think we are, we would be comfortable with our current taxation AND we’d be running an embarrassing surplus, and looking for ways to spend it. Certainly in that situation we could provide for good health care, good housing, and good jobs for all.
But we’re not comfortable with current taxation, and we run a staggering national deficit that we keep adding to, in good economic times and bad. It’s not sustainable even as it is. I wish we could find a way to provide SOME kind of decent housing, health care, and jobs for all, but we’re not even close to being able to.
We should be able to provide some kind of safety net in each of these areas - and I think we do try. But being unfortunate enough to be caught in that safety net should mean a loss of freedom: you do what the government says to do, because you’ve fallen so far as to be stuck on the government dole. A good place to get out of as quickly as possible, but better than starving, or being homeless, or suffering complete medical collapse. We could provide something minimal like that - very rudimentary housing, well secured and well policed; limited government health care; limited jobs programs.
You are not being fair to Robin Hood, DQ. Robin Hood liberated wealth that had been stolen/confiscated from the common folk by the government (i.e., King John and the Church) to return it to the people from whence it first came. Robin Hood turned to his ways only when government taxation became oppressive, once King John took power from his brother, Richard Lionheart, who was imprisoned in the Middle East. The “wealthy” nobility apparently felt the same way, hence the Magna Carta.
As far as a “safety net’ is concerned, the poor in America today live better than 95%-plus of the world’s population. To paraphrase common wisdom, better the government teach our poor to fish than buy them more and more fish at our expense. Plus (sorry MikeD), to say that our government could in any way provide good healthcare, good education, good housing or good anything belies a fundamental disconnect with historical reality.
Now, just where is that Robin Hood when we need him? I’d vote for him.
We should be able to provide some kind of safety net in each of these areas - and I think we do try. But being unfortunate enough to be caught in that safety net should mean a loss of freedom: you do what the government says to do, because you’ve fallen so far as to be stuck on the government dole
A good compromise and quick fix would be to ensure that those that fall on the government dole lose their ability to vote. Given that it is a conflict of interest and you really cannot expect human beings to vote against the government, when the government is paying their bills.
The same would be applicable to political government employees. On the same basis that churches are exempt from taxes. If you want to be political, then fine, but then you won’t be able to vote.
This creates a self-balancing mechanism like what had to be done with small states vs large states, the majority vs the minority, and the religious institutions against secular institutions. You separate them by ensuring that their interests do not lie upon the road to power as well.
What the gal was actually saying is that if I have a need for health care, shelter, whatever, and can’t pay for it, I have a “right” to get what I need and a “right” to use the power of government to steal (forcibly take) your money from you to pay for it.
That’s not actually a problem so long as those rights require that you have a concomittant responsibility attached to it. Such as the responsibility to live on the government dole and be classified as non-citizens, because you are a creature of the government, not a citizen, and thus not deserving of the Bill of Rights and voting abilities, of the United States.
if Code Pink wishes to become denizens and creatures of the federal government, then that should be their right. Just as it is the duty of the government to cut off their civil liberties and ability to vote, just as it is our right to allow people to do what they wish with their lives, such as becoming tools and slaves of the federal government, so long as it doesn’t harm us. And if you withdraw citizenship from those on the dole and those looking for free healthcare, then obviously it would protect our rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness in that those we subsidize are taking a lower position on the totem pole of power and status.
The real disagreement is whether rights should have any natural inborn responsibilities attached to it or not. Whether rights are “free”. Whether you have rights cause it is free and you or anyone else doesn’t pay a cost for them. Code Pink thinks freedom is free. That you can just grab stuff from the government trough and it is free. Freely available or should be made freely available.
I think civil rights come with responsibilities. The right to freedom of speech means also the duty of using it responsibly, and if you don’t use it responsibly, you can be charged with public endangerment such as creating a stampede in an enclosed space with your speech, or you can be met by hostile speech, which is another consequence of taking responsibility for what you say. Now people that don’t want to take responsibility for their exercise of free speech thinks that free speech should be free. That their actions should have no negative consequences that they must pay. This includes having to deal with hostile speech (Berkley’s response to the counter-protests about Code Pink) or getting sued for publishing photos of someone’s dead daughter on the internet.
How have we managed to get to the point that using government as a Robin Hood, stealing from the middle class and giving to the poor, has become acceptable?
because society and government no longer demands and requires that each individual in America pay for the sacrifices of other people that each individual is benefiting from.
Only the US military, one last bastion of the old virtues of preservation and reproduction, still appreciates the cost attached to all things.
Everyone argues about whether government provided shelter, health care, whatever, is a good idea, but no one anymore even argues that the whole idea of using the power of government to steal from one group of people and give to another group is, simply, wrong.
There’s nothing wrong with the government stealing from the wealthy and giving it to the poor. What is wrong is for the government to tax the wealthy and suddenly now expect the poor to have any political power over the wealthy. When you have a system where the political power rests upon the vote, which rests upon the majority of a population, but the tax base is paid by only 10% of the upper earners and corporations of that nation, you have a problem waiting to occur.
In the olden days, aristocrats solved the problem of the poor with charitable works and patronage. But that means the power and the purse strings were always in the hands of the rich aristocrats, not the poor commoners. And that’s how it should be. Power naturally rests with those that are paying for your livelyhood. Same reason why people support Hamas, cause Hamas pays for their hospital and food bills while Israel and America doesn’t. We pay for Hamas, though, but Hamas doesn’t listen to us because we don’t expect our foreign aid to make them listen.
The social revolutionary problems occur because people expect the rich and wealthy to pay for the costs of society and the poor, but for the poor to also have the purse strings and access to power. When you have that kind of situation, what you get is two hostile camps. The rich and the middle class that don’t want to be taxed and squeezed to pay for lazy parasites, and the lazy parasites that want more and more welfare packages and benefits. You eventually get something called a revolution, and a violent one at that.
One of the things necessary for nationalism is the opening of the military door to all citizens and available manpower. When disenfranchised groups join the military and fight for their country, they win rights and responsibilities because both the rich and the majority have to recognize that these people suffered and paid the costs for benefits that they never even got. So it is not just a question of who pays the most taxes, the rich or the poor, but who pays for the nation’s defense in blood and toil.
America exists because blacks volunteered to fight for rights given to Nazi prisoners but not black folks. America exists as we are because women voluntered to work in factories, away from homes, in WWI and WWII, proving that women weren’t as weak and feeble as men thought they were. That women deserved more rights and responsibilities because they have shown that they can handle the cost of those rights.
When people like Code Pink clamor for more power and also more benefits, the rich and powerful look down upon them as nothing but tools to be used, children that can be ignored and locked up because they cannot be counted upon to act as adults. This divides up the country into factions, and destroys the unity that so many had sacrificed to acquire in America’s past.
And when the rich and powerful look down upon the majority of the poor and disenfranchised as nothing but tools, social resentment increases and people like Arafat and Castro can get in on the power game. Because now the poor people think the rich folks owe them something. The rich owe the poor their production and money because… War for Oil? Bushitler? Their wealth comes from exploiting us, the workers? Any and all such slogans can work to ramp up revolutionary sentiment.
And thus a civilization falls. While Rome ultimately fell to the Vandals and German tribes, cause the gauls (french) had already been mostly pacified, what created the dint in Rome’s military armor was due to the fact that Romans no longer felt that they had to serve in the military. Romans no longer felt that protecting the borders and protecting Roman citizens was something for “true Romans” to undertake. No, that kind of work was fit more for foreign barbarians, you know the “fake Roman” citizens that joined because they were conquered. Thus the Roman elite back in Italy setup their little castles in sand and it all came down because they weren’t looking out at the gates or protecting the defenders of the walls guarding Rome.
It is all apart of the same decadence and decay process. This belief that one deserves benefits but should not pay the cost for them. The belief that America is invulnerable to foreign invasion, so therefore this means we can loot our citizens of everything we want and then everything will be okay in the end. The belief that the rich folks in America have gotten too rich for their own good, and need to be brought down a step in the ladder, while at the same time expecting the rich, like Soros, to bend over the barrel and take it without striking back due to the invincinble power of the Democratic process and the US military’s ability to enforce the Will of the People.
Technically, that is what Soros is doing. He saw how the nazis confiscated wealth and he told himself “I ain’t never going down that way”. So he created his own revolutionary cliques, to ensure that when society is overthrown by the maniacs, that he controls the maniacs.
As a country, we have indeed lost our moral compass.
In the end, all nations fall because all nations are composed of human beings. And human beings, just like anything else that exists in this universe, will eventually die.
The cycle of history procedes apace, even though each cycle brings us closer to the maximum potential of the human species, it also brings us to the troughs and low points as well.
The cycle of human history was explained to me this way. We start out as peasants, attached to our soil and our blood. We achieve immortality through our sons and daughters. That is what we work for. This is applicable to all serfs and to the immigrants that came to America. Hard workers, they were. Spoiled they were not.
Then after the peasant stage, we get to the stage of scientific curiosity and turmoil as certainties that were held to be absolutely true before were turned upside down by questioners and seekers of truth. This breaks the conservative past and connection with the soil and matters of reproduction, producing ultimately what we know of as Europe. They have no connection to their roots, to their nationalism, to their religions, or to matters of reproduction. They are people with no certainties in life, because they question everything of worth, or they think they do. What this results in is so much turmoil that civilizations can no longer resist the advance of barbarians and peasants that can out reproduce you, out believe you, and out exterminate you.
For the scientist that is focused on creating things for human peace, that scientist will not focus too much on conquest that a barbarian would. And thus civilizations need barbarians in the form of the US Marine Corps. Killers and warriors that is totally the opposite of scientific and modern decadent society with our questioning of the status quo and democratic ways of life. A soldier obeys and works under a benevolent dictatorship, because democracies and republics are notoriously defenseless against foreign invaders as well as internal dissidents using Machiavellian tools of political manipulation.
Don’t people recall how the Enlightenment brought on questions concerning the Catholic Church and the Ptolemaic system? That is the same thing as the 1960s social revolution. People that were once connected to the roots and traditions of America, interested in winning wars to ensure that their children live in a better world, now question everything that they had ever been taught about America and life and war. They no longer believe now because they don’t know what to believe. They become truly civilized because they are very open minded now. But that just means their civilization is very close to the end of the cycle.
Nations can go on inertial for a while, like France, but these cycles will eventually bring any nation down in ruin. The human individual cannot go on questioning everything without latching onto some kind of certainty in life. The problem is that if a person rejects traditional American values, then he has a chance to latch on to anti-American values. And that’s a problem for America’s Bill of Rights and way of life.
The positive way to question the past is what is seen by Bookworm and Neo Neocon’s actions. They don’t reject everything they ever learned, but they do try to make sure that the things they believe in are truly better than the flawed traditional viewpoints. That’s something the Vietnam folks didn’t really do.
If the Islamic conquest of the world succedes, they themselves will turn to sloth and decadence. They will also start to believe that the roots of Islam isn’t all correct or certain. Then they will change and have a chance to be disrupted by foreign invaders. But that won’t be until the cycle is completely over for them, since they are just starting, and as we can see with Rome, these cycles can last for almost a millenium before making a civilization fall.
A simple analogy is with children and parents. Do children have all the civil rights that adults have? Why not? Isn’t it because parents protect and take care of the children, because the parents are working and the children do not have an income?
The same thing is true for people that want to be taken care of by the government and their programs. Just give them what they want. If adults want to become children and give up the responsibilities and power that comes with being an adult, I say let them. It doesn’t bother me that i have to take care of more children, so long as the children don’t suddenly get to decide what the family is going to do now.
Y-man, I think you are on to something, but the devil would be in the details. Do folks on social security get to vote? Employees of a corporation that gets a federal bail out? People who get special privileges and services (handicapped parking, postage free mailing of matter for the blind) because of disabilities? Obtaining medical care at a free clinic, sending our kids to free public schools, driving freely on publicly maintained roads and regularly visiting (for free) publicly maintained parks and recreation centers? We all obtain government benefits to one extent or another. Where do we draw the line and take away the vote?
The danger is always in the desire to get new benefits, greater benefits, and benefits for “more” people, like Mexicans illegals in California. That is what turns a sustainable system that has a good chance of recovering into something like Europe. Economy goes down, social class resentment goes up, and then we have violence in the streets and the breakdown of law and government. Which causes the economy to go even more south because people no longer feel secure in backing of the government forces.
People like Mike Devx would support safety net style government benefits, but only so long as they are sustainable and that means the government and the people on the dole just don’t get to decide for themselves when to expand the program.
The Founders would have written something like that into the Constitution, but it just wasn’t a topic they were debating because the federal government didn’t have enough money to pay anybody a welfare check. This is the price of success and prosperity. The question of “do we exterminate the human race with biological and nuclear weapons” doesn’t even come up if you have never heard of nuclear or bio weapons.
As for the details, there is no real point in making this retro-active. Many Americans don’t want to be on welfare in the first place. You give them something better and they’ll take it. But the government can’t just give everybody something “better”. That’s impossible given gov corruption and human nature. So you have to motivate people to get out and do it themselves, and you should only provide them the opportunity and the tools. The point of this is to decrease the payout for people so that people don’t want welfare at all, even if they are on it. The point isn’t to disenfranchise black people or political opponents. If the whole purpose was to disenfranchise those folks, then it would be retro-active.
I’m only addressing that field because it is a valid criticism of restricting people’s civil liberties. People argued it for wiretaps and Gitmo and Patriot Act, and they’ll do it for this as well.
The idea Mike introduced and I took to its logical conclusions, solves the entire panapoly of protests against the Patriot Act. For if you want the government to decide for you your healthcare and your police protection and your military protection, then who are you to say that you are now immune from government reach just because there’s a Republican as President?
You’re clamoring for government healthcare and subsidized payouts for you, but you don’t want the government monitoring your phone calls but you will let the government decide how you live as it falls under their healthcare program? People need a reality check.
The Ameri Indians on the reservations had their privacy, rights, and land disturbed because so long as the federal government took care of them, the federal government could ‘un” take care of them. Historically, they didn’t want to become part of the United States, they didn’t want to apply for statehood like a bunch of other states out west with fewer populations than the Cherokees and Navajo put together did. The federal government sympathized with Indians, but they couldn’t do much when it was the states making the laws and voting in reps.
Currently, Berkley and Code Pink also appears like they don’t really want to be part of the United States, what with their trying to kick out the US Marines. They don’t want to be protected? That’s fine. Nobody in Berkley needs to qualify for Marine recruitment. They also don’t need to qualify for the First or Second Amendment, either, when you think about it.
Do folks on social security get to vote?
Since social security is a federal program, not a state program, those folks can vote in local elections but not in federal elections. That would be one possible compromise. Them voting for US President also wouldn’t be a problem since the US President can only veto, not introduce legislation. So it will be very hard for the President to stack on new social security benefits that extort money from the newer generation. At the same time, we get the benefit of senior and veteran experience with voting in a mature and responsible President.
Enlistment in the military would also be an automatic inclusion to all the responsibility and perks of citizenship. If they are honorably discharged.
We all obtain government benefits to one extent or another. Where do we draw the line and take away the vote?
The line is pretty clear. Your contribute to the tax pool and thus you get public services and protection from foreign invasions. There’s a basic level that the government must give you, because of the US Constitution. In reality, though, those things tend to be modifiable based upon what Lincoln, Roosevelt, and other Presidents did.
The really important topics that this idea will matter to is subsidized and prepaid healthcare. If you could take care of healthcare on your own dime, then you wouldn’t need the government So why should other people, who are willing and able to afford private insurance, have to subsidize your lack of wealth and ability?
There’s no way you could simply give “tax breaks” to the middle class and the rich, so only the poor pay for themselves. Because if the poor could pay for their own healthcare, they Would. No matter how high you raise the taxes on the poor, you won’t get enough funds to pay for prepaid healthcare.
So the solution is to have the rich and the middle class pay for the healthcare of the poor and the people who just can’t or won’t help themselves, but take the cost out of the poor via voting rights and civil liberties, while giving the middle class and the rich a social and citizen advantage. This is a sustainable system because it isn’t permanent and it won’t grow because people are going to want the privileges and full rights of the rich and the middle class. That’s human envy at work there. This will automatically give people a reason to move out of the lower class feeding on the public healthcare system.
These kinds of benefits are benefits that you yourself could get by some other way other than government handouts. Roads and the military, for example, isn’t available to any citizen regardless of who he is or how much money he has. Does he have enough money to afford a private army? Not in this country.
sending our kids to free public schools
I’m already in favor of giving parents tax breaks or vouchers if they are not taking advantage of the public education system. If you aren’t using it, you shouldn’t have to pay for it. Then again, I don’t believe in federal subsidization of state schools, so once you remove the federal subsidization, you will solve the other problem as well.
The government is going to provide a degree of handouts and services to people. I or anyone else can’t stop that. What we can do is to reduce the rate of increase and even make it negative. We can either do that through tyranny and forcing people to do it our way, or we can simply allow people to make their own decisions, but attach extremely negative consequences to those decisions that we find destructive.
Murder has a very large negative consequence attached to it. Yet we cannot order murderers not to kill and we cannot prevent all murderers.
The old psychological model of influencing human behavior with rewards and punishment does not include negative reinforcement. Punishment is not negative reinforcement. Negative reinforcement is where you STOP inflicting pain on him when he does something you want him to do.
And this idea I have described bases itself on negative reinforcement. On the assumption that all citizens have rights and responsibilities, but you can avoid that power and responsibility by putting yourself in a position where the rest of society takes care of you as a favor. We want that, we want people that don’t contribute to be on the bottom of the social ladder, rather than at the top as leaders. So it is a good thing to have on the government dole everybody that just wants to be a follower.
As for those on the government dole that could be somebody better, again we have the negative reinforcement. When that person is able to train himself and educate himself higher so that he can upgrade his social class, he gets access to social appreciation, citizenship perks, voting perks, full protections of the Bill of Rights. He no longer feels dependent on the government, he no longer fears that his life will change because the government gave an order and instituted a new change in his healthcare or welfare program. He’ll want to stay out of welfare then, because he appreciates not having the government controlling him like a child.
Many people look at this and think “I don’t want a social system of aristocrats at the top like the medieval ages”. What people don’t like to recognize is that we are already there. We already have a permanent underclass called blacks voting for Democrats and illegal Mexicans and immigrants that don’t speak English. The thing people should be focusing on is not trying to make everything equal, but to ensure that people at the bottom can and wants to move up.
Why would anyone at the welfare bottom heap want to move up to the middle class? So they can pay more taxes and also get their welfare cut? Come on. America has some advantages like that capitalist system, but it isn’t enough these days to counter the healthcare craze and etc.
People want free healthcare. Give it to them. There’s a price to everything so if they find themselves conned, that is going to be their problem. We just have to ensure that it is their problem, and not our problem.
Personally, I say find everybody in government bureaucracies not directly firable by the President, strip them of their right to vote, and then give those citizenship slots to the Mexicans and Asians and other folks trying to come to this country to work or stay.
Get some new blood people, or you’ll find that the bureaucratic rot will kill you from the inside out.
That’d be kind of funny, actually. If Mexicans know that they can get to stay here legally and also get the right to vote instantaneously, so long as such things are stripped from American bureaucrats, it won’t be long before the Mexicans start campaigning against bureaucrats. That’ll redirect the hate and the social resentment away from America, American citizens, and Republicans. That’s a good thing btw.
To me it is not what people feel is a “right” but rather their seeming desire to become a ward of the state. Make no mistake, if one see’s themself as a natural beneficiary of these “rights” they are in effect handing their fate over to government.
If a citizen expects the state to feed, clothe, house, and care for them they are then a captive of the state. They somehow rationalize it to fellow citizens are doing this for them. Wrong. Their fellow citizens are doing it through coercion by the state.
Their vote then becomes a slave, not to their conscience, but to who will provide them what they seek. This is a child’s view of things, in my opinion.
Allen, I am going to try to memorize your response. It could not have been better put!
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Book,
Someone may have already written about this, but just in case I will describe it. The “rights” this woman was referring to are termed “Positive Rights” and the concept is gaining steam in academia, where I am situated. This woman knows full well the story behind this movement. The use of “Positive Rights” is intended to juxtapose these rights to ”Negative Rights,” which are the rights that are enumerated in the constitution, and in common laws, for example. Negative rights include those rights that cannot (should not) be taken from us: freedom of speech (the right not to be silenced), freedom from violence (the right not to be beaten), and property rights (the right not to be robbed). In contrast, “Positive Rights” are rights to be awarded things that others have and you lack. They include many things, but one says it all: the right to wealth. If you are poor and someone has wealth, under the plan to institute “Positive Rights” you would be able to seek redress through the courts. It is intended to bring about via non-democratic institutions what failed to materialize through revolution or the ballot box: redistribution of wealth. This is not just a casual silliness that somebody threw out there as a joke; the intention is to bring the concept into our legal system. For example, a class action suit by a group like the ACLU would be used to leverage the wealth of targeted corporations. Combined with massive illegal immigration, the hope is that things will get ugly.
Hi, Brad. This is DQ, pitching in for a change while Book is on vacation, but you are quite right that things will get ugly if the academics can persuade the people and the courts that wealth should be redistributed without regard to what people have done to earn the wealth. But what is the end goal of the people who wish to make things ugly? I genuinely don’t understand why so many people on the left are so dead set on destroying the institutions that have allowed America to become the most powerful, the most prosperous and, yes, the most decent and moral nation on earth. Anybody have any explanation for this?
Explanation? Phft. A lot of the people who want this have never thought it out and have no clue what it would mean. They genuinely do not understand the difference between a right as it has historically been defined, which imposes no obligation or compulsion on other people and what they want to do- compel other people to pay for whatever they would like to have by calling it a right.
Those who DO know what they are asking for are trying to reach the same utopian communist fantasy they always have wanted. They are just smart enough not to call it that for the most part..they have decided to go after it in a piece-meal fashion.
As for why they still want this, even after seeing the results of such systems and the results of our system…I have never been able to understand that. I just don’t get it.
DQ, You call this nation “powerful, the most prosperous and, yes, the most decent and moral,” and yet I say, just as every chain is only as strong as the weakest link, a nation is only as powerful as its weakest citizen, as prosperous as its poorest, and as decent and moral as its empty jails.
Of course, a redistribution of wealth would get ugly. The rich cannot stand the idea of equality. The rich think they earned their money, if all they did was invest it. They think mental work is superior to physical work. Not different, better. They think doctors are better people than janitors. The think lawyers are better than school teachers. Not different, better. The conservatives, who actually seem reactionary, cannot think of any paradigm other than the “rugged individual.” And sadly, many middle class people who just eked in, think they are superior beings. If poor people would just adopt the right attitudes and get more education, they, too, could be like us. Only not. Because there is only so much room at the top.
When we judge people and categorize them by numbers, won’t some always be at the bottom? Won’t one of our fifty states always be the poorest? Can all of our students study hard enough to b in the top 10%? Remember the stories of the rich men who jumped from windows when the stock market fell? Do you recall the stories of the poor who jumped? Did you know poor people share? No. Although poverty has always been ugly, poor people know how to survive. The poor have something to give the rich, but the rich don’t want it. They cannot imagine a world different from the one they see.
But you see, it’s not always the rich. Take Teddy Kennedy for example. Don’t worry about his politics for a minute. Is he rich? Take professors at (horrible, horrible, horrible) liberal universities. Aren’t they educated? Only Kennedy’s money and the professors degrees don’t stop them from thinking of the poor. What’s the difference?
There is something in defending the status quo that rings of the old racist adage “at least I’m white.” Most of the folks who read this aren’t rich. Truth be told, most who read it are probably closer to poor but refuse to look at life from the underside.
DQ asks, “has America completely lost it’s moral compass?” Maybe. And a good bit of its logic, too. Without a redistribution of wealth, we may all go down the drain, one “rugged individual” at a time. Unless we learn what the poor can teach us: Redistribution means, we all share.
The wealth you seek to redistribute, HelenL, was created by 200 years of largely unfettered capitalism, which has given us such wealth as the world has never known, such wealth that even the “poor” that you speak so eloquently of are rich by the standard of the great majority of the world that has not embraced capitalism. You are determined to kill the goose that lays the golden eggs that you are so eager to steal from the rich and give to the poor. All your philosophy breeds in the end is a sharing of misery, because misery is all you will have left if you have your way.
Thus, we have a choice. We can have a system in which some are rich and some are “poor” by our standards and rich by the rest of the world’s standards, or we can have a system in which everyone is equally, but genuinely, poor — far poorer than than the poorest Americans today. We can have a system that rewards hard work or we can have a system that rewards sloth. We can have a system that permits those who earn to keep what they earn or we can have a system that steals the fruits of the laborer’s labor to give to those who are too lazy to labor. We can have a moral system or an immoral system, one based on merit or one based on theft. Respectfully, I do not agree with the choice you advocate, on either a practical or a moral level.
P.S. Helen, I’ve been a lawyer and a school teacher and neither is better than the other. Both work in highly articifial environments at very intellectual pursuits. By the way, per hour worked, I doubt the average lawyer gets paid more than the average teacher, either. Odd you would compare the two.
[...] will further their own vote. I found a great commentary on this subject over at Bookworm Room. From Don Quixote: I’ve been watching the silliness that is Berkeley and heard one of the Code Pink gals talking [...]
I read a brilliant essay just recently (I forget where) that argued very persuasively that the primary degrading force in human events was envy (which clicks with what I know about retrograde societies in Africa and elsewhere). The author argued that one of America’s strengths was that it attracted people from around the world who had not been hamstrung by the envy of their neighbors and shared a willingness with their fellow immigrants to improve their lives.
Sadly, HelenL, I detect a very strong undercurrent of resentment and envy in your post that weaves into your obsession with perceived “racism” (why, HelenL…what sad notes in your past have nurtured these obsessions?). Your caricatures of “the rich”, the source of their wealth, their motivations and how they think are very peculiar, to put it kindly. To paraphrase another savant - why do you think that your own personal life would be improved if you could simply by a whisk of your wand make all “rich” people disappear? If you wallow in envy and resentment, you will never be happy.
I genuinely don’t understand why so many people on the left are so dead set on destroying the institutions that have allowed America to become the most powerful, the most prosperous and, yes, the most decent and moral nation on earth. Anybody have any explanation for this?
What makes you think they believe these institutions allowed America to become the most powerful and prosperous nation on earth, Don? They don’t think that. They think the opposite. Which is how they justify destroying those institutions.
Until you understand that they don’t see America as a good thing at all, Don, you won’t really be able to predict what their views about american institutions are.
and yet I say, just as every chain is only as strong as the weakest link, a nation is only as powerful as its weakest citizen, as prosperous as its poorest, and as decent and moral as its empty jails.
See? Helen wrote that after I completed my first respose to you, Don, and I read it afterwards as well. But that’s just simply another example of how things are.
The rich cannot stand the idea of equality.
Robert KKK Byrd, Ted Splash Kennedy, John Fracking Kerry, T Heinz, Al Gore, Soros, and all the other folks making the big bucks cannot stand the idea of equality. So what is your point, helen? Are you going to get rid of those folks? I don’t think so.
When we judge people and categorize them by numbers, won’t some always be at the bottom?
Did someone apoint you to the level of omnipotent deity, helen. Because humans have always operated under a hierarchy, and only a god could change that reality. Somebody will always be at the bottom. That is what a hierarchy means.
And a good bit of its logic, too.
Coming from someone that believes in passion and never prefers the use of formal logic in debates, that’s a little bit farfetched don’t you think.
Passion is superior to logic, so why would the loss of logic be any detriment against America?
There is something in defending the status quo that rings of the old racist adage “at least I’m white.” Most of the folks who read this aren’t rich. Truth be told, most who read it are probably closer to poor but refuse to look at life from the underside.
let me get this straight with some logic.
The poor people here refuse to look at life from the underside, but rich boy Kennedy and intellectually empowered professors are the ones looking at life from the underside… who do you think you are kidding here.
Personally, those for achieving the maximum potential of humanity are the progressives; those seeking to mire humanity in the pit of misery by shackling individuals to the age old aristocratic bonds held by corrupt and foolish people like Ted Kennedy, are the ones maintaining the status quo of human suffering.
[...] talked in an earlier post about the right to steal money earned by others to pay for ones own needs. Outside of the pure [...]
DQ, I picked lawyer and school teacher, because you and Bookworm are lawyers, and she has criticized her kids school teachers.
And I guess one point that I didn’t state very clearly is that you may not agree with the redistribution of wealth, but you chose the word “steal” for its connotative rather than ts denotative meanings. Is that the teacher or the lawyer speaking?
Dare I say, we all know that poor people who get “money somebody else earned in our present (capitalistic) society” are not holding someone at gunpoint. 
Oh, and because I was a school teacher but have never even considered becoming a lawyer.
Poor people don’t have to hold anybody at gunpoint because the IRS does it for them. The power of the IRS to confiscate your money and property is gunpoint enough to do the job.
Hi Helen, Judyrose said it for me. I said steal because I meant steal. “Taxation is theft” is more than just a slogan.
Taxation is not so much theft as it is taxation without representation, given how rich people only have one vote for person while poor people ultimately outnumber the rich by a large margin. Thus the population that is getting squeezed does not have a large enough representation pool to counter the tyranny of the majority.
Pacifism only works because someone else is doing the dirty work of violence for the pacifists, one way or another. Otherwise, there’s nothing you can accomplish with the beliefs of pacifism. You can’t redistribute wealth because you can’t make the people that have wealth give it up to you. And you can’t convince them either, or at least helen has not provided any convincing arguments for why people with money should subsidize the groups she prefers. Certainly individuals like Warren Harding and George Soros, with an operative guilt complex, have an internal motivation to spend their wealth and make it trickle down, but those people are not typical of the majority of well to do in this country.
Human beings want things. And there’s nothing that a single human being wants, that can be achieved through pacifism. Even the indirect and passive use of government power is predicated upon violence, the threat of violence, and the fear of it.
This is a reality that is not recognized of course. Which is where doublethink comes in. You don’t recognize it when you don’t need to and you will recognize it when you do need to. A light explanation for how social revolutionaries are against the violence in Iraq but favor violence used to further revolutionary causes.