Let's not pretend that wealth has ever been distributed evenly, or that the rich and powerful have never sought to exploit the poor and powerless. The reality is that wealth gets redistributed all the time, and our tax policies over the past 30 years, and particularly the past decade have had the effect of redistributing wealth upward.
From the Concerned Citizen's Coalition Dictionary of Politically Polarizing Conversation Stoppers. More below the break.
Look, we get it. No one wants the government taking their hard-earned money and redistributing it to people who make their living popping out babies so they can get a larger welfare check. This is America. We work hard. We pull ourselves up by our own bootstraps. And we're not going to reward laziness by taking from those who do work hard and giving it to those who don't. We don't support a culture of entitlement, and we don't take kindly to anyone who wants to redistribute our wealth.
Now there are a lot of problems with that last paragraph, starting with the idea that everyone who doesn't have a job is just lazy, that there is no involuntary unemployment. That however, will be the subject of another entry; what we're really interested in right now is that term that has been so closely associated with left-wing, big government activism...a term that raises the heckles of so many hardworking Americans: redistribution of wealth.
Are we really going to pretend that wealth has ever been distributed evenly, or at least fairly, or that the rich and powerful have never sought to exploit the poor and powerless? The reality is that wealth gets redistributed all the time, and our tax policies over the past 30 years, and particularly the past decade have had the effect of redistributing more and more wealth upward, concentrating it in the hands of fewer and fewer individuals.
That's just economic data, and it's not really that hard to understand. The deeper reality we need to remember however is that the ultimate source of wealth is not in the individual, but in the collective. It is our land, our water, and our mineral resources, and though we may partition it off and sell the rights to it, it still belongs to all of us collectively. We give stewardship to those who have gained the public confidence to use those resources to the benefit of all, or at least that is how it is supposed to work. And these resources are necessary for any man to become wealthy in his own right, but even they are not really sufficient, for no man ever became rich without the help of America’s greatest resource: its people.
For all our adulation of the self-made man, he does not really exist. There is no denying his hard work, but there is also no denying the role of all those who came before him, who built the society that allowed him to achieve such wealth. Did he build the roads and bridges that allow him to transport his goods to market, or offer his services? Did he build the police and fire stations that protect his investments and make it safe to do business? Did he build the schools that educated not just his employees, but his consumers? Did he give those people jobs so they could afford to pay for his goods and services? The answer is no, those things were done by the people, collectively.
And so, the man who achieves such great wealth is expected, in proportion, to support the society that made achieving that wealth possible. Not to pay it back, but to pay it forward, so future generations are left with a greater collective wealth, and greater opportunities. This is part of what it means to be an American.
So, we can have a conversation about what might be considered fair, and of course fairness is rather subjective, so there may be a wide range of ideas proffered, but let's not let that phrase, redistribution of wealth, stop the conversation or fool us into thinking that the wealth of the individual comes before the wealth of the collective, or that the status quo is somehow fair, or that a greater gap between the rich and the poor will somehow make us into a better society.
More on the dictionary, and how you can help.