GOVERNMENT DOESN’T “ASK” ANYTHING: Thomas Sowell rips apart President Obama’s recent remark opining that the way to reduce poverty is to “ask from society’s lottery winners” that they make a “modest investment” in government programs to help the poor.
[T]he 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.”
As for referring to successful individuals as “society’s lottery winners,” Sowell observes:
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.”
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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?
Yep, it’s the LIVs who fail to realize they are being brainwashed by mainstream media “journalists” and Marxist professors who keep this “us against them” tactic alive. Conservatives need to increase their ranks in the media and the academy, or none of this can change. If the Koch brothers or other wealthy libertarian/conservatives really wanted to help change things, they would start endowing some U.S. civic and history programs at the secondary school level, funding academic positions in universities for those who possess libertarian/conservative views, and buying major newspapers (and ensuring that its editorial board was not leftist). These investments would buy more bang for the buck than all the white papers in the world.