Invoking the phrase “fair share” over and over again–as though repetition made it meaningful if not truthful–a smug President Barack Obama today at the White House touted his latest effort to spread the wealth around, a scheme that The Wall Street Journal expects will cost Americans $1.5 Trillion in higher taxes.
Insisting “it’s … about fairness. It’s about whether we are, in fact, in this together, and we’re looking out for one another,” the POT(57)US painted a picture less of a Constitutional republic of individuals and more of an enormous cult compound where all wealth created by members is owned and controlled by a board of elders who use it to coddle and control whom they choose (after grabbing a share for themselves).
As America’s century-long experiment in Progressivism has shown, this view is practically unworkable, as well as judicially and morally perverse. Life isn’t fair, and governments are not established to manufacture fairness but to maintain justice by securing rights–including the right to property. When a government seizes honestly earned wealth, skims a chunk for its own, and redistributes the rest in the form of acknowledged welfare programs, the welfare-lite of make-work jobs programs, or anything else that robs Peter to pay Paul, it misuses for injustice the power that it has been granted to enforce justice. It also perverts morality–punishing Peter for the virtuous behavior that creates honest wealth and rewarding Paul for the envy and arrogance that assert entitlement to what someone else has earned.
Fittingly, these perversions suffocate, rather than inflate, prosperity. High marginal taxes suppress saving, investment, job creation, and wage growth. President Obama seems to live in Progressive Politician’s Paradise, where big government’s damage to prosperity results in greater power for big government. But the Fatally Conceited demagogue may be a century too late to hope in that. We’ve tried rewarding government for punishing prosperity. The results have been predictable–more government, less prosperity. It’s time for the President and pandering politicians like him to learn that government is not too big to fail.
