Class warfare, fairness, and reality

Once again, I urge you to read John Stossel's column of the week. He says things much better than I do.  Here's the link. It's about fairness. About real fairness that comes from freedom, not regulation.

We are, as he writes, "wired" to desire fairness. I would say "conditioned" to do so. Yet, many of our parents chuckled when we, as children, demanded fairness in life. My mother, the sweetest woman who ever lived, often reminded me that life wasn't fair. And she was absolutely right.

Some of us were born with silver spoons in our mouths, some were born with great intellect, some with little intellect at all, some with great physical talents, some as klutzes. Some of us overcame the poverty of our beginnings, some of us didn't.

I look at the disparity of wealth in this country and think about countries I have been in where our poverty would seem like wealth. I think disparity in wealth is a Good Thing. Sounds cold, doesn't it? But it isn't, not really. That disparity is incentive. Seeing someone driving by in a $150,000 car should instill a desire to emulate him, to get where he (or she) is. To have that wealth, that luxury, at your command.

Or you could, like me, decide that isn't for you. That having "enough" is just fine.

What is bad is that some people resent the wealthy. They resent the young man who was born into wealth and does little. Or the Paris Hiltons and Kim Kardashians. Yet even more follow these "famous for being famous" celebrities as if they were people to emulate rather than just distractions from our dreary lives.

You will hear, over the next several months, about class warfare. About the "1%" and how they have "unfair" advantage over the "99%". Yes, they do. But, most likely, they either earned that status or someone in their family did. We have little "old money" in this country. Most of our wealthy and important families built that wealth in the past 200 hundred years. They didn't descend from nobility with titles that reflected the vast lands they held that were worked by those who were little more than slaves. Titles that were handed down from generation to generation, titles that signified their position in the ruling class.

This country has not destroyed opportunity, it is still possible to start out with little to nothing and end up rich and powerful. Punishing the current rich and powerful won't make that easier to do or make the country more "fair." It might just do the opposite, it might just have those pesky "unintended consequences" and leave the vast majority of us as serfs once again.

I also have something else for you to read. It is the most insidious organization I could imagine. And they claim to be "libertarian communists."

 http://www.commonstruggle.org/aims/

I found this site while reading about some a group called "clownbloq" who intend to disrupt the NATO summit in Chicago as part of the "Occupy Chicago" event. Their own site is:


http://campaigns.occupy.net/clownbloq/

If you do not think OWS, protesters at WTO and G8 summits are not extreme leftists, you are delusional. There may be some whose motives are "pure" but the protests are run, financed, and used by those who would destroy capitalism and deny freedom to all.