Thomas Sowell is a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University and knows a thing about about Obama's Marxist ideology because he was a Marxist once himself. His experience working as a federal government intern during the summer of 1960 caused him to reject Marxian economics in favor of free market economic theory. Sowell is both a syndicated columnist and an academic economist and is considered the leading representative of the Chicago school of Economics. He lends his knowledge to this posting so that he and I may educate Obama-ites to the fact that their messianic leader is leading them down the wrong path.
A recently discovered tape in which Barack Obama said back in 1998 that he believes in wealth redistribution may serve a useful purpose -- if it gets people to think about what are the consequences of redistribution are. History is full of examples of countries that set out to redistribute wealth and ended up redistributing poverty. The communist nations were a classic example. In theory, confiscating the wealth of the more successful people ought to make the rest of society more prosperous. But when the Soviet Union confiscated the wealth of successful farmers, food became scarce.
As many people died of starvation under Stalin in the 1930s as died in Hitler's Holocaust in the 1940s. You can only confiscate the wealth that exists at a given moment. You cannot confiscate future wealth -- and that future wealth is less likely to be produced when people see that it is also going to be confiscated. And unlike farmers, industrialists are not tied to the land in a particular country. Financiers are even less tied down. Vast sums of money can be dispatched electronically to any part of the world.
If confiscatory policies can produce counterproductive repercussions in a dictatorship, they are even harder to carry out in a democracy. A dictatorship can suddenly swoop down and grab whatever it wants. But a democracy must first have public discussions and debates. Obama faces governing in a deeply divided country and a partisan-rich capital, whee Republicans retained their majority in the House and Democrats kept their control of the Senate. He has already shown his disregard for the Constitutional niceties of the Founding Father's separation of powers with his (law-making) Executive Orders, will he devise a way to get around a House stifling his dictatorial urges??
Let's be realistic. Those who are targeted for confiscation can see the handwriting on the proverbial wall and act accordingly. When successful people with much human capital leave the country, either voluntarily or because of hostile governments, damage can be done to the economy they leave behind. We have all heard the old saying that giving a man a fish feeds him only for a day, while teaching him to fish fish feeds him for a lifetime. Redistributionists give him a fish and leave him dependent on the government for future fish.
The Way I See It....if the redistributionists were serious, what they would want to distribute is the ability to be productive in other ways. Knowledge is one thing that can be distributed to people without reducing the amount held be others. That would better serve the interests of the poor, but it would not serve the interests of the politicians who want to exercises power, and to get the votes of people who are dependent on them.
The confluence of the Obama's mendicants (addicted liars), environmentalists, the abortion lobby, those in gay lifestyles, the black and brown money grubbers and what I call the cohort of ''damaged'' women, as well as the social sciences know-nothings have proven a formidable combination. They are a new constituency amalgamation that will affect the politics of the United States for the foreseeable future. God Help America!!
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