The current round of class warfare over the proposed tax cuts and the evil rich has me thinking about why things are the way they are in this country. Basically, Senator Phil Gramm of Texas is right. There is a big heavy wagon that is the country, and there are those who are busy pushing it up a hill and there are those who are riding in it. In a better society than the one we have, there would always be a lot more people pushing than riding. Right now more seem to be riding.

Regardless of the whispers of the Greens, the Reformers and the Libertarians, we are a country of two relevant political parties. The Democrats and the Republicans. The current President of the United States, a Republican, is proposing that if the government is taking in more money than it needs, then it is the obligation of that government, in a free society, to give the extra money back to the people who earned it. The opposition Party (Democrats) believe that if the government is taking in more money than it needs, then it isn't spending enough and/or the government should write refund checks to the people who didn't send it in. Their argument is that the rich are evil because of their prosperity and are thus, undeserving of the money they have, let alone the money our government has taken from them.

Somehow, people who contribute the least are seen as more deserving of other people's money than the other people. This kind of thinking isn't new. Just read Marx. Or Lenin. Or Mao. Or Stalin. Or the Democratic Party Platform or the Green Party Platforms. This thinking is like going to a store, buying an expensive item, returning it, and having the store give your refund to someone else because the store manager has determined that you don't deserve it. Taking money from one group of people by force and giving it to another group of people is called redistribution of wealth. It is a socialist process. In less polite company it is a communist process.

What eventually happens in societies that start down this path, is that, as the wealth held in high concentrations is depleted in order to purchase the loyalty and votes of the masses of people, everyone's piece of the pie gets smaller and smaller until there is no wealth to redistribute. At this point the people who were the recipients of the government giveaways begin to receive the "distribution of sacrifices." (Ayn Rand). That means standing in line for toilet paper and hoping the government store has bread this week. When everyone starves, everyone will finally have their fair share.

I don't know about you, but my last paycheck was signed by a pretty wealthy person. I can't think of a single policy designed to punish the person paying my salary that will help me get ahead. I believe that, if you are poor and you think that government will help you stop being poor, then you will remain poor and deservedly so. Like it are not, we live in a highly competitive, complex, capitalistic country where some people are better suited for success than others. Often it isn't fair, or pretty, or comprehensible to a lot of people but it is the reality. It is also the reason our poor people have color televisions and cars. In countries where there are not so many rich greedy capitalists, poor people trek for miles across the savanna to starve to death on CNN. They pick runway gravel out of their daily gruel.