By way of Chicago Law Professor Brian Leiter's highly bigoted America-hating blog, a link to this more or less typical anti-capitalist, anti-rights whining. A perceptive reader notices the following failures of cognition:
(1) The zero-sum, fixed-pie mentality.
(2) No attempt to identify the underlying cause of increased inequality in the United States. Part of this has to do with how to measure income (more income is being taken in the form of benefits, particularly health insurance). Ask an economist, and the answer is more likely to be that globalization has caused a shifting in incomes. From the global vantage point, speaking of increasing inequality in one country is a massive context-drop. So, we have here a failure to identify cause and context.
(3) No recognition of any principle whatsoever, such as the absolute right of private property; perhaps the only principle involved is, "More equality good, greater inequality bad." Good luck in trying to ground any such principle. The highest court of appeal in this screwed-up mindset is Rawls's Theory of Justice, which is ultimately against groundings (since Rawls's theory is consensus-obsessed, and it's a given in such an approach that people cannot agree on groundings, such as the absolute human requirement to be free to create, earn and keep the product of one's own efforts).
(4) Focused on solutions that don't promote growth and initiative and expanding the pie, but rather on how to redistribute the pie. This follows more or less naturally from point (1). The fucking "liberal" socialists don't have any idea how to expand the pie, which has approximately 100 percent to do with individual initiative. Any policy should therefore be oriented towards actualizing individual initiative, and punishing success through force doesn't seem like a good way of doing that. Then again, I'm not a pragmatism-eaten economist, so I don't usually analyze policies in terms of "desirable" (read: consensus-wanted) results.
(5) A (quasi-?) Keynesian tenet whereby tax cuts going to the wealthy don't stimulate growth because "they don't go out and spend the money" the way the poor do. So whether or not you deserve to keep the products of your own talents, efforts and initiative depends on whether some fucking coercive policymaker in Washington determines whether you're going to "spend" the money rightly. Do keep in mind Keynes's axiomatic dictum for the pragmatism-eaten mindset: "In the long run we are all dead." Apparently, tax reductions for the wealthy just go into some unproductive bank account. Of course, then again, maybe those extra funds go into productive investments where the highest return is going to be had. Apparently those higher returns come from various developing countries with higher rates of economic growth. That would "exacerbate" the inequality right here at home, since these investments benefit the businesses and workers abroad, less so here at home. But this concerns underlying causes that the fucking liberals with their pragmatistic refusal to deal with underlying causes (that's "metaphysics" and nonsense) rarely if ever get into. That would require consulting the economists, and the economists have had this tendency to be a lot more pro-capitalist than the fucking liberals and socialists have been. I wonder why?
(6) Apparently, it's better to let fucking politicians, bureaucrats, public employees unions, and all their ilk decide how economic resources are to be directed, than to leave those decisions to the Evil Rich who got that way by . . . you guessed it, doing a better job deciding how economic resources are to be directed than everyone else did. But as we all realize by now, success in directing economic resources to their most profitable and productive lines is something that should be punished so that the fucking politicians can redistribute things more evenly and the American economy can stagnate more relative to the rest of the world.
(7) Stagnationism, not growth, as the basis for policy. This more or less sums up all the previous points. See also Nathaniel Branden's article, "The Divine Right of Stagnation," in The Virtue of Selfishness.
(8) America is a rotten place according to the fucking "liberal" socialists, so much so that people must be miserable living here. That's why so many immigrants come here to work, save, and invest. By the way, poor immigrants coming here just adds to the percentage of poor here in the country, which is Bad. Also, see point (7), where the basic mindset is that of stasis and stagnation. The poor immigrants coming here must be the same poor that come here five years from now.
Fact is, America is amazingly rich on average (or median); the only real issue here is how we Americans capitalize upon this great advantage. Sitting around like a bunch of whiny defeatists complaining about people making a lot of wealth is just not going to cut it here. What we absolutely need to do here, is to adopt the mentality of growth, i.e., of capitalism. What this entails is a rather new, scary, and initially-disorienting perspective: that Americans could become a huge rich capitalistic "class" (do please keep in mind how the term "class" is totally abused, applied totally out of context, basically undefined, etc. by the fucking Marxism-eaten "liberal" socialists) for the whole world. That would require a lot of Americans taking on the mentality of ownership rather than of stagnation in its various manifestations. Now, if we're defeatists, and pragmatists, and traditionalists, the argument is that "this can't be done." Why? Because it would be hard? Would it be too hard? Perhaps it would be too hard for people deeply embedded and devoted to a mentality of stagnation and weakness, e.g., many in the Democrat voting base.
But (a) we shouldn't tailor policy or rights-theory to that mentality and (b) it really isn't that hopeless a situation. Growth can happen in many amazing and unexpected ways if you just foster the right conditions for it. Fostering a zero-sum, fixed-pie, envy-eaten, whiner mentality is not the way to do it. Fostering a radically capitalistic, individualistic, pro-strength, pro-independent-thought mindset is the key. Likening the United States of America to a banana republic is such a failure of cognition that it's, sadly, telling how it receives prominence of place in our leading news outlets.
