Bravo to Mr. Bush! He recently endorsed the socialist idea of a widening gap between rich and poor, agreeing that it needs to be remedied, presumably through coercive wealth distribution. (See “Addressing Wealth Gap.”)
The concept of an income gap is meaningless in its circularity. Some people are richer than others. Some don’t like it. It’s called envy. In a free society, governments would be unable to placate the envious by stealing from those they envy. In an unfree society that’s precisely what governments do: they pacify the multitudes by mulcting the few.
To lend legitimacy to theft based in envy, intellectuals, members of the “Idiocracy” (bless Mike Judge for coining that catchall caption), constructed grand theories of which Marxism is one. Reasoning backwards, the illogic of these theories is, “If rich therefore exploitative.”
Try substituting wealth with some other individual difference: eye color. Or better still, beauty. Is it fair that some people are so much more beautiful than others? The socialists will argue that beauty is genetic; wealth is not. Wealth is a more complex variable than beauty, for sure. However, why does IQ correlate so well with income? One look at the wild Jim Kramer in action is enough to conclude that the wildly wealthy are a unique —often very brilliant and certainly very daring —breed. As it is, the benefits of their wealth-generating activities redound to us all. Big time.
Update: Socialists weasel with words in order to justify their thieving intentions. Point out that the top earners also pay most of the nation’s taxes, and they invariably reply that the very rich also earn most of “the nation’s income.” The problem is, there’s no such thing as the “nation’s income.” There is no pre-existing income pie from which a disproportionate amount of riches are gobbled up by the greedy rich. Wealth doesn’t exist in nature; individuals create it, and therefore should own it. It is a return for desirable services and resources they supply to others. Labor productivity is the main determinant of wages.
The Marxist-Leninist zero-sum analysis, whereby wealth is seen as having been achieved at someone’s expense, is false. And dangerous. This envy based fabrication has propelled the persecution of “ethnic minorities — which have achieved prosperity from poverty — Jews in Europe, Levantines and Indians in Africa, Chinese in south-east Asia,” in the words of P.T. Bauer.
Alas, the words of another late, great economist explain why The Truth is so unintuitive. In the introduction to F.A. Hayek’s The Road to Serfdom, Milton Friedman wrote: “The argument for collectivism is simple if false; it is an immediate emotional argument. The argument for individualism is subtle and sophisticated; it is an indirect rational argument.”