Tuesday, September 27, 2011

Giving Back

"Recipients of transfers tend to become less self-reliant and more dependent on government payments. When people can get support without exercising their own abilities to discover and respond to opportunities for earning income, those abilities atrophy. People forget - or never learn in the first place - how to help themselves, and eventually some of them simply accept their helplessness."

Robert Higgs

Necessarily, when any gubment moves to "redistribute wealth," it must take that wealth from someone who earned it and give it to someone who did not. In fact, there are those who feel entitled to other people's labor and wealth!

But what happens when wealth is so taken and so received? Those with gumption, and drive, and talent, and ability, will earn back (not take) what they had earned in the first place!* Why is that? Because they are who they are!

And those who take and wait to receive are who they are! Or have become who they have been encouraged to become... This is not a value that founded this country and made it so great and so strong.

Can such things as initiative and desire and dreams be distributed, or redistributed, equally? No.

Does this sound harsh? Is redistribution a correct or an incorrect principle? Read the Parable of the Talents! To do that you would have to look in Matthew 25 or Luke 19. But trust me, the principle is there. It might surprise you!

* These are they who are asked to "give back" to society! I disagree. They are giving! Those who should give back are the robbers and thieves, the predators, committers of fraud, the liars and general scum, those with disregard for others and their property - the law breakers! - they, THEY, are the ones who should give back. THAT is redistribution I can live with... What's that parable say again?

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