Joyriding the Gravy Train of Economic Inequality
To summarize, state-enforced redistribution of wealth in the name of economic equality will always split society into two unequal classes: the corrupt autocratic elite and the powerless majority, impoverished by economic stagnation. Its utopian goals notwithstanding, the main characteristic of such a society is forced inequality. In order to function, the state must stifle dissent and subordinate previously independent institutions that helped to erect the collectivist edifice, such as the media, trade unions, trial lawyers, and other special interest groups. All special interests are superseded by the interests of the state, represented by an authoritarian leader.
The only real choice before us, therefore, is not between economic inequality and economic equality, but between two types of economic inequality.
One is the transparent, volunteer economic inequality of laissez-faire capitalism, where people are free to choose opportunities that they like — but that also lead to predictably different compensation. Whether it’s the intense life of a CEO taking risky decisions, or the safe but uneventful existence of a government clerk, or the relaxed bohemian lifestyle of an artist — these are free choices based on what best suits people’s character and makes them happy, taken with full knowledge of the potential risks and rewards. The CEO, the clerk, and the artist receive different compensation for their work, yet they are all equal before the law, which protects their contracts with society and with each other.
These are not rigid classes; people can change their lives if they want to, and their children do not have to follow in their footsteps if a certain lifestyle or profession does not match their idea of happiness. Their material rewards are just because they are determined by the free market, and the differences motivate everyone to be more creative and productive. This system has brought prosperity, opportunity, and happiness to most people, making them equal beneficiaries of liberty and human dignity, as long as they don’t succumb to crime, drugs, or class envy.
The other type of economic inequality is the state-enforced redistribution of wealth, which is never transparent. The only successful career in such a system can be made inside the state hierarchy, which sooner or later becomes a snake pit ruled by cronyism, nepotism, kickbacks, and backstabbing. Given the existence of two distinct and unequal classes, the citizens face only two basic choices: to be a silent slave of the corrupt establishment, or to join the establishment and climb up the career ladder towards the unearned rewards and further away from the faceless, “less equal” masses below. Equality before the law ceases to exist, along with individual choices, aspirations, dignity, opportunity, and liberty — all sacrificed to the utopian illusion of “fairness.” As a result, neither the masses nor their rulers are happy with their lives.
Some years ago I escaped from the shipwreck of the Soviet “workers’ paradise” and moved to the United States, making a conscious choice between the forced inequality of socialism and the volunteer material inequality of capitalism. I didn’t expect to be rich; I only wanted an opportunity to earn an honest income without sacrificing my dignity. I wanted the freedom to pursue my own choices and aspirations, not the ones prescribed by the state. I wanted to live in a country where my success or failure would depend on my own honest effort, not on the whim of a bureaucrat. I wanted my relations with people to be based on voluntary agreements, not mandatory requirements. And finally, I wanted my earnings to be protected by law from wanton expropriation.
America deserves credit for living up to the ideas of liberty and fighting off the redistributionist utopia for as long as it has. As crippling as the hosting of two opposing economic systems can be, it still remains a free country. But the balance is rapidly changing. Like many immigrants seeking freedom and opportunity in America, I find this change not simply misguided but personally painful. And so do all freedom-loving people elsewhere in the unfree world, for whom the mere existence of this country still gives hope and validates their belief in liberty and individual rights.
This is a brilliant article and a perspective that I try to share with as many Americans as I can. I lived in the former Yugoslavia (1 year), Bulgaria (2.5 years) and the former Soviet Union (2 years). The further east I went (direction is arbitrary here — it marks the further into communist practice), the worse it got. Many towns in the former USSR looked as if they were experiencing the aftermath of WWIII (kinda like our Democrat strongholds like Detroit that look like Katrina-ravaged New Orleans without the hurricane).
The truly evil thing is that the upper eschelon of the left wing KNOW that this is the way it will wind up.
Thank you. (P.S. I visited Armenia and the hard-working entreprenuer ethic that I noticed among them has made them more resilient than most [e.g., their Georgian neighbors]).
Fantastic article! In the end, we are both body and soul, endowed with a divine spark. Yet we are all unique. A doctrine of forced material equality has always failed and will always fail because it denies the essential qualities of each unique human being as God designed us. Equal outcomes in material posessions can never be achieved. It would be no more foolish to require equal outcomes in art or athletics. Make Tiger Woods play with an old set of rusty golf clubs from the back of my garage. Require Yo Yo Ma to play with two broken strings, just to make it “fair”!
Doctor Barack is like a quack physician, prescribing poison to cure the patient’s illness. The more of the “prescription” that is administered, the more sickly the patient becomes. Thus even more of the “prescription” must be administered, making the patient sicker still.
Yet the quack, in his arrogance and deadly disregard for human life, keeps on distributing his phony pharmaceuticals. After all, he is the town physician, at the top of the heap in his community. His gigantic ego will not allow him to give up his favored status, or even consider the thought that his prescriptions may be the problem.
What other solution is there than to bury his mistakes, lie about the cause of death, bribe the medical board, and go in league with other quacks to make sure that you protect each other?
Better to be a Big Man Around Town in a community of sick people than an Average Joe in a healthy village.
You are wrong to think they are not trying to redistribute the spiritual wealth. How dare we hold to a high moral standard which others obviously incapable of living up to. We need to lower our standards. Not only should (for example) homosexuality be tlerated, but rather, it should be ENDORSED. Let’s not get too uptight sexually. All should have free license, and be free to wear their perversity on their sleeves in society. And so on.
The redistribution here is evident. It is evinced by the obvious sinking to the lowest common denominator where all are equally destitute of morality. It is the end to which all redistribution is always consigned.
This envy of which you write is really properly called coveting. Class-warfare is nothing but institutionalized coveting. Once they have you coveting, they urge you to steal, via “redistribution”. They don’t call it stealing, because if they did, people would wake to the awful reality.
Who would urge you to covet and to steal? The Devil comes to mind. Even if you don’t believe in Him, you understand the allegorical Devil. Ask yourself, “Where would you place Him on the political spectrum… on the Right or Left?” Check some issues. Pro-abortion? On the Left. Pro-homosexuality and gay marriage? On the Left. Bigger government and less freedom? On the Left. Redistribution, aka covet and steal? On the Left. The Devil is a Democrat.
This is why the Left never argues the right and wrong of things, because they would always lose, because they always choose wrong. So they deflect, distract, make the argument about something else. It’s why they defend such as Polanski. (It’s not rape-rape. Jeez!) It’s why they allow tax-cheats to remain in power. They’ve chosen their political ideology to supplant the proper morality. As long as you toe the Party-line, they will forgive “moral” failings. If they didn’t, they would have to face up to the gross immorality of their agenda.
The way to defeat them is to absolutely shame them in the public eye. Make it about Right and Wrong! Don’t discuss policy particulars. Always bring the discussion back to Right and Wrong. Right and Wrong. Right and Wrong. Right and wrong. They will always lose. Family values is a winner.
Marc Malone you are right!
And my response to your comments: Amen.
An excellent article.
Yet again, a superb article. Thank you so much.
Thanks again, Oleg.
Marc Malone: I wish it were so. Remember Bush Sr.’s VP, Dan Quayle, the GOP’s spear point on “family values”.
They turned it into a dirty joke.
Sorry. Disagree. Comes a time the gloves must come off, or get out.
Go Galt.
fantastic article
Oleg,
Another great article! Hope you’re planning to write a book as an expansion of the series of articles you’ve written. It should be a best seller.
Oleg, I want to give you kudos as well. Your writings here are fantastic. They’re only as dry as our apathy toward freedom. May we become extremists in defense of liberty.
The left is all about despair, envy and the eternal quest for fairness. If we followed their nostrums about how to make life more equitable, there would be no need for the elites of the left to exist. They on the left need a constant drumbeat of fear, envy and victim hood to keep them relevant. The leftist creed is responsible for more misery and death than all the right wing coups, dictatorships and juntas put together. Curious how all the noble intentions of the left result in such disastrous results. Even more curious is how the leaders of the left assume the trappings of power and privilege once they achieve control. I would hazard a guess that the price of enlightenment is to provide them with a comfortable and privileged lifestyle. We have stopped being an industrious and prosperous people in order to be seduced by the lie that we cannot be all we can be because outside forces are keeping us down. It may be that these forces are those of the left in order to keep their agenda and relevance going.
Oleg Atbashian is truely an excellent writer with much good to say. I look forward to reading much more from this insightful person.
This was a very good read again! Thank you.
Also, the ‘cultural elites’ would NEVER live next door to someone they supposedly have ‘compassion’ for. Ahem.
Class envy is ‘jealousy’…the green-eyed monster.
People want things YESTERDAY already rather than working and toiling and striving! What happened to, “If you want something badly enough, work for it and make it happen”?
Also, what some people seem to ‘forget’ is that there are people who just don’t want to work. Period. There are lazy people who are more than happy to live off the government teat forever as well as their offspring etc.
Redistribution creates a self-perpetuating cycle of able-bodied people who will never amount to anything in life because there is no impetus or drive. Going a little hungry is not such a bad thing…it DRIVES you to do something about it!
Great article; it highlights the main source of all statist ideologies (which require a scapegoat—for the USSR the West and counter-revolutionaries, for the Nazis the untermensch and anarchists, for the modern Menshevik collectivists the ‘idle rich’) I’d like to make a clarification, though: jealousy, covetousness and envy are often confused. Jealousy is wanting to keep something that is already yours, envy is wanting something someone else has, and covetousness is wanting to expropriate that something for yourself so that you deprive your neighbour out of spite. Jealousy and envy are not necessarily bad in and of themselves: they drive much of economic progress (I want my neighbour’s car, but he won’t sell it to me—so I get my own).
Thought provoking. Thanks for sharing.
thanks you OLEG
Join ACORN and/or SEIU and never have to work again, comrade! Heil “social justice”!
In the thread about Dunn, one leftist troll asked “does the right actually know what Communism/Maoism/Stalinism is?” ‘Cause we conservatives actually talk about those ideologies as if they were, gee, bad.
I notice this is a troll-free thread. Even the resident trolls don’t have the gall to tell a former citizen of the USSR that Communism is really terrific.
Oleg Atbashian, you have done excellent work here. My father was an Democrat, but a strongly anti-Communist, pro-defense one. As the son of Prague-born immigrants, believe me, he thanked God daily that he had escaped the horrors of both WWII and the Iron Curtain.
Chomp, slurp, belch. “Someday, comrade — chomp — all of you little people — gulp — will live like this. Now go away.” Gurgle, chew, sigh.
My grandfather is a veteran of the Polish Resistance. He was captured and sent to a concentration camp. After the war, he returned to Poland, which fell under Soviet occupation. There, he met my grandmother, got married, and my mother was born. Some time later, he fled Poland for Austria to find work. When he saved up enough money, he sent for his wife and daughter, and they spent a year and a half in Vienna living in a one room apartment, saving up money to immigrate to the US. They arrived in America in the midst of a recession, and it was difficult to find work. Nevertheless, my grandparents persevered, soon finding work in a flower shop in Pennsylvania. They made decent money, but not enough to send my mother to college. However, the long hours they worked had left my mother with responsibilities most teenagers didn’t have. She worked her way through college, graduating in five years with a dual degree in Finance/Accounting.
Today, my grandfather has been forced into retirement by the economy. Men like him don’t take well to retirement- they get stir crazy. He tried retirement a few years ago, got bored, and decided to go back to work, at least part time. My grandparents didn’t come to America to be spoon fed. They came yearning to work hard, breathe free, and build a better life for themselves and their daughter. And you know what? They succeeded. They got to buy a house and pay it off, watch their daughter graduate from high school and then college, and get married. They got to see the birth of their two grandsons, see us get baptized, make First Communion and then Confirmation, and see me graduate from high school. My grandmother, God rest her soul, attended my high school graduation in a wheelchair because she had wasted away from congestive heart failure to the point that she couldn’t walk or stand for more than maybe thirty minutes. She died about four months later. They returned to Poland several times, and my grandmother’s ashes are interred in the graveyard of the church she attended as a girl, the church her nephews still attend. They rejoiced at the liberation of Poland from the Communists, but it was never a serious option for them to stay in Poland; there just wasn’t anything for them there.
My grandparents were always quite generous. I blushed at the size of some of the gifts they gave me. I suppose you can do that when your house is paid off and you don’t feel like retiring.
#4 Never for Obama – Thanks for the expression of appreciation. Nice to know I had an effect.
#7 pelaut – No. It will work. One must hammer away at it. Quayle and Bush 41 did not. They… um… quailed. :p They did not stand tall. They let the Leftist media define the debate. One must be committed to the fight. Committed moderate is a self-contradiction.
Oleg, add mine to the kudos on this thread, but here’s something else:
even though you qualify that the classes in question are not inflexible, to call it “class envy” is still a misnomer. There are places where the moneyed and the ruling classes are just that, and apart from privilege of birth to enter them is very very hard. Soviet ruling classes’ children had no opportunity to even meet their plebeian coevals at any point of their school, play, mating etc. I imagine the same holds for the Miterrands et al.
“Class envy” is a proper name for those situations. With the U.S. redistributionists, where opportunity is still here for a bright and hardworking youth to become a millionaire at one of many pursuits, we have simple “money envy”. “You have a lot, that’s not fair!”. Everything they know they learned in kindergarten. Get guys with guns to take away and divide. This is not “opportunity envy” which class envy partially is.
I’m reminded of soviet grocers who came to San Francisco and toured a supermarket. Their major complaint was the “inefficiency” in stocking shelves with more than one brand, since that “impeded” distribution.
Worlds apart.
Thank you.
Red Square…..your words, your humor and your shared experiences mean more to me than you will ever know.
I’m very proud to have met you … albeit over the phone.
I believe our country has been saved with your humor and disaster postponed.
Agitprop…more powerful than most weapons of mass destruction.
What is needed is a PeopleCube bumper sticker on every car!
Here is another example of ‘unfair’…
My husband works very hard for a living and when he’s done laboring with his sweat and muscles he gets paid for that job and that’s that.
I, on the other hand can create fonts that I can sell at myfonts.com and get paid FOREVER for that font just so long as someone wants to buy that font once in a while. My labor for a single, intellectual effort can be paid for infinitely and when I die, my daughter can receive my profits well after I’m gone and so on and so on.
As my husband says, “Honey, you’re the smart one. Make some money with it.”
My husband is proud of my smarts and isn’t jealous that I’m smarter than him.
But, look who’s ahead? MY HUSBAND! He’s the hard worker and he’s come VERY far even though he works with his hands.
See?
Life is unfair but somehow it works out in the end.
So, Oleg, you got here just in time to watch America’s socialists and fascists in the so-called Democratic Party turn the U. S. into a Soviet-style socialist nation. Better start thinking about New Zealand, or perhaps Texas or Alaska, when they secede.
Sometime in the near future, Americans will be saying that they know what it’s like living in a country like that.
Oleg,
Excellent article. You’ve finally hit the nail on the head. Economic opportunity for all, not just the few.