Voltimand,

Never thought to approach it from that angle. Interesting. It does expose a dimension of the problem. But it isn’t the only way of looking at it. Envy is one angle. There are others as well. Not all socialists are envious people. I certainly wasn’t. People who know me well, and known me for my entire life, would never say that I was afflicted by that, or by the fear of envy. There were other more complicated motivations involved, but that would require a lengthy post involving a lot of detail about my journey through the early part of my life. I don’t think it relevant, or interesting, so I’ll pass.

For me, socialism is epistemologically false. It fails, always has failed, and always will fail. And when you are truly concerned about how to lift up the poor, you don’t get them out of the shit by simply doing what Obama wants to do, what Marx wanted to do, what Lenin tried to do, and what Castro tried to do. Socialism rests on the fallacy of zero-sum economic thinking (an error Obama falls into as well, per his own tidbits of comments dropped along the way).

You have to grow the pie. And you do have to have a society that creates conditions for opportunity and freedom of action.