How About We Try Redistributing the Ability to Create Wealth Instead?

After yesterday morning’s too-dreary Tatler post on Juan Williams succumbing to the propaganda of the Soros Stealth Socialists, perhaps it’s worth making the effort to highlight more encouraging news stories and insightful commentaries.

Oh. It’s Tuesday. That means a new Thomas Sowell column.

The opening sentence greets you with the polemical equivalent of morning sunrise:

With all the talk about “disparities” in innumerable contexts, there is one very important disparity that gets remarkably little attention — the disparity in the ability to create wealth.

How would America be different today if sentiments such as these were the standard among most of our academics? Hmm:

Gross inequalities in skills and achievements have been the rule, not the exception, on every inhabited continent and for centuries on end. Yet our laws and government policies act as if any significant statistical difference between racial or ethnic groups in employment or income can only be a result of their being treated differently by others.

Read the whole thing of course.

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If you want to “spread the wealth around” and see a general increase in the quality of life of all persons it requires nurturing the ability — and the will — to create wealth. This is not a task the federal government is capable of performing. To bring up a human being with the will to create, the moral clarity (and psychological and physical health) to live in a way so as not to sabotage himself, and the intellectual discipline to develop skills he can sell on the free market — these are the responsibilities of families and religious institutions.

One of the many facts lost in a world in which Rousseau’s Noble Savage finds vivid, glorified life in the Occupy Wall Street camps celebrated across MSNBC: Material wealth is only the physical manifestation of intangible mental wealth. A man who has acquired material abundance is just someone who has developed within himself the ability to spin straw into gold. He has assessed his abilities, resources, and opportunities and then aligned them with creating something of value for others in the community. The ability to perform this magic is generally disdained and misunderstood by our mainstream media muggles.