American Thinker: Progressive Fallacy Number 667: Wealth Redistribution Creates Societal 'Harmony'

Progressive preachers probably identify with Chinese President Hu Jintao's intention to reduce his citizenry's income gap in order to create a "harmonious society."  The Communist's sentiment saturates the politics of the Democratic Party.

Not to be outdone by Hu, British Prime Minister David Cameron recently complained that unequal societies rank low as measured by "almost every quality-of-life indicator."  Cameron didn't mention that the most unequal societies are the ones uglified by the most tyrannical elitists.  The tyranny, not the inequality, degrades quality of life.  In a society of laws, such as the United States, even the poor live more comfortably than almost everyone in oppressed societies.  The truth is that in prosperous cultures, when income gaps increase, high earners' wealth pours into technological innovations, which raise quality of life for all people.

But truth means little to redistributionists.  Class warfare gospel dominates most "when the rich get richer, the poor get poorer" arguments.  Multi-billionaire Warren Buffett prescribes confiscatory inheritance taxes designed to humble the superwealthy.  French socialist Dominique Strauss-Kahn wants "a new global growth model" because "gaping income gaps threaten social and economic stability."  Barack Obama demonized high earners and faulted America for having "the greatest income inequality since any time since the gilded age."  Progressives in general envision economic justice -- indeed, social justice -- through forced "fairness" lenses.

http://www.americanthinker.com/2011/03/progressive_fallacy_number_667.html

Seeing Like a State - Mike Reid - Mises Daily

When I first read James C. Scott's Seeing Like a State, I was studying at a far-left Canadian university, and in one of its furthest-left graduate programs. I, like many of my instructors and peers, assumed that the proper goal of scholarly research was to help the state help its subjects — with everything from raising crops to raising children. I looked forward to a career as a wise academic providing the state with all the knowledge it needs to improve its subjects' condition. But my statist assumptions came to an end when I read, as Scott's subtitle puts it, How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed.

Through entertaining case studies of disastrous state projects, Scott argues that government planners in the 19th and 20th centuries developed a particular aesthetic obsession: they were frustrated by the untidy complexity of real human societies. And their attempts to "improve" human life usually boiled down to attempts to simplify it — to make it look nice from the point of view of the administrator.

http://mises.org/daily/5101/Seeing-Like-a-State

American Thinker: Madison and the Schoolkids

The writer asks an interesting question:

Why must some people be subjected to reality while others live like it doesn't exist? The reality of Wisconsin is that unemployment is around ten percent. My home state of Wisconsin is facing a projected $3.6-billion budget deficit. That's bigger than New York's deficit, and they have ten times more people than we do. We don't even have enough money to pay for $137 million's worth of this cycle's budget, which ends on June third.

In the real world, companies facing this proposition have few alternatives outside bankruptcy. Yet we all know that reality never affects the government, right? Wrong! Not anymore in Wisconsin. We have reached the point where we can either follow Greece into the future or make tough decisions now. We can no longer afford to pay 100% of government union pensions. Even if my union neighbor pays 5.8%, as the governor has requested in his recent bill, the taxpayer of Wisconsin will continue to pay for the rest of it.

Imagine that you are now a unionized government employee. The missing Democrat senators are found, they are escorted back to WI, and the governor's bill passes. Because the governor has asked unions to pay twelve percent (and in some situations, a few points higher) of their health care premiums, you get a call from your insurance agent. He informs you of an outstanding balance of $1,000. Thanks to Scott "Stalin" Walker, you now have to pay $120 of that balance. Your neighbor, the taxpayer, will have to pay only the remaining $880 instead of the complete $1,000.

Now you're back in the real world. Where in the nearly destroyed private sector can you get a health care premium like that?

American Thinker: Madison and the Schoolkids