Whether its riots in Anthens or Obama’s 3rd World style demagoguery, the western world is in the grip of madness. This lunacy is called economic fairness or “spreading the wealth”. Generations of Westerners have been raise on the Progressive concept of equal outcome. This mentality has lead many European nations and the US to our current debt crisis. The public always wants more and is envious of those who have it. Rather than create pro-growth policies, politicians divide the pie. Well now the bill is coming due and too many people refuse to deal with reality.
Whether in the fights over the U.S. debt limit or the rioting in Athens, the common global theme is not poverty in absolute terms, but more often fairness — as in having about the same amount of things as others do.
Here in America, the months-long impasse over the national-debt ceiling continues. President Bush borrowed nearly $5 trillion in eight years. But President Obama easily trumped even that staggering figure with his plan to borrow over $6 trillion in his first four years in office. The architects of his economic policy — Austan Goolsbee, Peter Orszag, Christina Romer, and Larry Summers — have all resigned, and are now either back in tenured academia, making lots of money in the much-criticized revolving door, or writing op-eds about why the president’s plan isn’t working — or all three.
Now Obama is demanding higher taxes to prevent a government default — apparently on the logic that everything he did with his previously borrowed $5 trillion was vital to the republic and all elements of it must remain unquestioned.
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Abroad, the Greeks are still demonstrating, and occasionally rioting, over new austerity measures, angry that their northern-European creditors insist on having their $180 billion paid back, with interest.
Read the rest: The Global Fairness Madness
Victor David Hanson nailes it yet again. Many people view the governmnet as the means to get money. They believe that rather than accumulate wealth on their own, the governmnet owes them. This explains the resistance many have to making the hard choices to retsore fiscal sanity, which in turn leads to economic growth.
As Obama said to Joe the plumber, it’s about spreading the wealth. The correct attitude should be to foster wealth creation.
