Quality of Wealth

The Left uses wealth envy to raise people in revolution.

This draws the right into defending wealth. After all, it is through the creation of wealth that a society advances. No great ill arises when those who produce wealth share in the product of the doings.

Sadly, the right forgets that not all riches arise from production. Most of the great fortunes in history were accumulated through plunder. This new trend of politicians becoming mega-millionaires after office is a case in point. Cap and Trade will put billions into the pockets of Al Gore, GE and other supporters of the bill.

Big Pharmacy, big medicine and big insurance will make out like bandits with HR3200 ... which diverts money from actually care into the political system.

Not all wealth is created equally. A society thrives when its economic and political system is producing real wealth, it flounders when its diverted into the short term profits of plunder.

To thrive as a society, we must find better ways to differentiate between wealth created through production and plunder.

Today we see great fortunes made by insider trading, naked short selling, ponzi schemes and other dubious methods. Those producing goods are overwraught with constraints and taxes.

I wish Libertarians and Conservatives spent more time talking about the quality of wealth.

It is hard to do, because any serious discussion gets flooded by foul smelling progressives trolls trying to re-enforce the Marxist theme of wealth envy. I think people would find answers to the problems of the day if they discussed issues of quality.

For example, is the billions that we throw into insurance quality wealth?

Workers do not have equity in their health policy. The trillions thrown into the coffers of insurance companies does not create the same quality of wealth as we would have as products that helped workers build equity to cover health expenses.

Of course there is not a clean line between low and high quality wealth. Quality is often not a matter of an absolute but a matter of balance.

Radicalization can be achieved simply by overemphasizing one aspect of the economy. For example, one can radicalize an economy by over-emphasizing the role of capital, the role of competition, or the role of risk and security. The Marxist doctrine of wealth envy is designed to over emphasize the discussion of the distribution of wealth.

I became depressed in school as I found progressive professors teaching businesses practices guaranteed to create systemic flaws in the economy. For example, professors would teach impressionable young minds that doing business is an art of war where no rules beyond the concept of dominate or be dominated apply.

A business professor who mistook me for a progressive explained that he knew perfectly well that what he was teaching business students would lead businesses to ruin, but he hated the free market and wanted to see it fail. Teaching bad business techniques was his part in the prolitarian struggle.

Conservatives are often like those two ACORN workers entrapped into helping set up a prostitution ring. Conservatives get so caught up into defending the wealthy that they fail to distinguish the plunderers from the producers.

Anyway, I've long felt that conservatives make a mistake in the blanket defense of wealth. This line of defense caused conservative leaders to miss the point that many of the nation's wealthiest of the last half century (Soros, Madoff, etc.) have been gaining their fortune through plunder and not production. Naked Short Sales, Credit Default Swaps and Hedge Funds contribute little to the wealth of the nation, but make the plunderers using the techniques billionaires.

BTW, taxing the rich does not solve the problems of plunder. Taxation generally burdens true wealth production for the benefit of the plunderers. The solutions that arise from those bartering in the trade of wealth envy often favor plunder over production.