We Can Not Allow Class Warfare To Work Again!

This column originally appeared at Big Jolly Politics:

Thomas Sowell notes in this article, Trashing Achievements, a very corrosive form of class warfare has emerged in this campaign from desperate Democratic candidates from the courthouse to the White House. For instance, Sowell recounts this recent statement from the Democratic Senate candidate in Massachusetts,

To cheering audiences, Professor Warren says, “there is nobody in this country who got rich on his own. Nobody. You build a factory out there, good for you, but I want to be clear. You moved your goods to market on the roads the rest of us paid for. You hired workers that the rest of us paid to educate.”

This argument is wrong for many reasons, including:

• It assumes that your successful neighbors don’t pay taxes—but they do. And, what’s more, no matter where you slice it—the top 1%, 2%, 5% or 10%—the earners at these levels pay most of the taxes collected at every level of government in this country.

• It assumes that the group Professor Warren calls “the rest of us” pays all the taxes that pay for the schools and the infrastructure in this country—but they don’t. While virtually everyone who has a job pays into Social Security and Medicare, those programs don’t pay for the education and the infrastructure that Professor Warren is talking about. As for the federal income taxes that do contribute to pay for those programs, almost one half of the country’s population is exempted from paying those taxes.

• It assumes that the problem with government budgets is that we aren’t raising enough revenue to pay for education and infrastructure, but those programs are not driving the increase in the public debt. What is driving the widening gap between tax revenue and public spending are the growing costs of social entitlements, public-sector pensions, layers of unnecessary bureaucrats, mounds of new regulations, and fraud and waste in the procurement process.

• Finally, and most importantly, it assumes that government in our society always came first, and that all we have accomplished is a result of government giving us benefits. But any “benefit” bestowed by government had to come from taxes, and those taxes had to come from citizens or their businesses, and those citizens and businesses had to accumulate property and income to pay for those taxes. In the end, it is the source of private property and income—jobs and business, from the farm to the town square to the factory—that came first to pay for government.

In fact, Professor Warren’s argument turns the history of this country on its head. The national government did not even appear in the United States until the colonists were here for almost 150 years—living and working on farms and in small communities. In fact, from the 1630s to the 1750s, the European governments with colonies here largely left the colonists to govern themselves. It is the productive farmers and businessmen who owned property who paid the first taxes from their earnings to pay for the schools and the canals and the roads. They continued to pay the taxes to enlarge the infrastructure during the 19th and early 20th Centuries, and they were the ones who shouldered the burden of 70%-90% marginal tax rates for decades after the New Deal programs were enacted. And it still takes the production of private income from the efforts of the private job creators to pay for all those schools and roads that Professor Warren talks about.

Government didn’t come first in America. Productive, entrepreneurial citizens always have come first in this country.

The left’s class warfare rhetoric shows what is at stake in this election. If the Democrats don’t understand our country’s history, and don’t understand the consequences of the tax and spending policies they have enacted, they can’t be trusted to fix the problems that face this country. If they do understand our history and these consequences, then they are lying to the American people to stay in office—and we must not allow them to succeed.

Not this time, and not ever again.

It is time to move beyond this corrosive class rhetoric if we are ever going to stabilize and modernize our country to meet the challenges of the 21^st Century in a way that preserves and strengthens the inalienable rights we’ve been given.

It is time for a change in White House and the U.S. Senate.

It is time for all good citizens “to come to the aid of their countrymen” and make this change in the November Election.

A Basic “Conflict of Visions”

This column originally appeared at Big Jolly Politics:

In 1987, Thomas Sowell published a landmark book entitled “A Conflict of Visions,” in which he identified and explained the historical and intellectual roots of the differences between the modern worldview of Western liberals and that of Western conservatives. Since that first work, Sowell has published other works expanding on this theme. For any conservative who wants to fully understand the philosophical root cause of our political and cultural divisions with the modern left, these books are essential for your reading list.

But I want to focus on a more basic and practical conflict of visions facing us in 2012, and challenge you to listen to what our leaders say over the next two evenings. As you know, tonight the four remaining Republican Presidential candidates will debate in Florida on national television, to be followed tomorrow night by President Obama’s State of the Union speech. As you listen to these five men, I ask you to listen for their views on one topic: what provides for the general wellbeing of the people of this country? If you listen closely, the answer to this question will illustrate the basic conflict of visions between our two parties, and what is at stake in this election.

I believe you will find that the four Republicans, though they each will articulate the answer differently, will agree that the general well-being of the people is provided by private-sector jobs: jobs that employ people; jobs that provide for families and churches and neighborhoods; jobs that expand wealth by creating new goods and services, and return on investments to be re-invested to create new jobs; jobs that provide tax revenue for our infrastructure and schools; and jobs that channel and nourish individuals’ energies, hopes, dreams and ambitions. In turn, they see the role of government, like a private-sector business sees its staff or administrative departments—necessary to provide security and support for the people engaged in the creation of revenue for the company, or in this case for the creation of wealth by the private sector, but not as the primary creator of that revenue or wealth. For more than a generation, the private sector has been reducing the footprint of staff and administrative jobs, and making those functions more responsive to the needs of the people producing the goods and services, and the revenue, of their businesses, and conservatives believe that government at all levels should be similarly reformed. It doesn’t matter whether the conservative has been a lifetime elected official, a private-equity investor, or an entrepreneurial professional, conservatives share this fundamental view.

But what you will hear from President Obama is a completely different vision. He and his fellow travelers believe that government provides for the well-being of the people, and that all institutions, including private-sector businesses, function at the pleasure and direction of the government. Whether it is a re-distributive stimulus to try and spark employment, re-distributing resources to increase public-sector employment, or increasing taxes and then re-distributing them from providing security and infrastructure to providing entitlements, the underlying vision is that government owns and controls your wealth to use as it sees fit to provide for the “masses.”

Let’s see how the left’s vision works in the real world. Take public elementary and secondary education. The production of education occurs in the classroom between the teacher and the student. While we have re-distributed so much money to school districts over the last generation that we by far lead the world in per pupil expenditures, look at where it has gone. It hasn’t gone to the classroom, but instead to bloat the size and scope of staff and administration and their facilities to the extent that in many school districts the number of staff and administrators now equals or exceeds the number of teachers. When government sees itself as providing for the well-being of society, it increases its size, and runs every agency the same way—the perpetuation of the agency through increasing employment of staff and administration is seen as more important than the production of the service the agency was designed to provide. Because of this inherent inefficiency, little or no effective service is provided, and the wellbeing of the people is not furthered. Rather than reform this model, the left’s insane answer is to just continue to increase the wealth redistribution and the size of government until they “get it right.” The joke on all of us is that they’ll never get it right following this model.

The left’s model—its vision—simply doesn’t work in the real world over the long run. Not in Europe, and not here. And, as we are seeing in Greece, and throughout the Western world, we can’t afford (culturally, economically, or politically) indulging this vision anymore.

Regardless of who you are supporting in the Republican primaries this year, remember that it is this basic conflict of visions between the importance of a private sector job and the importance of bureaus and bureaucrats, which is at the foundation of our battle this year for our nation’s future.