Dakota Beacon

It is not often that I tune in to NPR, but yesterday I happened upon a discussion there concerning the shrinking middle class.  That conversation encapsulated and showcased the eternal fallacy of the Left’s view of wealth.

Examples of this perceived shrinkage followed – a woman who first lost her factory job when it was moved to China, then retrained as a medical coder and then lost that job due to out-sourcing (overseas, again?).  Then we moved on to the plight of the single mother struggling to make ends meet in an inflationary climate.  The suggested remedies for these distressing conditions included raising taxes on the “rich” and government providing better, more comprehensive services to the “poor”.    The participants in this discussion were apparently oblivious to the contradiction implicit in their own arguments.

Clearly, if a manufacturer moves its factory to China, factors in that decision point to a disadvantage in remaining in North Carolina or Ohio.  High taxes and heavy regulation in the U.S. and cheap labor in China determine the fate of American manufacturing jobs.  So the solution is to put higher taxes on the “rich”?  And certainly on “business”!  I supposed I could be polite and use the term “counterintuitive”, but let’s just be blunt and say “stupid and illogical” and leave it at that.

And when we move on to the unhappy situation of the single mothers and impoverished children, rather than concocting devices to keep these unfortunates where they are and breed more of the same, why not examine the causes and strive to counter them with real solutions?  Children need their parents.  Mothers are needed at home to care for, teach and nurture the child.  Fathers are needed to provide for their financial support and provide a home for them, as well as supply emotional support and model responsible behavior for their children.  Shortcuts like subsidized daycare serve only to enable the financially and morally crippling and corrupting effects of irresponsible parenting.  Yes.  Single mothers have a heavy load.  Sure, they need help now.  But while attempting to assist them in the short run we, as a society, should be encouraging traditional marriage and stable and self-sustaining homes for these mothers and children.  That is, if we want to see a resurgence of a larger, healthier middle class.

But then we must ask those arguing on the Left for increased public assistance and higher taxes and more regulations which require employers to shut down or move overseas, what they REALLY WANT.

Some on the Left are just simple people who never stopped to consider cause and effect.  To them “wealth” is a static entity.  There’s a nominal $1,000 on the game board.  It’s just a matter of who “gets it” or who takes it away from someone else.  If the “rich" have an advantage, then the “poor” must have less of the wealth.    But, in fact, wealth is a dynamic concept, ever changing, growing; shrinking, even disappearing altogether.  If an American manufacturer finds a financial incentive to set up shop in, say, Massachusetts, he will do so.  He’ll employ local New Englanders and those who move there to work for him.  He won’t pack up and move to China.  If a medical supplier is allowed to make a profit in America it will stay in America.  If, on the other hand, Obamacare steps in and prevents this with excessive taxation, burdensome regulation and even destruction of the market for the product, then it will either cease operation or move.  An agency providing medical coding, finding that high labor costs, increased demands for “benefits”, higher taxes and over-regulation are destroying its profit, will take its operation to Bombay rather than stay in Virginia, for example. 

Any student of Adam Smith or Ayn Rand will answer clear-eyed and forthrightly that the marketplace is the determiner of wealth.  Wealth is NOT static.  It is created, it is lost.  It grows or diminishes as society imposes its will.  We don’t need to go all the way back to Adam Smith or Ayn Rand, for that matter.  We can just ask Captain Obvious -  he’ll tell you, “Money talks.  And with Obama in the presidency and the Left at the helm, what it says is ‘Auf Wiedersehen’, ‘Sayonara’ and ‘Hasta la vista’. “

There are, of course, other elements on the Left.  There is a cynical, malevolent class on the Left that knows this as well as the most Ayn Rand-oriented Libertarian.  They are well aware of the ravages of crippling an economy through regulation and taxation and the devastating moral and financial consequences of using government’s coercive powers to disrupt and destabilize the family unit.  They know who suffers, who the victims of these programs are.  But they exploit this sense of helplessness and hopelessness to pose as the “rescuer” in a kind of bizarre institutionalized form of Munchausen Syndrome, perpetrating a wrong so as to profit by appearing to “right” it.

This is why government programs, from the supply of Obamaphones to the hideous end result of the EPA and Obamacare survive at the incalculable loss and ultimate destruction of America’s wealth, and with that it’s moral fortitude . . . and the middle class.  Those who harbor this cynical, post-American view of society seek to control others.  They, too, believe there are only ten jacks on the sidewalk and they want them all for themselves. 

With the loss of our middle class and our nation’s wealth and freedom comes another loss – the waste of lives and of talent and the hope and future of a great nation.