Respectability

Not too long ago it was considered a disgrace to be “on the dole.”  Today, according to The Wall Street Journal[i], 49.1% of the population lives in a household where at least one member receives some form of government benefit.  That statistic is staggering.

Yet does this mean that folks need to “be on the dole” because they are worse off than they were 40 years ago when “being on the dole” was frowned upon by society?  Consider the following facts.

• “Three quarters of Americans with incomes below the official poverty level have air-conditioning (only 1/3 of Americans had air-conditioning in 1971)
• 97% of poor people own color television sets (fewer than half the population had a television in 1971)
• 73% of those considered to be living in poverty own a microwave oven (less than 1% of the population owned a microwave oven in 1971)
• 98% of those whose income is below the national poverty level own a DVD or CD player (nobody owned these products in 1971 as these products didn’t even exist)
• 72% of the declared “poor” in America today own a motor vehicle”[ii]

Of course the idea that wealth can be evenly distributed or apportioned to everybody fairly in a society is a fraud and everybody should know this.  But the grandiose assumption that government can accomplish such a feat is based on the idea that there is only a specific amount of wealth which is available...regardless of production.  Let me be very candid with you here.  Such an idea is a lie.

Contemplate a field of wild berries or herbs, or any other product that nature produces without human effort.  How does this product reach a point where it creates any value to anybody without labor?  It can’t!  You can either expend the effort to pick and eat the produce for yourself or you can expend the human effort, also called labor or human value, to pick this naturally occurring product and market the harvest to others.  The latter provides a benefit to both the purchaser and the producer.  This is because those who can’t “afford” the time or effort necessary to harvest for themself can still benefit from those who do “afford” the time and effort to do so.  And those who afford themselves the time and effort are benefited from the price that the purchaser pays them.  Therefore, both the one expending the human effort to harvest the produce and the one who purchases the produce once it is harvested is benefited in this process.  And the amazing fact is that the produce would have gone to waste (been of no value) had the human effort not been expended to harvest it.

Now apply the grandiose idea of wealth redistribution.  Whose wealth?  Who created this wealth?  In other words who spent the human effort (value) to create something of worth out of something that had no worth?  And why should that which has been created by one person be taken away from them and distributed to another without due compensation?  Such behavior only debases the human effort (value) which has provided us with a civilization instead of a barbaric social existence. 

The fact that so many of today’s society are bankrolled by government redistribution plans tells us that a less productive, more barbaric and less cultured society awaits us in the near future.  And we can see the beginning signs of this even today.  The process of altering this inevitable course of human events is to share with others how they can create more human value which will produce a better civilization for all instead of empowering certain citizens to steal the human value of others to subsidized their standard of living.

In the past this honorable objective was accomplished through education and entrepreneurship.  Today our education system has been largely turned upside down because the schooling system employs many who’ve never produced anything in their life time to teach others to do the same.  And entrepreneurs are punished and penalized by burdensome bureaucracies which prevent them from producing products that could benefit everybody if left unfettered.   Then when an entrepreneur does succeed they are taxed to the point where the product produced becomes too costly to benefit anybody but the government. 

And I suppose you don’t get really excited about working hard and having your ability to earn a profit abridged by regulations which divert your profits to others who’ve opted to let you work hard while they simply stand by and exercise their right to vote in favor of  redistributing your profits for their benefit. 

Value is created out of what exists.  And the same is true about money.  When government authorizes the printing of large sums of money they are simply redistributing your wealth without your consent.  The only way to stop this is to learn to use your dollar more than once.  This is what bankers learned and master, at your expense, hundreds of years ago.  Today you can learn to do the same thing with your own money.  Wealth should never be distributed except voluntarily through charity or benevolence.  Stop allowing your hard human effort to be wasted and learn how charity really ought to work.  When you do the world will become a better place for everybody.  That’s just the way human value works.

Tomas McFie

[i] Real Time Economics, The Wall Street Journal, March 26, 2012
[ii] The Thomas Sowell Reader, Thomas Sowell