I must first clarify the term "Equality" because nearly everyone would claim the term as some form of an ideal social goal. My use of the term here is exactly in the way socialists and communists use it. That is, as the states' responsibility to guarantee all its citizens have equal rights and access to wealth and services regardless of their contributions to their culture and society. This is in direct opposition to the United States Constitution and government and their founding fathers' intended meaning of the word. They desired to ensure every citizens' equal opportunities to aspire to positions of power and wealth through the fruit of their own labors. It really comes down to this difference whether you should count yourself among the Socialists or Capitalists. Does "equal" mean equal opportunity or equal results? The free society (at all times, as much as possible without interfering with the desires of his neighbor, all men should be free to do with his property and time as he pleases) vs. the egalitarian society (from each according to his ability, to each according to his need)
If your version of equality matches the Socialist's, I have news for you. Equality breeds hopelessness. The incentive to improve his lot is removed from the individual under your Utopian plan to take from him the fruit of his labor and donate it to the lazy and stupid. Its one thing for him to choose to donate a portion of his earnings and what portion that will be, its quite another for a third party to command a donation and what size it will be. Not only does the worker lose desire to do the work, he now resents both the needy and the third party authority and will seek to hide his earnings. Failing that, he will refrain from performing well enough to be thought a donor. Your incentives reduce the total labor output resulting further into a total reduction in national wealth. We can be equally impoverished but we cannot be supplied with equal increase. Now here's the picture, party one creates wealth to prepare for a rainy day, party two has done only what was required to prepare for each meal, then comes party 3 to force from party one a portion of his preparation and then pockets half and gives half to party 2. No one is encouraged or improved in this scenario. The giver resents the giving because it was forced out of his hand, the recipient resents the gift because its never enough to change his station, and the benevolent politician or 3rd party requires ever more wealth to trade for his privelege, power and popularity. In the standards laid forth by Martin Luther King, if we are to judge one another by the content of our character, then your Utopia reduces the quality of character of each and every citizen and like any pure democracy, will eventually come crashing down around our mutual ears.
Compare that to the free society of equal opportunity where each man is responsible for his choices. One man works because he's hungry and another works toward greater wealth so does more than is necessary for his immediate needs. Having worked doubly hard and saved over years, he risks that surplus on investments or opens a business or creates a new invention. With the risked wealth and new business or endeavor, he continues to put in far more time and energy than do his hand to mouth counterparts. One man has wealth handed to him from his forebears, what is that to you? Obviously, there is no such thing as pure equal opportunity, any more than there is perfect equal results, (with politbureaus and the like) however each man's labors create wealth and that wealth is his reward, an incentive to continue and improve those labors. Even so, your complaints about unfair reward are usually unfounded, as though there were only so much wealth to be had, so much work and reward to go around. He did not steal wealth or prevent another from obtaining wealth, instead he increased the wealth stockpile. if the wealthy invest his wealth in new business or expanded business, then every man in the nation has an improved quality of life becuase that wealth was used to generate more stuff, a higher standard of living, more wealth which is now being circulated and utilized in the form of goods, information and skilled services. That is the enviornment which allows Google to start in somebody's garage and then grow into the gargantuan success it has become. The problem is now, that environment is shrinking. Competition is disallowed by gargantuan companies going to Washington with corruption in their hearts and vast quantities of money in their pockets to ensure regulations will prevent the next little upstart garage business from taking over their market share with a better idea. Still, you complain about unfairness to people who sacrificed to get what they have. People who willingly give away large portions of their wealth voluntarily as well as their personal time, and they do this far more often than you do it. Your blame game is unfair. Your envious thoughts of theivery is unfair.
Now let us address fears which prevent us abandoning the imaginary guarantees of Socialism and return once again to the ideals of our founding fathers, of free men shouldering the responsibility of their own choices along with their consequences rather than free governing elite reigning with little if any limitation. Order vs. chaos; "Without the state to mandate order our society is doomed to a greater risk of accidents and much loss of time and wealth due to inefficiency." In actuality, studies prove just the opposite is true. In most cases, the complexites of national and international transportation and economics or any other "CRISIS" issue used to increase government power, prevent central planners from fully anticipating eventual or even likely consequences of centralized control designs. A central contoller cannot adjust his gargantuan program to the individual needs nearly as fast as those needs develop, neither can he know what those needs are nor how to meet those needs with the available services and supplies. It is much more efficient to leave such decisions as locally as possible.
"Only the government can spend big enough and organize big enough to manage a military operation or national education, etc.," Well first, Liberals are the first to demand cuts to military development much less action. So this is a strawman argument but I'll address it anyway because this is the one of the few venues I want the government spending on and in control of. The main reason being it is one of the few responsibilities the founders attributed solely to state authorities along with police and justice systems. Even though I think private enterprise could do a better job managing these systems, I am willing to example to the Liberals submission to the authority of the Constitution. However, the department of education has only witnessed in its entire existence, the deplorable retraction of skill levels in every demographic in America. Literally, the country was better educated without a dept. of education than with. Such is the case with every program the government has endeavored to employ. Government is quite literally a necessary evil. The less of it we can get by with the better off we will be.
"But the markets fluctuate wildly causing horrendous economic depressions where people starve to death by the millions." Not quite. Markets do fluctuate, but the Great Depression was not just a result of market influences. Government intervened and exaggerated the effects of normal ebb and flow market forces. We are experiencing the same thing today. Government intervened and mandated risky loans to low wage earners for big ticket finance for homes. So government first created the wealth bubble. Then when the markets corrected the situation through collapse and withdrawel (national wealth literally shrank because property was over-valued) the government intervened again and begain printing and spending trillions of dollars in bailouts. Understand that paper currency is valued on trust, and the greater availability of currency the less value. So with every new printed and circulated dollar, all the other dollars out there were worth that much less. The government's effort literally devalued the national currency by one third in just under 2 years. It only took so long because the entities being bailed out were mostly banks and banks did what banks do when investments are risky. They stacked the bailout money in their vaults and tried waiting for sunnier economic weather. The Investors watched business investments evaporating and began withdrawing the investments to switch to textiles and hard goods like precious metals. The government is repeating the exact course that took us through the Great Depression. What nobody seems to remember is the depression of 1923. That's the one the government did not intervene in. We don't remember it because it was so much less severe than the soon to follow government sponsored economic downturn.
quotes on morality/judgment
“What is popular is not always right; what is right is not always popular”
Quotes on Democracy
“Chaos often breeds life, when order breeds habit" Henry Adams
“There is no greater stupidity or meanness than to take uniformity for an ideal, as if it were not a benefit and joy to a man, being what he is, to know that many are, have been, and will be better than he. Grant that no one is positively degraded by the great man’s greatness and it follows that everyone is exalted by it. Beauty, genius, holiness, even power and extraordinary wealth, radiate their virtue and make the world in which they exist a better and more joyful place to live in”, George Santayana
“Democracy never lasts long. It soon wastes, exhausts and murders itself”, Samuel Adams
"Democracy is the most vile form of government... democracies have ever been spectacles of turbulence and contention: have ever been found incompatible with personal security or the rights of property: and have in general been as short in their lives as they have been violent in their deaths." James Madison
“The reward for conformity was that everyone liked you except yourself”, Rita Mae Brown
“High hopes were once formed of democracy; but democracy means simply the bludgeoning of the people by the people for the people”, Oscar Wilde
"A pure democracy is a society consisting of a small number of citizens, who assemble and administer the government in person." James Madison (Can you say "Ku Klux Klan")
quotes on power in politics
Quotes on memory: deciept vs. truth
“The struggle of man against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting”, Milan Kundera
"Knowledge will forever govern ignorance; and a people who mean to be their own governors must arm themselves with the power which knowledge gives." James Madison
"It will be of little avail to the people that the laws are made by men of their own choice if the laws be so voluminous that they cannot be read, or so incoherent that they cannot be understood." James Madison
“All governments are run by liars and nothing they say should be believed”, I.F.Stone
“The majority of politicians, on the evidence available to us, are interested not in truth but in power and in the maintenance of that power. To maintain that power it is essential that people remain in ignorance, that they live in ignorance of the truth, even the truth of their own lives. What surrounds us therefore is a vast tapestry of lies, upon which we feed”, Harold Pinter, Nobel Lecture (Literature), 2005
“Hear and forget; see and remember; do and understand”, Japanese proverb
“Man’s stupidity has no bounds at all”, W.H. Auden
quotes on economy/banking
“When plunder becomes a way of life for a group of men living together in society, they create for themselves in the course of time a legal system that authorizes it and a moral code that glorifies it”, Frederic Bastiat, 1801-1850, political economist
“When a government is dependent upon bankers for money, they and not the leaders of the government control the situation, since the hand that gives is above the hand that takes. Money has no motherland: financiers are without patriotism and without decency; their sole object is gain”, Napoleon Bonaparte
“The issue which has swept down through the ages, and which will have to be fought sooner or later, is the people versus the banks”, Lord Acton, (1834-1902), English historian
