POST SCRIPTS

So John Edwards is throwing his hat back into the ring.

Great

All that really means to me is that I will have to switch the channel every time one of his nauseating commercials about 2 Americas comes on.

I am so sick of superficial class warfare being displayed as intelligent debate. Edwards’s solution is not, in principle, supportable, so he relies on catchy slogans to do his heavy lifting amongst voters.

He claims that there is 2 Americas, and he wants to change that…great…how?

Well first of all if you subscribe to his 2 Americas theory, you have to assume that one side is suffering as a result of the efforts of the other side. So we follow his liberal “logic� that if a fat man is standing next to a skinny one, then he clearly got that way by taking advantage of the thin one.

Do certain sectors of the population have unfair advantages over others? You bet they do. But it is a direct result of policies advanced by politicians like Edwards.

Edwards doesn’t want to de-regulate; he doesn’t want to revoke the unfair advantages that both labor and business seek from government. He simply wants to redistribute wealth. He wants to buy your vote, by telling you that a rich person owes a poor person money, simply because their rich. Well I’ve got bed news for you poor people, unless that rich person has stolen from you, they don’t owe you a dime. If we want to be technical about it, all things being equal, a wealthy person in a free market society is generally more valuable to the society as a whole than the poor person. This is NOT to say that they should somehow be treated differently under the law, or that the poorer person is less human; simply that a poorer person is much more likely to benefit from the wealth of a rich person (before taxes) than a rich person is to benefit from the wealth of a poor person.

But why bother with facts when it is so much easier to pander to the crowd. The liberal concept of “fairness� bears no resemblance to the English translation. As best I can tell it states that if you have more, you should be legally coerced to give more. Not necessarily to the charity or community of your choosing, but to a bureaucracy create by politicians who then have a little treasure chest which they can pull from to distribute tokens to their political base.

Let’s say all the worst things about politicians are true. That all of them pander, just to different sectors. Well in that case I want to be in the sector which panders to the upper middle class, and wealthy. Not because I am wealthy but because those who pander to the lower class have put themselves in a position to encourage poverty. I mean, after all, that’s where their base comes from right? Greedy Republicans incentive is to create greater wealth across the board since those who have earned their wealth are generally less inclined to give it up to the Edwards oracle, and therefore more likely to vote Republican.

Now I grant you that this comparison is a bit simplistic; but in principle it makes the point that those who pander to the poor AGAINST the rich, as Edwards does, have no real incentive in helping to create policies which would encourage greater wealth without income redistribution.

His position more accurately stated would read a little more like this.

Rich people owe you, because they are rich. Vote for me and I will take what is theirs and give it to you.

Much more honest and direct, I don’t see it being widely adopted though.