Duped!

Redistribution of wealth is theft. It is stealing money at the point of a gun from the person who earned it, in order to give it to someone who did not. The world over, there are people who work hard for what they have, and people who work less hard who envy the success of the harder workers.

Show me poverty, and I will show you that in most cases, the responsibility for that poverty lies squarely on the shoulders of the impoverished – that is, in some way or another, consciously or unconsciously, they’ve made a decision in their lives to live impoverished (flame suit on).

If someone makes the decision to live in poverty, why should we bemoan and lament it as if it is society’s fault? If I decide to quit my job tomorrow, start abusing drugs, lose my house, and begin to live in a dumpster behind the Red Robin downtown, why should anyone else be responsible for my decision, either to pay for it or to share in the blame? And don’t give me the “people get laid off all the time” schtick, either, we have unemployment insurance for a reason.

Everyone needs to earn their keep, or else they are nothing more than a thief from those that do. The “down-trodden” need to earn their keep, too, so why shouldn’t they?

Progressives claim that it isn’t so cut and dry. They think that there is an oppressor class that is keeping the down-trodden, well, down-trodden. They claim that the rich earned their money off of the backs of the down-trodden, and that this isn’t fair; but is this really true?

We’ve all be taken in our lives – duped. We didn’t expect anyone to repay us for our losses after we got hornswoggled. If some person was dumb enough to work so hard, develop so many ideas, and produce so much that they literally made another person rich, but didn’t get their well-deserved share of the results, then they got duped. Why should that be society’s responsibility to repay them for their naivety? They need to learn from their mistake, pick themselves back up, and move on. If they made another guy rich once, they can surely do it again and make themselves rich next time, right?

But I think what progressives are really talking about isn’t the one guy who made another rich guy rich; they are talking about the large group of guys, his employees, that made him rich, but this, again, is a fallacy. Take an automobile factory, as an example. The guy that invested (read, risked) massive amounts of his own money to create an automobile brand, factory, and the tooling and payroll necessary for this concept, makes a ton of money off of “the backs” of the people that work for him, who comparatively make quite a bit less money, according to the progressive ideology. Progressives see this as unjust. However, what they are saying is that the guy who installs window-cranks on the passenger side door of the cars should get an even share of the millions made by selling the car, but why? He isn’t risking his life savings, his reputation, and the possibility of total finiancial ruin to make the car. He stands next to the assembly line and installs window cranks all day. He is easily replaced by countless other people who could do the same job. His contribution to the total value of the business is, at best, the cost of the total value of installing the passenger side window crank on the car. My guess is that on average, his pay is very close to the value that he adds to the assembly process. It has to be, or else the plant would fail.

He isn’t getting duped. The owner isn’t getting rich off of his back – he is getting paid a fair wage that is calculated in part by analyzing the added value that his labor contributes to the total value of each car. He is also getting paid based upon the uniqueness of his knowledge and skill set – ie, how hard he would be to replace if he were to leave the company. Engineers with proprietary information in their heads get paid a lot more because they produce more value for the company, and are more indespenisble.

Progressives see it as unjust that the window-crank installer isn’t making an equal share to the plant owner, and yet, if the plant owner’s share is equal to that of the window crank installer, then why would he become the plant owner in the first place? Why risk everything he has to open a new plant, when he could just get a job as a window-crank installer at another car plant and get the same return? Suddenly, all of the jobs created by the guy willing to take the risk never get made, and no one, even the window-crank installer, has a job at all.

Alternatively, why don’t progressives see what is going on here as being the truth? A guy is getting paid based upon (more or less) the value of his day’s production, in a job that wouldn’t exist if it weren’t for the risks that were taken by the guy that owns the plant?