John Hayward writing at RedState has another excellent article today, The War on Misfortune. It addresses the left’s shift to emphasize action against “income inequality” instead of mere pursuit of “social justice.” The former providing an ongoing institutional(ized) revolutionary party concept necessary to keep people aroused. It is all about thinking ahead.
They’ll tell you they want to make capitalism better and more compassionate, not only for the forgotten few who might be left to die in dark alleys, but for people that every other society on Earth – and every other era of history – would consider remarkably well off. Pure tax-and-spend welfare state ideology runs into the inconvenient fact that prosperous capitalist nations don’t generate a very large number of truly destitute people. There just aren’t a lot of votes there.
So the name of the Left’s game is to trick the middle class into thinking of itself as poor. People who see themselves as the victims of sinister, invisible, exploitative forces are not going to make a fetish of retaining their independence. They need protection, which only the compassionate State can provide. Notice that in all of this “income inequality” blather, President Obama never gets around to naming any individual perpetrators, or accusing them of any specific crimes. Were are supposed to accept that something is vaguely, indefinitely wrong, and only the President’s employment of vast compulsive force can fix it… even though it’s gotten much worse under his watch.. . .
We would add the peeve of ours that the name “Pope Francis” could be substituted for Obama in Hayward’s passage above. That is based on the careless cheap shots the Pope takes with regards to “unfettered capitalism,” easily taken to castigate broadly but seen nowhere in this world, in his recent exhortation “Evangelii Gaudium.”
Hayward goes on to explain with reference to an article my Tim Carney in the Washington Examiner that:
“income inequality” is only an absolute social and economic negative when caused by political corruption and cronyism:
Maybe the statists believe their superior morality and wisdom entitle them to a better living than money-grubbing private businessmen. The irony is that they sucker lower-income people into their schemes by promising to protect them from the very misfortunes that political control of the economy causes, as ideology blinds it to opportunity, and political will drives it to double down on failure.
An excellent conservative article, in its entirety, read more of it here.
R Mall
