Dear Friends,
It seems to me, the disparity between the rich and the poor is so misused and so misunderstood, it ceases to be a metric of the justness of the market system, and has become a mere tool for leftist propaganda. The term is never fully defined, is it the difference between the income of the highest earners and the lowest earners, is it the difference between the wealth of the richest and the poorest, or perhaps it is the difference between the both income and wealth of the prosperous and the pitiable? The parameters are never stated, only left to the imagination of the observer, and as such becomes a subjective measure and not an objective measure. This makes the term spurious in that it appears logical but is in fact false logic meant to deceive. Yet this sophist measure is touted as proving the unjustness of the market system, and by extension, the justness of the socialist system. If we are to improve our standard of living and not backslide, as we have done under Obama’s reign, we must throw away this specious measure for one that is objective and empirical.
It is all the rage today in the unbiased press to claim the disparity between the rich and the poor is at an all time high. We are scolded by the rich media elite that we must do something about this disparity else we are immoral and self indulgent people. The media elite however never actually lower their own standard of living they only demand us to lower ours. Using this false measure to goad us into accepting government actions, that we know will harm our economic interests, for the supposed interests of the “poor.” As we are shamed into lowering our standard of living the elite in the media, government and culture increase theirs. Are we to assume then that we are the culprit when it comes to the disparity?
President Obama is constantly using this specious claim, along with the spurious admonition that all of us must give a little so that others can get a little. All the while Obama vacations on Nantucket island, the playground of the rich and powerful. He never vacations at a bowling ally, Detroit or Seven Flags. He spends all of his time with the rich, living the life of a king, at the expense of the taxpayer… you know, us… the ones who have to give up a little so that others can have a little more. Apparently we must give so the king can have more. How does this help the poor though? His spurious rhetoric makes Obama’s admonition that we “share” the sacrifice, hypocrisy at best.
Socialism is always touted as the means to close the gap between the rich and the poor, but when we examine the results of socialism, honestly and fairly we find the direct opposite is true. Take the most socialistic nations, Cuba and North Korea, there are many more but these two will suffice. In Cuba the socialist haven in the Caribbean, Forbes Magazine has deemed Fidel Castro one of the richest men on the planet.. A label he vehemently denied but is empirically true. He owns not only everything on the island of Cuba but everyone as well. If he arbitrarily orders someone to do a thing, they must do it else face jail, or worse. He decides what everyone gets, he decides every aspect of the county’s economy. This all makes Fidel Castro richer than rich, it makes him the slave master of Cuba.
In North Korea people must do and think exactly as the tyrant says, even crying at the death of the last tyrant, if the tears are not sufficient or realistic, they get punished for three generations in forced labor camps. People who have escaped those human atrocity factories, have given some of the most horrendous stories of human suffering, starvation and deprivations imaginable, where a child will sell out their mother to the hangman for a slice of stale dry bread! Meanwhile, the tyrant lives the life of a king. He has the best of everything while his people starve. Is it possible to have a greater disparity, by every measure, than between the master and the slave?
A better scale would be to compare the standard of living of the poorest in a society to the richest. If the poor are well fed, have multiple flat screen televisions, at least one car and the finest sneakers… as compared to another country where starvation is common, housing is filthy, leaky and subject to collapse, where it can be obtained, which of the two is more just? The wealthy will always have a high standard of living and the poor will always have a lower standard of living, that will never change, and is only exacerbated by socialism’s benefit to the politically favored versus the politically disfavored. When the actual disparity between the standard of living between the rich and poor is low however, the rich claim the environment and thus the carrying capacity of the planet is threatened. The truth is, it is not what they have that makes them happy, it is what we don’t have that they have. To that end, they use spurious arguments like the gap between the rich, (themselves) and the poor, (us) to further their selfish ends.
When we use the standard of living of the wealthy versus the poor we are using a metric that can be measured empirically, is objective and not subjective and is far more indicative of the real justness of an economic system. Moreover, if we add the rate of rise of the standard of living in a given system, we have a much more accurate measure. This is not done because if it were the market system would always win out hands down. Since the New Class sets the parameters of any debate on the justness of a given economic system, and they are the ones with political favor and power, they always seek to give us false choices, hanging us on the horns of a dilemma, so we are gored no matter what we choose, resulting in a system that further empowers them.
Since socialism in all it’s pernicious incarnations is simply distributive justice by political favor, and since the New Class has both political favor and political power, they benefit most when society is socialist. Therefore they want socialism despite the very real damage to the lives and welfare of the people. To this end, it is in the egoists self interests to use spurious claims of economic justice, to goad us into allowing government actions that do real harm to our economic, cultural and social interests. Spurious claims are by their nature difficult to counter and so they become memes in our society. It is up to us then, as self interested human beings, to do everything in our power to point them out as well as the sophist nature of them, else we fall into the rabbit hole of absurdity in the name of justice.
Sincerely,
John Pepin
