No Takers Without Makers
You can't take wealth and 'redistribute' it unless someone makes it. But human nature is such that people need incentives to make things. People will work hard for themselves, their families, their friends, and their communities, but not for something as nebulous as the 'common good' especially when, as is inevitably the case under socialism, the 'common good' is primarily the good of the central planners who then generously allow some 'trickle down' to the centrally planned. There can be no government-sponsored social programs without a robust economy, and no such economy without capitalism. That is the point of the graphic below.
But leftists, in the grip of utopian fantasies, do not understand human nature; worse, many if not most of them deny that man has a nature at all, holding that humanity is itself a social product or construct.
This brings me to the excitable Tim Walz, Kamala Harris’ Vice-Presidential pick. He recently said, ““One person’s socialism is another person’s neighborliness.” You read that right; that’s what he said as you can easily verify for yourself. Now the plain falsity of the statement shows either the stupidity of the man who made it, or, more likely, his chutzpah and contempt for his audience: he thinks ‘the people’ are so stupid as to swallow that lie. Of course, it could be both that the man is stupid and that he thinks we are stupid.
Why is the statement false? Consider similar examples in the vicinity. “One man’s terrorist is another man’s freedom fighter.” “One man’s treasure is another man’s trash.” A glass can be half-full to one person but half-empty to another. The pattern is repeatable ad libitum. One and the same thing is seen differently and valued differently by different people. The differences are not intrinsic to the object but relational features projected by the different people. The three examples I gave are true. What Walz said, however, is manifestly false since there is no one thing taken in different ways.
Socialism is obviously not neighborliness. I don’t need to explain to my astute readers why. What perhaps needs pointing out, however, is just what a contemptible, language-abusing bullshitter Walz is.
And you are still a Democrat? What are you thinking? Are you thinking?