By Lowell Ponte, Special for USDR
“A lot of wealthy white and black people aren’t bad, but they control 1 percent of the economy and this cannot stand,” said Vice President Joe Biden during a February 23 speech about Black History Month.
“It’s not fair because the business experts are saying that concentration of wealth is stunting growth. So let’s do something that’s worthy of emancipation.”
Mr. Biden seems to be saying that wealth beyond some relatively-low threshold should be confiscated, that the wealth of today’s wealthy should be “emancipated” by government because concentrated wealth slows economic growth.
Vice President Biden speaks the Obama Administration’s usual Progressive class warfare “envynomics” of polarizing divide-and-conquer political rhetoric that depicts the rich as enemies of the rest of us.
But instead of dismissing Mr. Biden’s speech, let’s deconstruct it to learn from the few grains of truth it contains.
Some businesspeople are, indeed, a cause of much of the sluggish growth in our economy. These, as the Washington Post reported last December 18 in an investigation titled “The Great Start-Up Slowdown,” are today’s crony capitalists whose wealth comes from government.
Progressives always claim that they, like Robin Hood, must confiscate wealth from the rich to redistribute it to the poor. In reality, this makes government’s ruling class, including Mr. Biden, and its cronies the “rich.” Under King Barack Obama, the middle class is being beggared to enrich a tiny elite of privileged government favorites.
Think, for example, of Mr. Obama’s redistribution of more than $90 billion to “green” companies, including more than $534 Million to the soon-to-go-bankrupt Solyndra. Fully 80 percent of these crony companies turned out to have high executives who were major Democratic Party contributors.
The Federal Government, as Craig R. Smith and I wrote in our book The Inflation Deception, owns 65 percent of all American land west of Denver. Government owns 40 percent of all land in the U.S. – and de facto owns it all, because it can charge private property “owners” rent in the form of taxes, fees and regulatory costs for being on “their” land. And during the Obama Administration, government spending has accounted for up to 39 percent of America’s entire GDP.
Compared to government riches, our wealthiest individual, Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates with his mere $82 billion, is a pauper.
Government demands that taxes be paid in its debased monopoly fiat money, and government asserts its power under eminent domain and regulatory powers to confiscate or asset forfeit whatever it wishes from us serfs under its feudal system.
Free market wealth is earned voluntarily. Government wealth has been taken by force.
Taking capital, the economic life blood of growth and hiring, away from our capitalists who pay the developed world’s highest business taxes – on average, 46.3 percent of company earnings, according to a recent PricewaterhouseCoopers study – has severely crippled our economy.
It weakens our economy if American companies seek more freedom by moving to other countries, as our foreign-born ancestors once did.
Progressive government is not our emancipator. It’s our enslaver.
The emancipation we serfs need is from the obese, greedy and very wealthy government Mr. Biden helps rule.
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