On August 8 of last year, I sent out the message below.
We are now engaged in a national debate over what my wife Sherry has styled "health care redistribution."
Redistribution of wealth and income has been the goal of one political movement after another since the dawn of government of the people, by the people, and for the people. How portentously Lincoln's phrase echoes now.
Again and again, those schemes have failed to produce prosperity in other countries. Consider the failure of redistributionist economic policies in Russia, Cuba, China, even France and Great Britain, where Margaret Thatcher reversed it saying "The trouble with socialism is that eventually you run out of other people's money." In none of these countries has an economic leveling ever produced increasing prosperity for any segment of the productivity spectrum. The nonproductive, by appropriating the goods and services of the productive via the ballot box or revolution, can have a little more for a little while, but the slowing, then halting, then reversal of the general rise in prosperity enabled by economic freedom soon makes those gains seem small and then begins to destroy them.
Think of Cuba. The lowliest illegal immigrant in this country from El Salvador or Guatemala has a greater prospect of achieving prosperity than the average Cuban in Cuba. The economic oppression in Cuba means that Cubans drive American cars from the fifties kept running by baling wire, chewing gum, and enterprise. Their housing stock decays continuously. And as with all failed communes, the difference in economic potential drives away the productive so fast that emigration must be prevented by force and the populace held hostage to the redistributionist ideal.
No economic policy has ever produced as great an increase in prosperity for the lowest levels of society as economic freedom. Low taxes, minimal regulation, and free trade are the regime that increases wealth the fastest at every level of income. More than that, it is the regime that enables the most poor men and women to rise out of poverty and move up the ladder of income.
Victor Davis Hanson here exposes the mission of Barack Obama and the leftists who march arm and arm with him as redistribution of the most fundamental kind. It is one of the most important pieces ever written about Obama and the revolutionary change he promises.
I encourage you to read it carefully.
I also encourage you to forward this to others.
Many of us spent much of our political life opposing international communism. We should not now stand by and allow Obama's domestic brand of it to advance without a fight.
I hope you agree that this is a fight worth joining.
