15 Aug 2009

Two Kinds of People

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There is one group of people in America who truly care about social injustice, but they don’t consider the violation of property rights to be high on the list. That’s why they approve government programs that involve redistribution.

On the other hand, there are Americans who take property rights seriously; they get tingles when they watch Russell Crowe tell his boy in Cinderella Man(paraphrasing) “We don’t take food from the butcher that isn’t ours, because that’s stealing, and we don’t steal. Not ever.” And yet, these same people don’t really get all worked up about police brutality, or the fact that some people are living under bridges while others eat filet mignon.

(Note that the above two groups aren’t exhaustive–there are Americans who care about property rights and want to help the sick and the poor. But the above two groups catch a lot of people.)

What’s ironic is that both groups would see their objectives better satisfied, if they paid more heed to the concerns of the other. If the first group really took property rights seriously, and therefore couldn’t support any government “social” programs that relied on coercion, then as if by magic there wouldn’t be so many people living under bridges, and there wouldn’t be millions of people who couldn’t afford health insurance.

By the same token, if people in their capacity as private citizens got more involved with “making the world a better place”–through voluntary means–then their opponents on Election Day might be more willing to let things run their course, rather than voting in a political “solution.”

==> Related to the above musings, Anthony Gregory has an article at LRC explaining how the power elites have used the two-party system to constantly grow the size of government with every successive administration. (Those are my words, not his.)

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