Government, moreover, is supposed to “equalize opportunity” and has therefore to provide access to education and health care to everyone. As former Vermont governor and former chairman of the Democratic National Committee Howard Dean told MSNBC’s The Last Word last week, “what governments do, is redistribute” income. Dean, who sought his party’s presidential nomination in 2004, argued that the debate about the role of government should not resolve around the question whether or not income is redistributed. “The question is how much should we redistribute,” he said, adding, “The purpose of government is to make sure that capitalism works for everybody.”
Without income redistribution, entitlement programs as Medicaid and Social Security would not exist, Dean claimed, which is true, nor would the government build roads, which is not true. Infrastructure is not a form of income redistribution because everyone can make use of it freely. Dean’s attempt to sidestep the bigger debate about the role of government is futile as Americans are increasingly aware that the price of “income redistribution” is their freedom. It also attests to the utterly detached mentality of some Democrats who seem incapable of believing that there are people who don’t want the government in their lives.
Leftists everywhere both fail to comprehend the meaning of capitalism and have a vision of government that is deeply misguided. As one public sector initiative after another fails, time and time again, the left continues to call for more government, arguing that this time, it will work. All the while, they blame the free market for corrupting their noble schemes, refusing to see that it is the market they have bound and it is government that is corrupting. Once government tries to make capitalism “work for everybody,” it is on a path to socialism that it has embarked. That path ends when “fairness” is achieved and no man is allowed to make more money than his neighbor.
It is a satire, isn’t it?
The entire post rests on the argument:
Factually, this is not true. What exactly are the freedoms being lost? I like that neighbors aren’t suffering grinding poverty and that desperate people aren’t being driven to criminality. I’d suggest that gives me more freedom not less.
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p>Is it really true politically? Frankly doubt it.
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p>The last paragraph — with its anonymous Leftists talking about unnamed programs — floats so high above anything verifiable it could be a little cloud shaped like a tea cup.
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p>The person screaming at the health care meeting who told me she had a Medigap policy, but insisted that none of her insurance was through the government
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p>The executives of megabanks which only still exist because the government bailed them out
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p>Defense contractors who profited from the Iraq war