Liberty's Torch: equality

Showing posts with label equality. Show all posts

Sunday, July 21, 2019

Changes

Sit by my side, come as close as the air,
Share in a memory of gray,
     Wander in my words,
     Dream about the pictures that I play
Of changes.
Green leaves of summer turn red in the fall
To brown and to yellow they fade,
     And then they have to die,
     Trapped within the circle time parade
Of changes.
Scenes of my young years were warm in my mind,
Visions of shadows that shine,
     Till one day I returned,
     And found they were the victims of the vines
Of changes.
The world's spinning madly, it drifts in the dark,
Swings through a hollow of haze,
     A race around the stars,
     A journey through the universe ablaze
With changes.
Moments of magic will glow in the night,
All fears of the forest are gone,
     But when the morning breaks,
     They're swept away by golden drops of dawn
Of changes.
Passions will part to a strange melody,
As fires will sometimes burn cold,
     Like petals in the wind,
     We're puppets to the silver strings of souls
Of changes.
Your tears will be trembling, now we're somewhere else,
One last cup of wine we will pour,
     And I'll kiss you one more time,
     And leave you on the rolling river shores
Of changes.
Sit by my side, come as close as the air,
Share in a memory of gray,
     Wander in my words,
     Dream about the pictures that I play
Of changes.
[Phil Ochs]

Yeah, Phil Ochs was a New Left asshole who destroyed his own life, but what a songwriter! Anyway, this piece isn’t about Ochs, or the New Left. It’s about Apollo XI, the moon landing, and what’s come over us in the fifty years (and one day) since.

(Fooled you, didn’t I?)

Mark Steyn deposeth and sayeth:

     Four decades later, Bruce Charlton, professor of Theoretical Medicine at the University of Buckingham in England, wrote that “that landing of men on the moon and bringing them back alive was the supreme achievement of human capability, the most difficult problem ever solved by humans.” That's a good way to look at it: the political class presented the boffins with a highly difficult and specific problem, and they solved it—in eight years. Charlton continued:
     ‘Forty years ago, we could do it—repeatedly—but since then we have not been to the moon, and I suggest the real reason we have not been to the moon since 1972 is that we cannot any longer do it. Humans have lost the capability.
     ‘Of course, the standard line is that humans stopped going to the moon only because we no longer wanted to go to the moon, or could not afford to, or something....But I am suggesting that all this is BS. . . . I suspect that human capability reached its peak or plateau around 1965-75—at the time of the Apollo moon landings—and has been declining ever since.’...

     [I]f you think about it, isn't it kind of hard even to imagine America pulling off a moon mission now? The countdown, the takeoff, a camera transmitting real-time footage of a young American standing in a dusty crater beyond our planet blasting out from his iPod Lady Gaga and the Black-Eyed Peas or whatever the twenty-first-century version of Sinatra and the Basie band is.

Those are among the saddest statements the famously optimistic “happy warrior” Mark Steyn has ever penned. I can’t find anything in America Alone or After America that compares with them. But that doesn’t diminish their accuracy – or their supreme importance – one iota.

Fifty years of changes. Some of them were good ones. It’s awfully hard to knock the developments that furnished me with a lucrative career and made it possible to post these interminable essays. But sociopolitically and culturally, the great majority of them were negative – and they were not offset by the positives interspersed among them.

I could enumerate the changes. I could go into gruesome detail about why most were net negatives despite the positive ballyhoo about them at the time. In nearly every case that ballyhoo was copious and wholly meretricious, even treacherous. But we swallowed every change whole. We’re still struggling to digest them.

Quite a lot of decent Americans were utterly shocked by this New York Times article:

The Cold War was fought as much on an ideological front as a military one, and the Soviet Union often emphasized the sexism and racism of its capitalist opponents — particularly the segregated United States. And the space race was a prime opportunity to signal the U.S.S.R.’s commitment to equality. After putting the first man in space in 1961, the Soviets went on to send the first woman, the first Asian man, and the first black man into orbit — all years before the Americans would follow suit.

I can feel my blood pressure rising as I read that vile screed, so out of consideration for the sentiments (and blood pressures) of my Gentle Readers, I’ll spare you any larger excerpt. This feminist-socialist bitch is determined to pollute the greatest technological achievement in history: one that no other country has even attempted since. It’s a good thing she isn’t here as I write this.

Yes, the three Apollo XI astronauts were white men. White Christian men, at that. As were the great majority of the people whose technological savvy and unstinting effort made the Apollo XI mission possible. At that time, most American women were more interested in things other than the STEM fields: marriage, children, homemaking, the nurturance of a family, its roots and its standing in its community. Very few went into the sciences or engineering – by choice.

Very few do so today – again, by choice. Wherefore, then, does a no-achievements bitch, in commemoration of the greatest of all American achievements, praise a nation that was largely impoverished and barely twenty years from total collapse?

Well, possibly because she’s a mealymouthed feminist-socialist bitch of no attainments whatsoever whose invidious resentment of people who actually did something — and of her comparably able contemporaries – compels her to denigrate their achievement. Envy can be that powerful.

Envy is at the core of many of the individually identifiable ills that overtook us after Apollo XI.

You’ve probably seen this before. Indeed, you might have seen it here. It’s the immortal Clive Staples Lewis on envy, which he describes as:

     [T]he feeling...which prompts a man to say I'm as good as you.
The first and most obvious advantage is that you thus induce him to enthrone at the centre of his life a good, solid, resounding lie. I don't mean merely that his statement is false in fact, that he is no more equal to everyone he meets in kindness, honesty, and good sense than in height or waist measurement. I mean that he does not believe it himself. No man who says I'm as good as you believes it. He would not say it if he did. The St. Bernard never says it to the toy dog, nor the scholar to the dunce, nor the employable to the bum, nor the pretty woman to the plain. The claim to equality, outside the strictly political field, is made only by those who feel themselves to be in some way inferior. What it expresses is precisely the itching, smarting, writhing awareness of an inferiority which the patient refuses to accept.
     And therefore resents. Yes, and therefore resents every kind of superiority in others; denigrates it; wishes its annihilation. Presently he suspects every mere difference of being a claim to superiority. No one must be different from himself in voice, clothes, manners, recreations, choice of food: “Here is someone who speaks English rather more clearly and euphoniously than I — it must be a vile, upstage, lah-di-dah affectation. Here's a fellow who says he doesn't like hot dogs — thinks himself too good for them, no doubt. Here's a man who hasn't turned on the jukebox — he's one of those goddamn highbrows and is doing it to show off. If they were honest-to-God all-right Joes they'd be like me. They've no business to be different. It's undemocratic.”
     [From Screwtape Proposes a Toast]

Envy is the secret motivation of every whining bitch -- of either sex — who claims to stand for “equality.” And by legitimizing envy and propitiating the envious, we have brought America, the Renaissance Civilization, the highest fruits of the Christian Enlightenment, to the brink of ruin.

Envy isn’t just a capital sin; it’s the deadliest of the lot. If permitted to take root in one’s soul, it can flower into any – or all – of the mortal sins. And I submit to you that culturally, socially, and politically, that is exactly what it has done:

It has catalyzed the destruction of intergenerational loyalties and respect.
It has given rise to undreamed-of carnage through abortion.
It has fueled vast waves of adultery.
It has been used to justify theft, both individual and systemic.
It powers great volumes of slander.
And of course, it feeds upon itself, such that no one anywhere who is superior in any way to the envious ones is permitted peace, privacy, or security.

Envy is unassuageable. It hurls accusations and mud at others who have anything the envious one does not. It saps the desire to achieve. It gradually reduces the envious one to total impotence. And it is destroying this nation as we speak.

Jesus entered a village where a woman whose name was Martha welcomed him. She had a sister named Mary who sat beside the Lord at his feet listening to him speak. Martha, burdened with much serving, came to him and said, “Lord, do you not care that my sister has left me by myself to do the serving? Tell her to help me.”
The Lord said to her in reply, "Martha, Martha, you are anxious and worried about many things. There is need of only one thing. Mary has chosen the better part and it will not be taken from her." [Luke 10:38-42]

Could the Redeemer have been any clearer? He had no need of a great feast. Indeed, He had no need of a simple dinner. He came to us in the flesh to tell us of the Kingdom of God and the relatively simple requirements for entry. Mary, who listened to Him attentively while Martha scurried about dealing with food, plates, and utensils, had chosen “the better part:” the wisdom He had been born to dispense. Martha resented it – a not uncommon occurrence when “the chores” are apportioned unequally – yet failed to realize that what really bothered her was the choices she and her sister made: in both their cases, free and uncoerced.

It cannot be made clearer, Gentle Reader. The rebuff of envy and everything it powers is vital both to our individual souls and to the health of the nation. We have shirked this duty for too long. I pray that it’s not too late to undertake it, and to bring to it the wholeheartedness, the constancy, and the righteous fury it demands.

May God bless and keep you all.

Sunday, December 9, 2018

What Comes Of “Equality”

When I saw this article yesterday, it filled me with sorrow:

     SOUTH Africa has set a date for when its much-criticised land expropriations can begin after a politician declared: “Your time is up, white people.”
     The country’s National Assembly approved a proposal to change the constitution to make the so-called reforms legal in a vote of 183 to 77.
     This paves the way for land to be taken from farmers without giving any kind of compensation.
     And now lawmakers have agreed to set up a committee that will write and introduce a new bill for land expropriations.

Every African nation that has transitioned from “colonial” (i.e., white) rule to native (i.e., black) rule has followed a similar path. It calls to mind a quote from Vladimir Bukovsky:

Is it really surprising that whenever you get striving for equality and fraternity, the guillotine appears on the scene?

What black South Africans don’t realize is that the people they’ll be guillotining are themselves. That is what comes of such policies, as anyone familiar with the course of things in Zimbabwe can attest.

But this piece isn’t primarily about South Africa’s auto da fe. Neither is it about race.

I’m on record as having stated, quite plainly, that I’m a racist. That is: I believe that as statistical aggregates, the races differ in ways that are important at some times and in some contexts. Thus I cannot be cowed by being called a racist, for I admit it freely and can’t imagine, given how amply it’s supported by the observable facts, how it could constitute a condemnation. This irritates the apostles of equality and that chimera called “social justice.” If they can’t silence me by wielding their favorite epithet, what would work?

It is observably the case that those nations founded and peopled by whites have attained greater heights of justice, prosperity, and security than those founded and peopled by blacks. It is observably the case that in America, areas in which blacks concentrate have far more crime, squalor, illegitimacy, and local disorder than those in which there are few of them. It is observably the case that American blacks score, as an aggregate, about 15 points – one standard deviation – lower on intelligence tests than American whites. Moreover, the fantasies of the rosy-glassed notwithstanding, these are not “cultural artifacts.” They are patterns that have been repeated throughout recorded history and are equally observable in every other nation with a significant black population.

Given all the above – and whether you like it or not, those are facts, not the venom-drenched snarls of a Ku Klux Klansman – why, when South Africa rejected white rule and transitioned to a majority-black power structure, should we have expected that the Euro-American norms the white governments had maintained would continue? For it is not “equality,” an unattainable condition except in the very shortest of short terms, that the blacks of Africa desire, but the assuagement of their envy, to wit: to pull down the whites for daring to outperform them.

The envious are not satisfied with equality; they secretly yearn for superiority and revenge. In the French Revolution of 1848, a woman coal-heaver is said to have remarked to a richly dressed lady: “Yes, madam, everything’s going to be equal now; I shall go in silks and you’ll carry coal.”
[Henry Hazlitt, The Conquest of Poverty ]

Envy is ineluctable, implacable and irreconcilable, is irritated by the slightest differences, is independent of the degree of inequality, appears in its worst form in social proximity among near relatives, provides the dynamic for every revolution yet cannot of itself produce any kind of coherent revolutionary program.
[Helmut Schoeck, Envy]

Envy is a form of hatred. It’s the capital sin of which few, if any in our time, dare to speak. Leftist activists mouth platitudes about “equality” and “social justice” as camouflage for their designs, when what really moves them is their envy and the envy of those for whom they claim to speak. Some of them are merely deluded, though they’re dangerous nonetheless. The rest employ their pearly phrases to conceal a drive for power, status, and their perquisites. Those who kowtow to them can be partitioned into two groups: persons unable to believe in their right to what they have earned, and Democrats.

Envy is particularly valuable to that second group. They pander to it, hoping to excite it sufficiently that the envious will raise them to power. Thomas Babington Macaulay knew it:

The day will come when [in the United States] a multitude of people will choose the legislature. Is it possible to doubt what sort of a legislature will be chosen? On the one side is a statesman preaching patience, respect for rights, strict observance of public faith. On the other is a demagogue ranting about the tyranny of capitalism and usurers and asking why anybody should be permitted to drink champagne and to ride in a carriage while thousands of honest people are in want of necessaries. Which of the candidates is likely to be preferred by a workman?
[From a letter from Macaulay to H. S. Randall of New York. Emphasis added by FWP.]

But who envies? Not everyone. Not necessarily Macaulay’s “workman.” For many a decade the American most scrupulous about the property rights of all Americans, high or low, was the blue-collar workman or laborer. Indeed, many such workmen, perhaps most, are still of that mind today. And well they should be, for they know from experience that no gain of any sort can be had without hard work directed toward a good end. Their pride in their attainments, however modest, is well justified.

No, the naturally envious man is of another cut.

It’s time for a little C. S. Lewis:

     Democracy is the word with which you must lead them by the nose. The good work which our philological experts have already done in the corruption of human language makes it unnecessary to warn you that they should never be allowed to give this word a clear and definable meaning. They won't. It will never occur to them that democracy is properly the name of a political system, even a system of voting, and that this has only the most remote and tenuous connection with what you are trying to sell them. Nor of course must they ever be allowed to raise Aristotle's question: whether “democratic behaviour” means the behaviour that democracies like or the behaviour that will preserve a democracy. For if they did, it could hardly fail to occur to them that these need not be the same.
     You are to use the word purely as an incantation; if you like, purely for its selling power. It is a name they venerate. And of course it is connected with the political ideal that men should be equally treated. You then make a stealthy transition in their minds from this political ideal to a factual belief that all men are equal. Especially the man you are working on. As a result you can use the word democracy to sanction in his thought the most degrading (and also the least enjoyable) of human feelings. You can get him to practise, not only without shame but with a positive glow of self-approval, conduct which, if undefended by the magic word, would be universally derided.
     The feeling I mean is of course that which prompts a man to say I’m as good as you.
     The first and most obvious advantage is that you thus induce him to enthrone at the centre of his life a good, solid, resounding lie. I don't mean merely that his statement is false in fact, that he is no more equal to everyone he meets in kindness, honesty, and good sense than in height or waist measurement. I mean that he does not believe it himself. No man who says I'm as good as you believes it. He would not say it if he did. The St. Bernard never says it to the toy dog, nor the scholar to the dunce, nor the employable to the bum, nor the pretty woman to the plain. The claim to equality, outside the strictly political field, is made only by those who feel themselves to be in some way inferior. What it expresses is precisely the itching, smarting, writhing awareness of an inferiority which the patient refuses to accept.
     And therefore resents. Yes, and therefore resents every kind of superiority in others; denigrates it; wishes its annihilation. Presently he suspects every mere difference of being a claim to superiority. No one must be different from himself in voice, clothes, manners, recreations, choice of food: “Here is someone who speaks English rather more clearly and euphoniously than I — it must be a vile, upstage, lah-di-dah affectation. Here's a fellow who says he doesn't like hot dogs — thinks himself too good for them, no doubt. Here's a man who hasn't turned on the jukebox — he's one of those goddamn highbrows and is doing it to show off. If they were honest-to-God all-right Joes they'd be like me. They've no business to be different. It's undemocratic.”
     [From Screwtape Proposes A Toast]

Note that the word envy does not appear in the Lewis passage above. He speaks of the resentment of those who know themselves to be inferior in some regard. But this is envy’s natural habitat. Demagogues know it and play to it. They seize upon Thomas Jefferson’s stirring declaration that “all men are created equal” – by which he meant that we must be equals before the law, not in any other sense – and treat it as meaning that all of us “should be equal:” in attainments, in income, in property, and (may God save us from our follies) in dignity and others’ esteem.

It’s an impossibility...but impossibilities are the stock in trade of the demagogue and always have been, which is why guillotines always appear in their wake.

Not every man who envies – i.e., who hates others who have what he does not and would like to see them brought down – is an absolute inferior. Some have drive but lack talent, or the reverse. Some are without direction, and therefore never “get started.” And some, it must be said, are merely unlucky: not in the right place at the right time, and so are unable to put their gifts to their best use.

None of these things, including unquestionable inferiority of talent, drive, direction, and good fortune, justifies envy. Of the seven capital sins, envy is by far the most likely to be capitalized upon: i.e., to propel action intended to assuage itself. That’s why it’s the only emotion forbidden by the Decalogue: Thou shalt not covet!

But that will never deter the demagogues. They’d rather be shorn of their genitals than refrain from the excitation and exploitation of envy. For they are the ones best poised to reap an actual profit from that exploitation.

One more quote, if I haven’t yet exhausted your patience with the previous ones. This one is from Katherine Anne Porter’s magnificent short story “Flowering Judas.” Hearken to her mini-portrait of “revolutionist” Braggioni:

     Braggioni loves himself with such tenderness and amplitude and eternal charity that his followers—for he is a leader of men, a skilled revolutionist, and his skin has been punctured in honorable warfare—warm themselves in the reflected glow, and say to each other: ‘He has a real nobility, a love of humanity raised above mere personal affections.’ The excess of this self-love has flowed out, inconveniently for her, over Laura, who, with so many others, owes her comfortable situation and her salary to him. When he is in a very good humor, he tells her, ‘I am tempted to forgive you for being a gringa. Gringita!’ and Laura, burning, imagines herself leaning forward suddenly, and with a sound back-handed slap wiping the suety smile from his face. If he notices her eyes at these moments he gives no sign....
     ....He bulges marvelously in his expensive garments. Over his lavender collar, crushed upon a purple necktie, held by a diamond hoop: over his ammunition belt of tooled leather worked in silver, buckled cruelly around his gasping middle: over the tops of his glossy yellow shoes Braggioni swells with ominous ripeness, his mauve silk hose stretched taut, his ankles bound with the stout leather thongs of his shoes.
     When he stretches his eyelids at Laura she notes again that his eyes are the true tawny yellow cat's eyes. He is rich, not in money, he tells her, but in power, and this power brings with it the blameless ownership of things, and the right to indulge his love of small luxuries. ‘I have a taste for the elegant refinements,’ he said once, flourishing a yellow silk handkerchief before her nose. ‘Smell that? It is Jockey Club, imported from New York.’

The wealth the envious imagine themselves seizing from “the rich” invariably flows to the Braggionis of the world.

Writing about this subject leaves me gloomy. It chafes me particularly to do so in Advent, when all Christian souls should be preparing themselves for the coming of the Christ Child. But that doesn’t diminish its importance, nor the imperative with which it ought to command the attention of every man of good will. Indeed, a decent definition of man of good will would run “One who despises envy, and would have none of it in himself or others.”

The article about the South African devolution is only part of the reason it was on my mind at this time. I’ve recently seen and heard fresh demonstrations of envy and envy-powered resentment among the very people I’m supposed to act charitably toward, as a Christian should. Some of those demonstrations occurred even as those “poor people” were receiving assistance from their better-off neighbors.

I shan’t draw the moral for you, Gentle Reader. If you weren’t intelligent enough to see it for yourself, you wouldn’t be a patron of Liberty’s Torch.

May God bless and keep you all.

Thursday, October 29, 2015

Quickies: Rhetorical Concessions Engender Ideological Defeat

I’ve generally enjoyed Andrea Tantaros’s commentary...until now:

Aha! The “equality” chimera in full attack, with claws raised and saliva dripping from its fangs! I thought she was smarter than that.

This morning at least, if I could inscribe a single tenet on the forebrains of all the conservative commentators on Earth, it would be this one:

“Equality” is a stalking-horse for totalitarianism.

There is no “equality” among human beings. There should be equality before the law: meaning that one’s identity should have no bearing on his guilt or innocence when charged with an offense. But that’s the only sort of equality possible in a free society: the “all men are created equal” mantra Thomas Jefferson understood full well that has been twisted so viciously by the Left.

Freedom – the absence of governmental coercion or constraint from individual decision-making, excepting acts of aggression or fraud – must be regarded as a principle. If it is not – if it’s merely a gauzy desideratum to be traded off for something else that some gaggle of mouthy activists have demanded – it will always lose. A politician who refuses to accept those dicta is not to be trusted with the smallest degree of public authority or trust.

An out-and-out socialist once said to me, quite baldly, that if freedom stands in the way of equality, then freedom must be abandoned as a societal good. He meant it, and all its implications, quite sincerely. I knew what he wanted and told him so...but he would not back away.

Politicians are seldom that forthright...but whenever freedom is counterpoised to something they want for their constituents, their supporters, their creditors, or their standings in the polls, they mock-reluctantly relinquish the defense of freedom. How, then, does such a politician differ in principle from my long-ago socialist adversary?

Something to think about over your Cheerios.^®

Saturday, July 11, 2015

The True Dimensions Of Egalitarianism

“Equality.” We’re all for it, right? Old Tom Jefferson put it in the Declaration: “All men are created equal.” That must mean we should all be equal, in every way and at every instant from birth to death, right? Besides, our pastors teach us that we’re all equal in the eyes of God, right? Right?

That’s the Gospel of Egalitarianism. Perhaps it’s better stated as an Eleventh Commandment:

“Thou Shalt Not Differ From Others.”

It lacks a certain something, though: an enforcement mechanism. As matters stand, people vary all over the map. What to do, what to do...hmmm...wait, I have it! We’ll have the State make us all equal, like in that Kurt Vonnegut story! With the all-seeing, all-knowing, all-powerful State to watch over us, no one would dare to be better than anyone else at anything!

At last: there would no longer be any reason for anyone to envy anyone else! A magnificent Utopian vision! The dream of the Left in glorious Technicolor! There are just a few wee problems:

     It would be totalitarian;
     It would occasion an unprecedented bloodletting;
     And no matter how much force you use, it can’t be done.

You already had an inkling or two about that, didn’t you?

Certain totally insane notions simply refuse to die. Egalitarianism is conspicuous among them. Contrary to what many think, it’s not that such notions are genuinely beautiful, dreams we would truly love to achieve if only it were possible. It’s that they’re useful to those who seek power over others.

     No two individuals are equal in any way.
     No two races are equal in any way.
     The two sexes are not equal in any way.
     No two ethnicities are equal in any way.
     No two cultures are equal in any way.
     No two religious creeds are equal in any way.
     And they cannot be made equal by any application of wishful thinking or force.

However, the notion that X and Y should be equal – in political terms, that such equality is a God-given right -- justifies the use of State power over them. If your goal is the expansion of the State and its powers, egalitarian claims and those making them are weapons in your arsenal.

Are you happy with the way American government has used its powers to this point, Gentle Reader?

Courtesy of Sara Noble, have a gander at a recent outcropping of egalitarian thought:

Retirement USA is a national initiative that is working for a new retirement system that, along with Social Security, will provide universal, secure, and adequate income for future retirees. The initiative has developed 12 Principles for a New Retirement System, which provides a framework for a future system in which employers, workers, and the government would share responsibility for the retirement security for all American workers.

Make sure you have a look at those “principles.” Then make sure you have a quiet place to lie down until the shakes subside.

What, precisely, is the rationale behind this new socialist initiative? Why, that a “secure retirement” is a right. Never mind that only recently, in historical terms, has anyone but the very wealthy been able even to contemplate retirement. Never mind that other socialist gestures toward “secure retirement,” such as the one currently destroying Greece, have all eventuated in failure at best, disaster at worst. Never mind that the American step in that direction, Social Security, is on the verge of collapse and cannot be saved without either means-testing it – i.e., changing it from a form of insurance to a form of welfare – or tax increases so massive that working Americans would essentially be made serfs laboring for the leisure of retirees.

It’s not the first stroke in this direction, of course. Congress has already entertained the suggestion that private pension funds and savings should be confiscated:

     RALEIGH — Democrats in the U.S. House have been conducting hearings on proposals to confiscate workers’ personal retirement accounts — including 401(k)s and IRAs — and convert them to accounts managed by the Social Security Administration.
     Triggered by the financial crisis the past two months, the hearings reportedly were meant to stem losses incurred by many workers and retirees whose 401(k) and IRA balances have been shrinking rapidly.
     The testimony of Teresa Ghilarducci, professor of economic policy analysis at the New School for Social Research in New York, in hearings Oct. 7 drew the most attention and criticism. Testifying for the House Committee on Education and Labor, Ghilarducci proposed that the government eliminate tax breaks for 401(k) and similar retirement accounts, such as IRAs, and confiscate workers’ retirement plan accounts and convert them to universal Guaranteed Retirement Accounts (GRAs) managed by the Social Security Administration. Ghilarducci’s plan first appeared in a paper for the Economic Policy Institute: Agenda for Shared Prosperity on Nov. 20, 2007, in which she said GRAs will rescue the flawed American retirement income system (www.sharedprosperity.org/bp204/bp204.pdf).
     The current retirement system, Ghilarducci said, “exacerbates income and wealth inequalities” because tax breaks for voluntary retirement accounts are “skewed to the wealthy because it is easier for them to save, and because they receive bigger tax breaks when they do.” Lauding GRAs as a way to effectively increase retirement savings, Ghilarducci wrote that savings incentives are unequal for rich and poor families because tax deferrals “provide a much larger ‘carrot’ to wealthy families than to middle-class families — and none whatsoever for families too poor to owe taxes.”
     In a radio interview with Kirby Wilbur in Seattle on Oct. 27, 2008, Ghilarducci explained that her proposal doesn’t eliminate the tax breaks, rather, “I’m just rearranging the tax breaks that are available now for 401(k)s and spreading — spreading the wealth.”

Private pension funds, IRAs, and 401(k) accounts hold approximately $18 trillion in assets. That’s almost exactly the size of the federal debt. More than coincidence? Your Curmudgeon reports; you decide.

Then decide whether “retirement equality” strikes you as a noble goal or just one more scheme of State theft under a wholly deceitful veneer of good intentions.

Whenever some noisy interest group starts prattling about “equality” or “rights,” a smart man puts one hand on his wallet and the other on his sidearm. The Rights of Man are laid out plainly in old Tom Jefferson’s magnum opus:

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.

Though many argue otherwise, the “equality” Jefferson had in mind was equality before the law: i.e., that the law cannot justly distinguish among men according to their identities, their assets, or their origins. That stands in sharp contrast to the egalitarianism of the Left, which seeks to use State power to coerce us all in the name of various unattainable “equalities.”

But there’s a simpler way to cut away the nonsense, buried in that innocent-looking phrase “the pursuit of Happiness.”

Does a right to pursue something imply a right to catch it?

Isn’t a secure retirement merely a material goal some of us pursue, on the grounds that it would make us happy to be able to retire after spending forty or fifty years laboring?

What about the trades in which there has never been any possibility of retirement, such as farming? Did the innumerable legions throughout history that labored over the land, coaxing from it the food we require to sustain our lives, have a “right” they never knew about? Or was it that the way they chose to “pursue Happiness” simply foreclosed that possibility, that they were aware of that from the outset, and chose to work the land even so?

And should we grant the smallest groat of respect to a claim of “rights” that infringes upon others’ right to “pursue Happiness” peaceably and as they see fit?

In closing: I have no equals. Neither do you. Keeping that constantly in mind would armor us against nearly all the various claims of “rights” being bandied about today. For in truth, there is only one right that can be defended without contradicting oneself: the right to be left alone, so long as one honors others’ right to be left alone. All other claims amount to nothing but a power grab.

There’s no limit to the power-mongers’ ability to claim new “rights.” They haven’t gotten around to claiming that “an equal right to life” prohibits some persons from living longer than others...but it might not have occurred to them just yet.

Give them time.