Money is a tool. A Message to Redistributionists

I love it. ~ Janice

"Money is a tool. And wealth, accumulation of money, is a bunch of
tools. Now when one person, a carpenter for instance, has a bunch of
tools, we don't say to him, "You have too many tools. You should give
some of your saws and drills and chisels to the guy who is cooking
the omelets." We don't try to close the tool gap."

<http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1592384/posts>A Message to
Redistributionists
Cato ^ | May 1, 1997 | PJ
O'Rourke http://www.cato.org/pubs/policy_report/cpr-19n4-5.html

Posted on 03/08/2006 10:45:38 AM EST by Marxbites
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1592384/posts

P. J. O'Rourke is the author of Parliament of Whores and an H. L.
Mencken Research Fellow at the Cato Institute. These remarks were
delivered at the Cato Institute's 20th anniversary celebration on May 1, 1997.

Cato is about ideas. We spend a lot of time talking and thinking
about ideas, but not just good ideas. Bad ideas are important, too.
In fact, a lot of life operates on bad ideas. And I thought I'd like
to talk about a bad idea: closing the global wealth gap. That is a
very bad idea.

I mean, do we want to close the beauty gap and make everybody look
like Dick Morris? Do we want to close the virtue gap and encourage
Mother Teresa to have a deathbed affair, or appoint that Kennedy kid,
Michael, to run the Save the Children Foundation? Do we want to close
the talent gap and have an NBA full of players who have the height
and talent of, for instance, me? If we had a world without gaps,
where everyone was the same color, size, social class, and sex, who
would get pregnant? If everyone had the same information, what would
we talk about? Consider what would happen if everyone had the same
work, the same job. Everyone would take the same vacation. You would
have 5.8 billion people headed to the shore in the first two weeks of
August, playing a game of beach volleyball--2.9 billion to a side.
The idea of a world where all people are alike, which is essentially
the idea that we fight against at Cato, is a fantasy for the stupid.
But I'll tell you, egalitarianism is worse than stupid, it's immoral.

I think the Old Testament is quite clear about that. The Bible might
seem to be a strange place to be doing economic research, but I have
been thinking, from a political economy point of view, about the
Tenth Commandment. Now the first nine commandments concern
theological principles--thou shall not steal and kill and so forth.
Fair enough. Then there's the Tenth Commandment: "Thou shall not
covet they neighbor's wife. Thou shall not covet thy neighbor's
house, nor his manservant, nor his maidservant, nor his ox, nor his
ass, nor anything that is thy neighbor's." I mean, here are God's
basic rules for how we should live, a very brief list of sacred
obligations and solemn moral precepts, and right at the end of it is:
"Don't envy your buddy his cow." What is that doing there? Why would
God, with just 10 things to tell Moses, choose jealousy about the
stuff the guy next door has? Well, think about how important to the
well-being of a community that commandment actually is. What that
commandment says is that if you want a donkey, if you want a pot
roast, if you want a cleaning lady, don't bitch about it, go get your own!

The Tenth Commandment sends a message to socialists, to
collectivists, to people who believe that wealth is best obtained by
redistribution, and that message is clear and concise: Go to hell!
It's as simple as that.

Egalitarianism is sinful; it's also cowardly. We fear the power that
others have over us, and since wealth is power, the egalitarians fear
the rich. They're afraid that Kathie Lee Gifford is going to make
them sew jogging suits in sweat shops for 30 cents an hour. But,
seriously, how rational is fear of the rich? Let's take a midnight
stroll through a rich neighborhood. And let's take a midnight stroll
through a poor neighborhood just a few blocks from here. Sure, you
can get in a lot of trouble in Monte Carlo. You can lose at roulette
or get suckered into a shady business deal with Princess Stephanie's
husband. But you are a lot more likely to get mugged here in
Northwest Washington. Now, mind you, I don't think we should begrudge
the crimes of those poor people down the street. They're just
practicing a little free-lance socialism; they're just being liberal
Democrats in their own small way.

But the point is that the real alternative to the power of the rich
is not power of the poor. It's just plain power. If we don't want the
world's wealth to be controlled by people with money, then the
alternative is to have the world's wealth controlled by people with
guns. And governments have guns. They have quite a few guns. Now, in
theory, it is fine that the government has guns and that the guns
control money because, in theory, the mugger puts his pistol down and
picks up a ballot and he steals from multinational corporations
instead of from you. But the reality is obviously quite different.
The track record of collectivist societies in the 20th century speaks
entirely for itself. Thirty million dead from closing the wealth gap
in Chinese agriculture; 6 million dead from closing the commerce gap
in the Ukraine; and the deaths go on and on. Even the most democratic
government becomes a law unto itself, and I don't think I really need
to elaborate on that. At this moment Bill and Hillary are headed over
to the Sidwell Friends School to hawk the Lincoln bedroom to
Chelsea's friends. ("Okay, bring your pajamas, s'mores, and a hundred
thousand dollars.")

Such are the products of envy and fear, which brings me to the third
mainspring of egalitarianism: greed. And by greed I don't mean the
simple lust for material objects. I am concerned about the greed for
position and pride, for what nowadays is called self-esteem. I wonder
how many of the people who profess to believe in the leveling ideas
of collectivism and egalitarianism really just believe that they
themselves are good for nothing. I mean, how many leftists are
animated by a quite reasonable self-loathing? In their hearts they
know that they are not going to become scholars or inventors or
industrialists or even ordinary good kind people. So they need a way
to achieve that smugness for which the left is so justifiably famous.
They need a way to achieve self-esteem without merit. Well, there is
politics. In an egalitarian world everything will be controlled by
politics, and politics requires no merit.

Consider the four men who have been America's most prominent
politicians in this past year: Bob Dole, Newt Gingrich, Al Gore, and
Bill Clinton. Would you hire any of those men? Would you hire any of
them to mow your lawn? Bob Dole would be down on his hands and knees
trying to make a deal with the grass not to grow. Gore would be
asking the cat if dandelions are an endangered species. Newt would
borrow the Toro. And Clinton wouldn't be able to make up his mind.
Power mower or push? Do the front first or the back? Rake and then
mow, or the other way around? So he'd give up and he'd be in your
kitchen raiding the refrigerator, flirting with your baby sitter.

We have to kill ideas like the wealth gap. The world doesn't need to
be thinking about the wealth gap; the world needs to be thinking
about wealth. Wealth is good. Everybody knows that about his own
wealth. Wealth improves your life; it improves your family's life.
You invest in wise and worthwhile things, and you help your friends
and neighbors. Your life would get better if you got rich, and the
lives of all the people around you would get better if you got rich.
Your wealth is good. So why isn't everybody else's wealth good, too?
I don't get it. Wealth is good when a lot of people have it, and
wealth is good when just a few people have it. And that is because
money is a tool, nothing more. I mean, you can't eat money, you can't
sleep with it, you can't wear it as underwear very comfortably. And
wealth, accumulation of money, is a bunch of tools. Now when one
person, a carpenter for instance, has a bunch of tools, we don't say
to him, "You have too many tools. You should give some of your saws
and drills and chisels to the guy who is cooking the omelets." We
don't try to close the tool gap.

Wealth has brought enormous benefits to the world. Rich people are
heroes--especially if they donate some money to Cato. Those rich
heroes didn't necessarily mean to be heroes, but that's beside the
point. They are heroes, and yet the way we treat wealthy people in
our political systems is terrible. Even now that the whole world has
come to believe that free markets and private money making are good
things, we still have our residual infatuation with equality and our
proposals to close wealth gaps.
Received on Wed Mar 8 23:18:36 2006