Rightful Owners

Honoring the American ideal will create more rightful owners...

Rush Limbaugh has made much of his characterization of Obama’s agenda as “returning the nation’s wealth to its ‘rightful owners’”. In Rush’s formulation, Obama is of the leftist worldview that says all wealth has been accumulated on the backs of the poor and defenseless (for Obama this means all ‘people of color’), and usually through either deceit or some form of mean-spirited exploitation. The coercive power of government is therefore needed to right these wrongs by sticking it to the rich and redistributing their wealth to the victims of their evil designs and actions. Rush is pretty much spot-on in his read on Obama, and we wouldn’t take exception to any of it.

But it sort of begs the question: who are the ‘rightful owners’ of wealth in a society characterized by American ideals? There’s of course a literal way to look at this question, which leads to an answer framed by legal concepts of property rights, laws of inheritance, rules of sale and transfer, etc. And that’s fine as far as it goes. But the question has a deeper dimension, which actually yields a simpler answer. And there is great unifying and uplifting power in this simple answer: the rightful owners of wealth are those who earn it through acceptance of, appreciation for, and a determination to take advantage of the American ideal of individual freedom and responsibility under God.

Under this American ideal, rightful owners are not limited by skin color, gender, place of worship (or no worship); nor are they limited to a certain class of people defined by education or economic background. But they are characterized over time by hard work, the pursuit of excellence, persistence, commitment, and by behavior that aligns pretty well with what the Bible calls ‘righteousness’. No, we don’t mean rightful owners are Puritans or selfless angels, but we do mean very specifically that the relentless leftist view that all American wealth is the product of greed, dishonesty, and ruthless and unscrupulous behavior is flat out false and has always been false. And for every exception that the leftist wants to shout out—what about Enron! What about AIG!—we shout back that they aren’t really exceptions. Because one of the key elements of this definition—and the one forever omitted or denigrated by the discussions of our Political Class—is that ‘rightful owners’ emerge ‘over time’. Wealth which seems to be in the hands of those whose behavior is characterized by greed, dishonesty, and ruthless and unscrupulous behavior tends over time to dissipate and ultimately disappear.

The point here in any case is not really to posit the perfect unassailable, no-exceptions definition of rightful owners, but to highlight the importance of the capacity for change in wealth creation and ownership over time, if only American society sticks to its ideal. In fact, we’d go so far as to say that if American society does not stick to this foundational ideal, there will be no capacity for positive change in wealth creation and ownership. Governments cannot overrule or overturn the requirement for hard work, persistence, commitment and righteous behavior. Nor can they order or coerce the governed to embrace these qualities. Only free people who sense their freedom to achieve, to earn and to keep the rewards of their efforts will embrace these qualities.

So Obama and the leftists can pass a law taking all wealth from those who have it and giving it to those who don’t (that’s the essence of cap and trade), but by trampling on the basic American ideal, the only thing assured by such a law is disillusionment, chaos, criminality, corruption and hatred—leading to the very society that leftists think exists now: one in which all human activity is reduced to a fight for the crumbs of an economic pie that will not grow. This fight is won by those who bribe government officials or steal from others or profit in black markets of various kinds. The dynamic free market capitalists leave town or quit.

This is why moving in a direction of massively greater government spending and massively higher taxes in order to pay for these greater government benefits is always a move in the wrong direction for human progress. That’s right: moving in a direction of higher taxes in order to provide for greater government benefits is always a move in the wrong direction.

So look at nationalizing healthcare in this context. It takes away individual freedom—when everyone must participate in the same way—and it denies any sense of personal responsibility for health. That’s really all you need to know. It is antithetical to the American ideal. It will be a disaster.

An element of the American dream used to be articulated in terms of time—as in measurable improvement over generations--sometimes by giant steps in a single generation, but oftener by steady, incremental progress.. This element is still valid; it still works over time. But it is more demanding of individuals than the Political Class wants to believe or accept. The Political Class is forever pursuing temporal ‘fairness’ fixes to what is essentially an eternal challenge of individual growth in character, as evidenced by hard work and the pursuit of excellence, persistence, commitment, and so on.

Rightful owners are free individuals who have risen to the meet this challenge. Under the American ideal, any individual can do this, and when the government is aligned with preserving and protecting this ideal, then the effect of many, many individuals living in freedom and pursuing excellence is economic growth, a much bigger pie for everyone—i.e., an expansion in the number of rightful owners and in the value of what they own.

Obama’s socialist policies—which is another way of describing policies to ‘return the nation’s wealth to its rightful owners’—can only fail. The American people are sensing this, and they are turning on his agenda. They should.

Paul Gable

July 12, 2009