Vanity Fair: Red All Over

[Geee]

American Thinker:

Joseph Stiglitz has created a frisson of excitement among the chattering classes with his recent piece in Vanity Fair. Stiglitz thinks that maybe the uprising on the Arab street will come here. His article decries the fact that in America, a small percent of the population has the greatest amount of wealth. He says they monopolize "the nation's income." The nation's income? What exactly does that phrase mean?

Stiglitz' article is a classic re-statement of Marxism's critique of free enterprise. The idea that the rich somehow "control" all the wealth in the country, that they act in concert, that their actions harm those of lesser wealth, that income inequality is the thing we should focus on, and that the "nation" owns all the wealth created within its borders -- all of this was said before in Das Kapital.

I'll take my own family as an example of why Stiglitz is wrong. For most of his life, my father was the sole support of our family. He worked with his hands as a carpenter every day. When rain or snow canceled his work, he didn't get paid. It was that simple.

He was grateful to his union for the fact that he didn't have to work weekends and overtime (unless he was generously compensated for it). He was proud of his work, and should have been. He never took a vacation that I can recall until he was 62 and on Social Security.