What We Should Care About

[Geee]

American Thinker:

The debates in post-election Washington and the exhortations of conservative punditry seem focused almost entirely on economics. But if our politics is built around economic concerns alone, we see the world through the same lens as Marxists. Politics, like everything else in life, must be grounded in moral principles, but Marxists believe that morality is simply a function of economics: wealth, or rather the proper distribution of wealth, is superior to bourgeois ideas of integrity, decency, faith, and love.

That is profoundly different from the foundational ideals of America. The Founding Fathers did not risk their lives and their fortunes to get richer, although that is what Marxist professors teach our kids. Men like Washington hoped our new land would prosper over time, but their purpose in creating a new nation was liberty.

This liberty tends over time and over a large group people to produce general prosperity, but this is a very inexact process -- more like the messy statistical laws of physics in areas like thermodynamics rather than the clean results of arithmetic. Sometimes hardworking and thrifty people grow poor, and sometimes unsavory wastrels grow rich.