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The rule of law is indispensable for the existence of a prosperous economy. The Obama administration has practically paralyzed the economic recovery by restraining investments. I have never seen a poor person offering a job to another poor. Most of the jobs are created by people with money wanted to make more money.A Nation of Peasants?A Nation of Peasants? - Victor Davis Hanson - Townhall Conservative
Victor Davis Hanson
Traditional peasant societies believe in only a limited good. The more your neighbor earns, the less someone else gets. Profits are seen as a sort of theft. They must be either hidden or redistributed. Envy rather than admiration of success reigns.
In contrast, Western civilization began with a very different ancient Greek idea of an autonomous citizen, not an indentured serf or subsistence peasant. The small, independent landowner -- if left to his own talents and if his success was protected by, and from, government -- would create new sources of wealth for everyone. The resulting greater bounty for the poor soon trumped their old jealousy of the better off.
Citizens of ancient Greece and Italy soon proved more prosperous and free than either the tribal folk to the north and west, or the imperial subjects to the south and east.
The success of later Western civilization in general, and America in particular, is testament to this legacy of the freedom of the individual in the widest political and economic sense
We seem to be forgetting that lately -- though Mao Zedong's redistributive failures in China, or present-day bankrupt Greece, should warn us about what happens when government tries to enforce an equality of result rather than of opportunity.
Even after the failure of statism at the end of the Cold War, the disasters of socialism in Venezuela and Cuba, and the recent financial meltdowns in the European Union, for some reason America is returning to a peasant mentality of a limited good that redistributes wealth rather than creates it. Candidate Obama's "spread the wealth" slip to Joe the Plumber simply was upgraded to President Obama's "I do think at a certain point you've made enough money."
That is the main reason businesses with money are sitting on the fence, and not investing it which would provide jobs, reducing the unemployment and allowing the workers to earn income and pay taxes, accelerating the economic recovery.