Making the Soviet Proletariat Proud: Hey Uncle Bernie, Redistribute This!

Communism, socialism, whatever it's called is a dandy of an idea. I mean who wouldn't want no end poverty, and all we have to do is dictate it, right?  Sounds great.  And it works of course! Just look at the Soviet Union.... Oh yeah right, they are gone. Then socialist China instead... What? It's now "capitalist with Chinese features."  Cuba!  Cuba then, a bastion of social success and equality.  I mean doesn't every Cuban own a boat?  Oh, ya, any Cuban that owns a boat is now a Floridian.  Venezuela? Let's talk to the Venezuelans.  Oh, they are all waiting in breadlines.  Maybe they can just eat cake instead.  North Korea, a workers' paradise, where even the dogs are fed well... fed on the still living bodies of  enemies of the state.  A little gross and morose to be sure.

OK fine, these are all governments.  What about socialism with an eye focused the glory of God?  Maybe the Shakers?  No.  It didn't work and they died out?  Rats.  Hmmm.  The Mormon's United Order!  The Mormon's are still around, aren't they... and are a hot bed of capitals Republicans. Fine, so socialism hasn't done Karl Marx proud, but it's not like it cause the Holocaust or something...  hold on... I was just notified that NAZI is short for "National Socialists."  Socialism DID cause the Holocaust.  Well that is disappointing for the worldwide brotherhood of workers.

Well facts-schmacts, we all know communism and socialism with work this time.  As Uncle Bernie keeps tell us.  The rich people have most of the money and we have to take it from them.  WE have to redistribute THEIR wealth.  Because as we all know, money and wealth is like land, there is only so much to go around.  If someone has a lot, it necessarily means that the rest of use have little, right?  Wrong comrades. No soup for you!  Nope, not even any borscht.

Money and wealth is not like land.  There is not a fixed amount in the world and just because someone has more, it does not mean you have less.  I have no intention of backing that up with any economical data, it's my blog and I don't want to waste the space, but it is true nonetheless.  Besides, I am guessing anyone trying so say otherwise has a picture of Karl Marx hanging on their wall and has studied economics in a school that does not drug test its facility.  But let's even assume that the fixed amount of money in the world is true, the beauty of capitalism is not that it makes some people rich, it is that it makes everything cheaper and more accessible for the rest of us.  Then you can buy much more with far less.  So even if there was a fixed sized pie, you can have more in your little piece of the pie.  So your life is better.

Now here is the proverbial kick in the crotch to the hate-the-rich socialist crowd that they so desperately want to stop (a Mongolian proverb perhaps).  When people find ways of making things affordable and better for the rest of us, they become... RICH.  Tricky little buggers argent they?  Bill Gates helped bring personal computers to every house in the US, creating millions of jobs and opportunities (including my humble telecommuting existence) and made a butt-load (not sure if that is a metric or standard unit of measurement).  This is ample cause to to hate that greedy capitalist Bas... [insert common name of a child born out of wedlock] for sure.

Then once these guys get rich they do this evil thing called "investing their money."  They loan their money to other companies, sometimes even small businesses, who are trying to offer us products and services that we want or need.  Then when that company succeeds, those greedy little investor have the audacity to makes even more money!  Criminal!  Moreover, these investments then often turn the business owners into even more evil rich capitalists.  If we could just stop this vicious cycle the ghost of Fredrick Engels could rest easily. But unfortunately for our communist friends, that is how it works.

But here is the reality about the super rich in this county; the truth is that there is only so much you can buy with money.  Last year Warren Buffet made 15,000 times more money than I did.  Wow!  I'm a lawyer even.  So logically if his income is 15,000 times greater than mine, he should have 15,000 time more stuff than yours truly.  Pulling out my trusty calculator this means he would have have a 57 million square foot home, 15,000 Chevy trucks, 45,000 DVD players (but only 30,000 of them Blu-ray).  But that is not how it works.  In fact, I own twice as many houses as he does (not necessarily by my choice), though his one house is twice the square footage of mine, just not 15,000.  And even the most ostentatious of big spenders, who seems to loose their wealth eventually anyway, may own four or five houses at most, but not thousands of times more than the average Joe and maybe only 4 to 5 times bigger.  No one is out there recreating Dowton Abbey in Ohio.

Now let's ask, what do the rich have that you you need;  TV, suits, cars, computer, watches, iPhone, stereo system, food (we are a fat country for a reason)?  I am guessing that most lower income Americans (and virtually all college students) have all of these.  The rich of course spend a lot more for "better quality" and brand names, but can you tell the difference between a $100 watch and a $10,000 watch?  I am pretty sure I can't.  Either way, they both tell me the time.

This brings me back to the original point of income redistribution.  Now you may be surprised that I agree with Uncle Bernie that we should redistribute the wealth. We just go about it different ways. Uncle Bernie would forceably take it from the rich by taxing their socks off and proceeding that money though the great efficiency multiplier called the Federal Government. The correct approach is to have them redistribute it willingly; sell them crap and lots of it. Sell them overpriced perfumes, custom cars, expensive food, $1000 dress, boats, and nutty clothing for their dogs.  As much as our coveting nature wants to revile against this kind of spending... this is income redistribution.  There is an entire industry of luxury goods that employs millions of us simply folk like you and me that cater to this spending and takes money from the rich willingly.

Now I hear my dear socialist friends screaming that you are not going to sap the wealth out of George Soros my selling him the Gold Apple Watch.  Agreed.  But I am quite certain that he doesn't have an Uncle Scrooge money pit either, so his money is stashed somewhere.  It is in banks, where we get our loans.  It is invested in the stock market which funds our companies and bolsters our 401K plans.   The rich also do this deceptive little thing called "giving to charity" to try to trick us into thinking that these rich 1% are humans with a hearts that bleed for humanity.  I mean who does Warren Buffet think he is kidding, giving away $22.7 Billion dollars to charities can't hide the stain of his being a rich capitalist marauder.  $22.7 Billion is just smoke and mirrors my friends, smoke and mirror.  He really only cares about money at he sits in his upper middle class home that he paid less than $300,000 for.

The truth is my friends is that this "screw the rich" demagoguery is more about our coveting than it is about currency.  It is about wanting what we don't have and hating whose who do.  It is about dreaming of things we wish we had, rather than getting off our butts and working for it.  And it as more about politicians hiding the failures their Marx Brother (Groucho, not Karl) economic and spending policies by getting the mob to hate those with sound economic and spending policies.

So while bringing down the rich has a nice rising proletariat ring to it for the lazy anarchist in all of us, what does it accomplish?  My late wife had a great observations on this topic (no she is not dead, she is just my ex-wife who was always late).  She said that communism and socialism did, in fact, make everyone economically equal.   But it did so dragging everyone down to an equal level of poverty and despair; letting no one rise but bureaucrats and despots.  So it this way it quite easy to dictate that all income be redistributed, it is just not so easy to keep the society from starving to death in the process.  So thanks for the object lesson Russia, Cuba, Venezuela, China, and North Korea, may your economical incompetents offer all of us education rather than emulation.







Reading Alternative: If you are a math person and don't like to read such lengthy blog posts (and who would blame you), the crux of this point may be illustrated by tallying up the number of citizens who died in these communist/socialist countries while trying and enforcing this grande experiment.  Here is a hint, most Powerball winner have fewer dollars than these experiments have victims.  Point made.