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by Mel Griffith
The "occupy everything" crowd has been much in the news lately. It is made up of spoiled brats who have enough time and money to go camping instead of working or looking for a job. Their protest is based on a fundamental misunderstanding of how the economic system works. They seem to think that there is a fixed amount of wealth in the country. For some peculiar reason they think that what wealth there is ought to be evenly distributed among the population, regardless of how much work someone does or how much talent they have. In their view, if you have more than they do, you must have stolen some of theirs and they want the government to get it back for them. In reality, the economy doesn't work the way they think it does. There isn't a fixed amount of wealth in the country. It gets created and destroyed all the time and those who are good at creating it frequently end up with more of it than most others. Folks get wealthy mostly by creating it instead of by shifting existing wealth around. Often those who create wealth for themselves also create wealth for other people. Bill Gates got very wealthy by creating products which people bought and used because the products helped the customers increase their own wealth. If people who have the talent to create valuable things others can use are not allowed to reap the benefits of their work, what incentive do they have to work hard and take risks? The occupy protesters who want to get rid of the rich 1% and distribute their wealth to everyone else seem unaware that the Russians tried that idea for seventy years only to discover that there wasn't anything to distribute because people don't work very hard if they don't benefit from it. Russia now has its own 1% and their economy works much better.
President Obama and his crowd cater to the "occupy" nonsense by insisting that the way to solve our out-of-control spending problem is to tax the rich still more. They know full well that if we took everything the richest 1% had it wouldn't make much of a dent in the government's runaway debt. In fact, the rich are already paying more than their fair share. The rich already pay about 40% of income tax while half the people pay nothing. A fair tax would be a flat tax where everybody pays the same percentage. When Obama talks about the rich paying their "fair share" what he really means is to make their share more unfair than it already is. He believes that the public isn't smart enough to figure that out, and he may be right. Unfortunately, many in Washington don't seem to understand the economy much better than the occupy crowd and keep hampering progress with their passion for more power through overregulation.
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