Posted on 08/07/2009 12:44:18 PM PDT by bs9021
Not About the Money
by: Alana Goodman, August 07, 2009
Opponents of free-market economics have often portrayed capitalists as greedy money-grubbers, but one conservative think tank is arguing that free enterprise is the foundation of a virtuous and moral society.
“Taxation is about fairness and freedom, it’s not about money,” said American Enterprise Institute (AEI) President Arthur Brooks at the Heritage Foundation on August 4th. “You can raise my taxes another five points. I’m not going to like it, but my kids are not going to go without shoes. What’s going to offend me is it’s going to make me less free and it’s not fair and it’s not American…And that’s a moral case. ”
An April 9th poll by Rasmussen Reports showed that Americans under age 30 were pretty much evenly divided on the question of whether they preferred capitalism or socialism, with 37% choosing capitalism and 33% choosing socialism.
Brooks believes that this trend may be due to changes in how socialism is viewed by the younger generation. “I’m 45 years old…When I was a kid, socialism meant gulags…socialism meant the Soviet Union. For my students, when I was [teaching] at Syracuse, socialism meant college professors—boring guys with beards and Ph.D.’s. In other words, the world has changed an awful lot.”
To counter these changes, Brooks suggested that proponents of a free market system revise the way that they have been communicating their ideas. “Relying on the loaded language [of the past]…isn’t going to work. We need new language and new messages,” he said. “The problem with the free enterprise advocates is that we’ve been talking about the money in an already rich country as if it were about the money—and it’s not. Entrepreneurship is not about the money. Small business is not about the money....
(Excerpt) Read more at campusreportonline.net ...
Socialist economies routinely produce double digit unemployment and endemic economic growth resulting in a far lower standard of living for the society over all.
Like all your high tech toy's kiddies? You got them because of the profit incentive of a capitalist society rewarded the innovators that invented them. Socialist societies are stagnant, they do not produce those things, they only leech them off capitalist societies that do produce them.
If the ‘Bama continues to crush the life out of free enterprise, there will be no money for any projects, nor will there be anything left to tax. That’s when production quota failures will be met with prison sentences and executions. If history teaches us anything, it’s this.
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