The Moral Imperative of Free Markets

President Obama’s campaign trumpets compassion while portraying Mitt Romney’s business acumen as immoral. Obama presumes righteous superiority, but how is exploiting the poor for political props presidential? Why must Romney justify success? How, two decades after communism collapsed, does antagonistic class rhetoric retain credibility?

Liberals paint free markets as morally lacking by bemoaning that capitalism plunders workers and pillages the environment. Progressives compare real world capitalism – distorted by fallen man and political intrusion as it inevitably exists – against theoretical ideals never attained anywhere, leastwise in socialist systems prone to oppression and ecological calamity.

Progressives exaggerate the excesses and failures of free enterprise while affording government moral approbation. Tellingly, those most bothered by greedy businessmen, (who generally profit by pleasing customers), appear unperturbed by greedy politicians even as government power derives from feasting on the wealth of others.

Businesses merely make offers which customers may accept, or depart peaceably. Government enforces demands. Washington mandates, err “taxes” us, bending citizens to the sinecure’s will under the shallow guise of “social justice.”

Economically, justice entails that transactions are entered freely and measured fairly. Funded by confiscatory taxation, government programs rarely achieve either. The Left’s beloved “social justice” is rooted in covetousness; an anti-social and unjust cancer vexing American culture.

Per the OECD, America has amongst the developed world’s most progressive income taxes, which fuel a federal behemoth primarily disposed toward paying people not to produce. As dependency surges Tim Geithner boasts about mailing 80 million checks a month.

Only wealth’s creation can elevate the lower rungs. Stunting high earners to attain equality lifts nobody. America’s working poor fare exceptionally well as our poverty line exceeds per capita income most anywhere else. Markets permit those born destitute to rise by merit, which explains why immigrants come.

Thanks to all!

I write because it’s urgent to get the message out to a broader audience. The very essence of America is at stake.

I am not paid.

I post to FreeRepublic because it’s a fantastic website.

FreeRepublic requires articles from Forbes to be excerpted and linked.

The audience at FreeRepublic is immaterial relative to Forbes.com where these are published directly and RealClearMarkets.com which publishes them indirectly.

http://www.realclearmarkets.com/topic/topic.php?id=5284

Thanks!

Bill

Thank you for posting! If all freedom-loving, constitutionally literate citizens who have studied the writings of the Founders and Framers of our Constitution would post and share their findings about their nation's ideas of liberty, simply to be sharing them, then perhaps future generations might be able to inherit what all of us inherited.

For instance, the attacks on "capitalism" sometimes come from those who infer or downright assert that the idea is somehow incompatible with Christianity. The claim sometimes is used to justify the ideas of coercive "redistribution" by some government entity of the wages of private citizens.

Some questions might be pertinent and helpful to a thoughtful discussion on that point:

Is liberty of imperfect individuals in a society more compatible with Christianity? - OR

Is coercive control by imperfect individuals in government over all other imperfect individuals in a society more compatible with Christianity?

Christian teachings encourage individual benevolence, meekness, etc. Where in those teachings is use of coercive power over the lives of others encouraged?

Do imperfect individuals who gain coercive power by election to posts in government somehow become more virtuous and wise than likewise imperfect individuals in the society?

Are there examples in American history where the general welfare of the society benefitted by applying the principles of so-called "government" control of the means of production and distribution?

A reading of Governor Bradford's diary of the experience of the Jamestown Colony might be instructive here.

America's Founders preferred liberty for individuals, and their principles made America a desired destination for millions for over 200 years.

"To preserve [the] independence [of the people,] we must not let our rulers load us with perpetual debt. We must make our election between economy and liberty, or profusion and servitude. If we run into such debts as that we must be taxed in our meat and in our drink, in our necessaries and our comforts, in our labors and our amusements, for our callings and our creeds, as the people of England are, our people, like them, must come to labor sixteen hours in the twenty-four, give the earnings of fifteen of these to the government for their debts and daily expenses, and the sixteenth being insufficient to afford us bread, we must live, as they now do, on oatmeal and potatoes, have no time to think, no means of calling the mismanagers to account, but be glad to obtain subsistence by hiring ourselves to rivet their chains on the necks of our fellow-sufferers." --Thomas Jefferson to Samuel Kercheval, 1816. ME 15:39

"Were we directed from Washington when to sow and when to reap, we should soon want bread." --Thomas Jefferson: Autobiography, 1821. ME 1:122

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