The conservative economist opines: "The history of the 20th century is full of examples of countries that
set out to redistribute wealth and ended up redistributing poverty. The
communist nations were a classic example, but by no means the only
example. In theory, confiscating the wealth of the more successful people
ought to make the rest of the society more prosperous. But when the
Soviet Union confiscated the wealth of successful farmers, food became
scarce. As many people died of starvation under Stalin in the 1930s as died in Hitler's Holocaust in the 1940s. How can that be? It is not complicated. You can only confiscate the
wealth that exists at a given moment. You cannot confiscate future
wealth — and that future wealth is less likely to be produced when
people see that it is going to be confiscated."
More commentary from Dr. Sowell: "We have all heard the old saying that giving a man a fish feeds him
only for a day, while teaching him to fish feeds him for a lifetime.
Redistributionists give him a fish and leave him dependent on the
government for more fish in the future. If the redistributionists were serious, what they would want to
distribute is the ability to fish, or to be productive in other ways.
Knowledge is one of the few things that can be distributed to people
without reducing the amount held by others. That would better serve the interests of the poor, but it would not
serve the interests of politicians who want to exercise power, and to
get the votes of people who are dependent on them."
Thomas Sowell Op-Ed: Obama's Fallacies Of Redistribution
