Thomas Sowell: income redistribution doesn’t work

Thomas Sowell has a great piece in today’s New York Post about why income redistribution, which then-state-Senator Obama was revealed this week on tape to have endorsed, doesn’t work.

Why, for instance, within a few years of Castro’s confiscating the wealth of prosperous Cubans who then fled to South Florida, was Cuba impoverished – and South Florida’s Cuban-American community, who had reached U.S. shores completely impoverished, again prosperous?

Because, as Sowell aptly points out, their wealth was the result of their “human capital.” This community had the ability, and the values and work ethic, to succeed. Their prosperity was no more random than that of any group of people in a free society. The wealth they had was produced by them, and when it was given away to others, those others–without the same capacities, perhaps, and also hemmed in by a system that fails to reward hard work or innovation and a political system that discourages individual excellence–did not produce the same amount of wealth.

The fallacy in Obama’s and other leftists’ thinking regarding income redistribution is that there is a limited amount of wealth and it falls into certain hands randomly. Also that wealth can be sustained by no special effort on the part of anyone, but the ever-existing ever-growing pie just redistributed forever like the miracle of the loaves and the fishes. In reality, however, real wealth is almost always the result of sustained initiative and drive as well as of creative thinking. And that can’t be legislated into perfectly equal distribution.

Thomas Sowell explains it here … So well!

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