Posted by
Stephen Ashby on Thursday, October 16, 2008 12:00:00 AM
There are a couple of things I find chilling about Barack Obama's exchange with the now legendary Joe the Plumber.
When Joe complained about Obama's proposed tax policy, the Dear Leader replied, "It's not that I want to punish your success, I just want to make sure that everybody who is behind you, that they've got a chance for success too...I think when you spread the wealth around, it's good for everybody".
The first thing I find disturbing is how similar Obama's comments are to a slogan popularized by Karl Marx in 1875, "From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs". Mankind experimented with this concept on a wide scale in the 20th Century and the result was a vale of tears. It was a legacy of unnecessary human suffering and oppression.
The second thing find disturbing is the level of confident arrogance in Obama. Senator Government didn't know anything about Joe the Plumber, but he confidently assumes that Joe can afford to fork over a hunk of his wealth for the benefit of others. It does not seem to occur to Obama that there is no particular moral imperative that Joe be forced to support the comfort of others, whether he can afford it or not, nor that it might be wrong to use the coercive force of government to steal the wealth of an individual in order to give it to somebody else. A guy who would steal the property rights of others would likely have no problem also taking their life and liberty to forward their agenda of "change".