Will Karl Marx have the last laugh?
(EDITOR’S NOTE: For the next two weeks, the Editor’s 2 Cents column will be devoted to rerunning two columns from April 2006 that were finalists for the Bastiat Award for Journalism that year. The author points out that these columns, which argued against increased socialism in the United States, were written while George W. Bush was president.)
Karl Marx lost the battle, but he may be winning the war.
We all thought back in the late 1980s when communist governments were collapsing under the weight of their own excesses in Eastern Europe, that the discredited ideas of communism’s founder would disappear, too.
But old Karl Marx may have the last laugh.
From each according to their ability; to each according to their need.
That is the simplest statement of Marxist philosophy that exists, and if it doesn’t set off alarm bells when you hear it, then you haven’t been paying attention to the political debate in our country recently. More and more, it looks like our country and our people are supposed to feel guilty for being successful, and we are supposed to make up for it by throwing money at people who haven’t earned it. In the old days, they called that begging; now they call it “entitlement.”
The United States has jobs, and Mexicans need them, so therefore Mexicans are entitled to those jobs.
Hospitals have health services, and poor people need them, so therefore poor people are entitled to those health services.
Bill Gates has billions of dollars, and the government needs billions, so therefore he should fork over as much as the government wants — no questions asked.
(Oh yes, and because he has so much money, the government is going to want more of his than yours. Heck, they’re entitled to it, right? From each according to their ability; to each according to their need.)
While we’re on the topic, the government has billions of dollars it already got from Bill Gates and other taxpayers, and people with less initiative, intelligence and good fortune than Bill Gates need it, so therefore they are entitled to it in the form of tax credits. It doesn’t matter if they paid taxes or not. They “need” the money — so they get it. You can call it an earned-income tax credit or you can call it communism. Either way, it’s the same story:
From each according to their ability; to each according to their need.
If you are a hard worker, it ought to make you mad. There you are, putting in extra time and effort to accomplish the best for yourself and your family, but the next guy over is less driven (”I like to enjoy the good things of life!) so he ends up taking it easy. You provide health insurance for your family; he provides nothing. When your family gets sick, you bring them to the hospital, pay the deductible, follow the rules, borrow if necessary, set up a payment plan, but you do the right thing. When his family gets sick, he brings them to the hospital, demands the best care, then complains when he gets the bill. “Why is my family not entitled to the best health care,” he whines. “Are we not people?” So instead of trying to pay the bill, he lets the rest of us pay in the form of higher bills, higher insurance payments and higher taxes.
From each according to their ability; to each according to their need.
Now, before anyone accuses me of locking the hospital doors and letting people die on the street, let me explain myself. I do believe in charity. I do not believe in entitlements. Charity helps to bring us closer together; entitlements drive us further apart.
It is a good thing for the government or a church or an individual to help someone in need, but it is a bad thing to let people expect that every time they get in trouble, there is going to be someone there to bail them out. That is not called charity; it is called enabling.
When you enable an alcoholic to continue drinking by helping him to avoid the consequences of his disease, you are not doing him any favors — you are just speeding him on the way to his death — and you will encourage resentment at the same time.
Likewise, when you enable the chronically unsuccessful to avoid the consequences of their lack of education, resourcefulness or toil, you are just speeding them on the way to a life of dependency and despair, and if you don’t think people on welfare resent the hand that feeds them, visit the inner city in a major urban area for a day. You will not discover an attitude of gratitude.
Maybe Karl Marx should have said it this way: “From everyone else because they’ve got it; to me, because I damn well want it.”
(Original publication date: April 9, 2006.)