You may remember Xi Van Fleet. She's the Chinese immigrant who gave a speech to Loudoun County Public School warning about the teaching of concepts relating to Critical Race Theory and seeing alarming similarities to her experience with the Chinese Cultural Revolution.
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. Farmers in the Soviet Union cut back on how much time and effort they invested in growing their crops, when they realized that the government was going to take a big part of the harvest. They slaughtered and ate young farm animals that they would normally keep tending and feeding while raising them to maturity.
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 on the Fallacy of Redistribution
Free stuff doesn't come from nowhere.
"I have never understood why it is 'greed' to want to keep the money you have earned but not greed to want to take somebody else's money."
-- Thomas Sowell
One of the big myths about Thanksgiving is that the starving pilgrims were saved by the natives teaching them to farm. That's untrue.
https://www.aei.org/carpe-diem/thanksgiving-lessons-about-the-failures-of-socialism-and-the-success-of-private-property-and-capitalism/
The first Thanksgiving was a celebration of abundance after a period of socialism and starvation. The members of the Plymouth colony had arrived in the New World with a plan for collective property ownership. Reflecting the current opinion of the aristocratic class in the 1620s, their charter called for farmland to be worked communally and for the harvests to be shared.
You probably will not be surprised to hear that the colonists starved. Men were unwilling to work to feed someone else’s children. Women were unwilling to cook for other women’s husbands. Fields lay largely untilled and unplanted.
Famine came as soon as they ate through their provisions. After famine came plague. Half the colony died. Unlike most socialists, they learned from their mistakes, giving each person a parcel of land to tend to for themselves. The colonists threw off the statist intellectual fashions of their day.
The results were overwhelmingly beneficial. Men worked hard, even though before they had constantly pleaded illness. Fields were not only tilled and planted but also diligently harvested. Colonists traded with the surrounding Indian nation and learned to plant maize, squash and pumpkin and to rotate these crops from year to year. The harvest was bountiful, and new colonists immigrated to the thriving settlement.
Think about it. Imagine you're in a class, and the teacher says that every student will get the same grade, the average of all students. The low-performing students will be thrilled and won't do much. Why should they when they're going to score as high as the best students? The high-performing students will realize they're being dragged down by everyone else and not bother putting in the effort, because they're being exploited and carrying the weight for the whole class. The average will drop dramatically compared to the class total if each student had been able to keep their own score.
Equity means forcing everybody into poverty - whether that's academic poverty, intellectual poverty or literal poverty.
