Monday, February 23, 2009

from NY to Israel Sultan Reveals The Stories Behind the News






Land of Opportunity or Land of Entitlement?


Posted: 22 Feb 2009 07:21 PM PST


For centuries America has attracted immigrants as "The Land

of Opportunity", not because we had a giant government

bureaucracy overseeing every aspect of daily life, but because

good jobs and social mobility were available.



These two factors combined together represented the

American ideal of a place without limitations where

anyone could become anything they wanted to be.

Unfortunately America has been slowly changing from

a Land of Opportunity to a Land of Entitlement, overseen

by a monolithic bureaucracy and subsidized by workers.

That is why the constant cry of "Soak the Rich" that we've

been hearing lately is so obnoxious. It isn't Robin Hood and

the Merry Men raiding the Sheriff of Nottingham loot in

Washington D.C. on behalf of the oppressed and the

downtrodden. It's the Sheriff of Nottingham, a massive

government bureaucracy looking for new sources of

revenue to gorge itself on.

The free market has its flaws, and plenty of them.

On the other hand building up a massive bureaucracy

that consumes most of what the free market creates

has one huge gaping flaw.

The same one that affixing a giant blood sucking leech

to your leg does, while wondering why you can't get any

blood pumping to your head anymore.



The reason why so many saw America as a "Land of

Opportunity" is because it placed no limits on how

high they could go. You might start out working on

the factory floor, only to own your own factory in a

few years. The peddler could go on to open his own

store, and then his own chain of stores. That used to be

the American story, and a not uncommon one either.

It become much less common, because as taxes have

increased to subsidize a growing government bureaucracy

that regulates everything, social mobility has also become

that much more difficult.



Soaking the Rich places a glass ceiling over the Land of

Opportunity, turning it into the Land of Entitlement.

It marks an end to ambition based on hard work and

accomplishment.



Everyone who hails Barack Obama's success story has

been missing the real point. He's the son of a diplomat

who became a legislator. Most of Obama's working life, he

has either been drawing a government salary, or a salary

contributed to by government funding. There's no particular

achievement in lining your pockets with taxpayer money.

There is one in actually working hard, earning a living, and

building something of your own that didn't come from

government money.



That's the difference between a Land of Opportunity and a


Land of Entitlement.

And Obama's story is a particularly poor example, because he
represents the Entitlement side of the coin.

The Land of Opportunity side allows people to make their

own destiny. The Land of Entitlement side gives them a
small salad bar of options for using government bureaucracy
to find a place of their own, from distributing the dole, to
being on the dole, to delivering the dole, to passing new dole
funding regulations. That's the gist of it.

The free market empowers people to make choice. Government
bureaucracies disempower people. Social mobility in the Land of
Entitlement is not defined by hard work, but by the
chameleon-like ability to blend into the bureaucracy and
exploit it for your benefit. Obama is a paragon of that virtue,
but no other. When Obama insured that his wife got a six
figure raise, backed by taxpayer money, he was
demonstrating how the game was played in the Land of
Entitlement. And he was also demonstrating why the Land of
Entitlement is such a dead end. A sucker's game played by
liars and con artists with someone else's chips.


What once drew immigrants to the Land of Opportunity

was the vision of its boundless frontiers, an open land

where anything was possible. Today that land has

become replaced by rigid high walls, by the concrete

rules and regulations of government authority, rising

ever higher and tunneling deeper and deeper.

The Land of Opportunity represented freedom.

The Land of Entitlement represents a permanent

desk job for the bureaucrat, a permanent waiting

list and a wallet sinkhole for everyone else.

The economy can't be fixed by "soaking the rich"

and siphoning the proceeds into more government

spending. The rich are the top half of an economic

pyramid that actually produces money and passes it

along to the rest of the system, and gives everyone

who's actually interested in earning a living

something to shoot for. The more you soak the rich,

the less money there is for everyone. And for all their

faults, the rich actually put more money into the

economy, than your average politician does.

The economy can be fixed by adding a new clause

right besides the Separation of Church and State.

The Separation of Business and State.










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