What is the result of believing the lie that economic equality (of results) is more important than economic growth . . . property ownership . . . or getting a just reward for one’s labor? It is entrapment in poverty.
The need for people to see examples of others who have gone from poverty to wealth means that it is very destructive for a society to continually vilify “the rich,” to portray them as evil, and to promote envy and hatred toward them. The idea that wealth comes from the exploitation of others rather than from creating new value is a Marxist idea, not a Christian viewpoint. Such class-warfare rhetoric tends to discourage poor people from trying to succeed in business and become wealthy through hard work and perseverance – for who wants to be hated by everyone else? If a society focuses on envy or hatred of the rich, it significantly hinders its economic productivity.
Every time a nation moves from poverty toward increasing prosperity, some people will do better economically than others. People have different gifts and skills, different levels of ambition, different work habits, and different levels of intelligence in various areas. Many people will become moderately prosperous because they do quite a good job of providing useful products and services of value for the economy … In fact, in free-market societies, most people who become moderately wealthy have quite “ordinary” occupations.
Of course there will be a very few people who become spectacularly successful. Often they are people who invent new products or new ways of mass producing products. They are people like Henry Ford, Cornelius Vanderbilt, Andrew Carnegie, Steve jobs, Bill Gates, Jeff Bezos, etc. There are also incredibly talented athletes, entertainers, entrepreneurs and investors who earn and successfully invest in the free-market economy. (The preceding paraphrased from The Poverty of Nations, pages 303 – 304.)
The prosperity of any nation is the result of its collective productivity, ingenuity, and private economic investment – less the cost of government and nonproductive entitlements – as measured in non-inflated (constant) dollars. History has clearly demonstrated that a competitive, free-enterprise, free-market, work-ethic, entrepreneurial, profit/surplus-motivated, constitutional, sky’s-the-limit economy – is the best way of producing prosperity for the greatest number.
In God we must trust . . . but we must always do our part – to secure and promote the truth and a better way – to protect our freedom and interests – and to defend our competitive, free-market system and the Judeo-Christian American-Way.
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