Statists prevaricate on - J :)
Free markets bring prosperity. Redistribution brings poverty.
But Marxists, fellow travelers, useful idiots, and no-info voters march on.
"Here’s the bottom line: Capitalism is the greatest engine for the production of wealth the ingenuity of man has ever invented. Are you interested in helping the poor? Embrace capitalism. Do you want to help clean up the environment? Embrace capitalism. Are you interested in obliterating the scourge of malnutrition or some ghastly African disease or illiteracy or [fill in your personal do-good desideratum here]: yep, embrace capitalism. The global poverty rate, Kevin reminds us, has been cut in half in the last 20 years. Think about that. Then think about the sorrowful history of our species up to about 1830. How much progress against widespread — really, near total — poverty had there been from the beginning of time until then — until, that is, capitalism started to take off? Not much.
"Like Barack Obama (indeed, like Karl Marx), Cardinal Rodríguez Maradiaga believes that the fundamental problem of economics concerns the redistribution of wealth. In fact, the fundamental economic problem concerns the production of wealth, the more, the better. 'The question of how certain goods are 'distributed' in society,' Kevin observes, 'is a second-order question at best; by definition prior to it is the question of whether there is anything to distribute.'[...]"
"'Political failures,' Kemo Sabe. That would be the failures of the folks we’ve installed as our masters in places like Washington—compounded by the ever expanding cadre of 'experts' and sentimental do gooders who would rather emit virtuous rhetoric about changing the world for the better than promote the policies that actually do the job. Now as ever, the Left is immensely destructive of human happiness, and the fact that some proponents of its misguided, self-congratulatory policy of immiseration wear red hats is partly pathetic, partly depressing." http://bit.ly/1xPJWlm [My emphasis]
