>Congress shouldn't be allowed to redistribute wealth.
When wealth is redistributed in the right direction, then there are empirical, measurable, positive benefits across the whole of society -- including those who are already wealthy.
It's fallacious to assume that, because many laws passed within the last 30 years have inappropriately favored large corporations, effectively redistributing public money to them, the process of redistribution itself shouldn't occur anywhere at all -- and that the issue of inequality can't or shouldn't be addressed.
If you really want to "strike at the root" of the problem, then you need to look toward the influence of money in our political system. The more unequal the distribution of wealth in our society, the easier it is for a small financial elite to bend the law in their favor.
Don't you think that almost by definition, the more free a society is economically, the more unequal wealth will be distributed? As entrepreneurs, we are certainly aware of this fact in striving to found businesses. In a society where people are not free to easily start businesses, then it becomes very hard to get ahead because there is no way to effectively make oneself more productive, or magnify ones productivity via a business. It seems to me like any act of forcibly taking wealth from those who created it and giving it to others is a perversion of freedom, since it acts against the very freedom which created the disparity.
Not positive that this means that redistribution is absolutely a bad thing, but I also think the argument in favor of it is far from clear. It seems to me like the default would be to leave well enough alone and leave people to keep what they earn in a free society where there would be a separation of economy and state.
The problem is when "getting ahead" becomes the only way to gain freedom in a society. With economic freedom as the primary form of liberty, people must effectively compete for freedom, or in a way "earning" it as an indentured servant would. The majority of the citizens of such a society would live under absolute tyranny and serfdom; those who owned nothing would be slaves.
The most certain way to guarantee freedom is through democratic* empowerment in a community that controls its own resources, where one's decisions directly effect changes in his/her own life. In this way all people are guaranteed control over their own destinies.
* (I'd rather see participatory democracy in small communities than the republican form of representative democracy that the U.S. constitution specifies.)
When wealth is redistributed in the right direction, then there are empirical, measurable, positive benefits across the whole of society -- including those who are already wealthy.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Spirit_Level:_Why_More_Equa...
It's fallacious to assume that, because many laws passed within the last 30 years have inappropriately favored large corporations, effectively redistributing public money to them, the process of redistribution itself shouldn't occur anywhere at all -- and that the issue of inequality can't or shouldn't be addressed.
If you really want to "strike at the root" of the problem, then you need to look toward the influence of money in our political system. The more unequal the distribution of wealth in our society, the easier it is for a small financial elite to bend the law in their favor.