Our mainstream media have discovered a new issue: inequality in America. The gap between the wealthiest 1 percent and the rest of the nation is wide and growing wider.
This, we are told, is intolerable. This is a deformation of American democracy that must be corrected through remedial government action.
What action? The rich must pay their fair share. Though the top 1 percent pay 40 percent of federal income taxes and the bottom 50 percent have, in some years, paid nothing, the rich must be made to pay more.
That’s an appealing argument to many, but one that would have horrified our founding fathers. For from the beginning, America was never about equality, except of God-given and constitutional rights.
Our revolution was about liberty; it was about freedom.
Equality, egalite, was what the French Revolution, the Bolshevik Revolution, Mao ’s Revolution of 1949, Castro ’s Revolution of 1959 and Pol Pot ’s revolution of 1975 claimed to be about.
This was the Big Lie, for all those revolutions that triumphed in the name of equality were marked by mass murders of the old ruling class, the rise of a new ruling class more brutal and tyrannical, and the immiseration of the people in whose name the revolution was supposedly fought.
