Harry Binswanger writes in Forbes, Give Back? Yes, It’s Time For The 99% To Give Back To The 1%

Let’s begin by stripping away the collectivism. “The community” never gave anyone anything. The “community,” the “society,” the “nation” is just a number of interacting individuals, not a mystical entity floating in a cloud above them.

All proper human interactions are win-win; that’s why the parties decide to engage in them. It’s not the Henry Fords and Steve Jobs who exploit people. It’s the Al Capones and Bernie Madoffs. Voluntary trade, without force or fraud, is the exchange of value for value, to mutual benefit. In trade, both parties gain.

Each particular individual in the community who contributed to a man’s rise to wealth was paid at the time–either materially or, as in the case of parents and friends, spiritually. There is no debt to discharge. There is nothing to giveback, because there was nothing taken away.

An end must be put to the inhuman practice of draining the productive to subsidize the unproductive. An end must be put to the primordial notion that one’s life belongs to the tribe, to “the community,” and that the superlative wealth-creators must do penance for the sin of creating value.

HKO

Fiscal prudence is never enacted “for the sake of community”.  Community is used and abused as a rationale to raise taxes and increase spending.

I also detest the praising of a wealthy soul who “gave back” what he never took to begin with.

A strong moral society finds poverty a potential object of shame.  A weak and decaying society applies the same shame to wealth.

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