I guess I’m more than a little out of step here, but my definition of economic justice is helping more people increase their earnings and keep more of what they earn. Economic success should be available to everyone who is willing to work for it to the degree which they are willing to work. For example, a businessman starting a business will put in 60 hour weeks in the beginning of the venture in order to get things started. When his company grows and becomes more stable, he may be able to drop to 50 hours a week. If he becomes wealthy, it is because he has earned that wealth. That businessman should be held up as a positive example of what hard work can accomplish, and every American should be encouraged to follow that example. That is economic justice–you get what you work for and are allowed to keep a large portion of it. It is not economic justice to take money from someone who has earned it and give it to someone who has not.
Unfortunately, the definition of economic justice has been skewed in recent years to embrace the idea of taking money from people who earn it and giving it to those who have not earned it. ObamaCare is the epitome of that concept, and the mainstream media has finally awakened to that fact.
Yesterday, Investor’s Business Daily posted an article about the redistribution of wealth that ObamaCare represents.
The article reports:
Take the New York Times. In a fit of candor, it now agrees with what we’ve said all along — “redistribution of wealth lies at the heart of” the Affordable Care Act.
The paper reported that “economic justice” was Obama‘s real goal in taking over a sixth of the economy.
But to make his plan “palatable” to “middle-class voters,” he had to mislead them into thinking nothing would be taken from them. He had to assure them, in a “semantic sidestep,” that ObamaCare was a win-win for all Americans, when in fact it created “losers as well as winners” — tens of millions of losers, as it turns out.
“Hiding in plain sight behind that pledge — visible to health policy experts but not the general public — was the redistribution required to extend health coverage to those who had been either locked out or priced out of the market,” the Times said. “Now some of that redistribution has come clearly into view.”
Of course, it was visible to Times correspondents as well. But they’re just now getting around to informing voters, after flooding them with pro-ObamaCare stories during the 2012 campaign.
Right now the media is not the friend of the American voter, but we as voters have to take some responsibility for what we are willing to believe. During the 2012 election campaign, the information about ObamaCare was available to anyone who chose to look past the mainstream media. The death panels were talked about, the taking money out of Medicare was discussed, and the problems with keeping your current health plans was discussed–not often in the mainstream media–but those ideas were discussed.
The lesson to all of us is simple–the media is telling us what they want us to know when they want us to know it. If we want to be informed citizens, all of us need to learn to do research on our own. There is an election next year–it’s time to get busy.
