Big Red Car here. Early today in the ATX but already you can tell it’s going to be a great day. Every day in the ATX is great.
On Earth as it is in Texas.
Wealth is a good thing
Wealth is a good thing. It allows you to live well. It allows you to convert your dreams into reality. It provides opportunity for your family, your children. It allows you to fund noble causes. It allows you to live the Amercan Dream.
Wealth is prosperity, fortune, means, substance, affluence, property and a store of value. This notion of a store of value is critical in getting one’s mind around wealth as is the concept of wealth being property. Your property. You own it.
Wealth is the conversion of your labor into something of financial value which you can then invest to create more value and more wealth. It is both a beginning and an end.
You get wealthy by working hard and it is available to anyone willing to pay that price.
Get a job. Come to work early. Stay late. Work hard. Save your money. Invest your money. Build your personal wealth. Let it grow. Harness the power of compound interest.
Wealth is a duty
To create wealth is a duty in much the same way one who has been given great natural talents or gifts is responsible to ensure they are not squandered.
For some folks, the ability to create wealth is their talent. What they do with it — perhaps fund noble causes, send their children to great universities, fund their own talents — is the result of harnessing that talent.
Nobody should be embarrassed they are good at creating wealth. Some should be beaten like a rented mule for what they have done with it.
When The Boss works with his brilliant young CEOs, entrepreneurs, founders sometimes they are reluctant to include in their Vision for their new enterprise the desire to create wealth. They articulate the unsolved problem of the world they intend to slay, they invoke the balm they intend to put on the world’s pain points but they fail to say they want to become wealthy in the process.
Stop it. It is OK to want to get rich and do good things with your riches.
The war on wealth
Today there is a war on wealth which follows the meme that wealth is an accident and that folks who have worked to create their wealth are somehow “luckier” and therefore should be embarrassed by their success. In their minds, it is a tax on luck. Odd notion, really.
Our President contributes to this daily and infamously when he suggested small businessmen “…did not make this…”. Silly goose.
Sayeth the Big Red Care: Nonsense!
Further sayeth the Big Red Car: Bullshit!
The liberal left wants to confiscate and redistribute not just a successful person’s income, they want to confiscate and redistribute successful people’s wealth. The terms “war on wealth” and “tax on success” are different pews in the same church praying to the same god of penalizing outcomes. Good outcomes.
Remember that wealth is after tax money. You’ve paid taxes on it once just to create it. Now the liberal left wants to tax it yet again because it’s just sitting around making you wealthier still. They have nothing good to do with it, they just want to confiscate and redistribute it. They want to control it. They want to control you.
This is the essence of the war on wealth. The notion that your wealth — after tax value — should be taxed again, again, again and again.
It is not enough for the liberal left to tax your gains on wealth, capital gains tax ya’ll, they want to tax it for just sleeping in your bed. For just hanging out with you.
This is also the essence of the estate or inheritance taxes — the liberal left has successfully made dying and the transfer of your wealth to your heirs a taxable event. This is, after all, just property. Why can’t you do with your property after you die what you could have done with when you were alive?
The war on wealth includes confiscatory taxes on income, taxes on capital when you invest your after tax income, taxes on your estate when you die. To this the liberal left wants to add a tax on your wealth and property while you are alive.
Economic impact
So, Big Red Car, what does this all mean?
Simply put, the US economy is an economy driven by the desire to create wealth. We are capitalists. We want to be paid for labor and when we marry labor with capital, risk capital, we want to be able to create wealth.
If you want to create jobs, you have to embrace the idea someone is going to get rich in the process.
If you are making war on wealth, you have to get comfortable with the idea no jobs will be created as you have created a disincentive for job creation.
If you create an atmosphere in which entrepreneurial vigor is rewarded, you will unleash the power of the American entrepreneur. It is after small business which is the real engine of growth, economic expansion and job creation. If you want to choke entrepreneurial vigor to death because someone is getting rich in the process, guess what? No jobs.
Think this is baloney?
Consider the case of say, Texas, where there is little or no taxation. Where the regulatory environment is balanced between the public good and economic vigor.
Absent Texas job creation, the US is an anemic economic engine. Again, no Texas jobs in the mix and US job creation is stagnant and almost non-existent.
These policies matter. If you are interested in a vigorous American economy, if you want to wipe out unemployment — create jobs, stop making war on wealth and wealth creation.
But, hey, what the Hell do I really know anyway? I’m just a Big Red Car. Be kind to someone you love this weekend, ya’ll. That someone might be you.
This is such an incredibly awesome post. It’s amazing that it’s been proven over and over again that wealth is good. It’s not good just for the individual, wealth permeates everything and everyone. The equal opportunity to create wealth is one of the cornerstones of freedom. Our government is now portraying that equal “results” is the way to go. History has proven the destructiveness of this ‘progressive’ way of thinking both for the individual and society. Thanks again Jeff for this outstanding post.
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The American Dream is rooted in equal opportunity. There is no such thing as equal outcomes. That requires confiscation. Opportunity is democratic.
Capitalism is about opportunity for everyone. Everyone.
Socialism is about confusing attempts at equal outcomes for the little people. The folks at the top still want and get power and wealth. They intend to ration and control the outcomes for everyone.
BRC
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This one took me a long time. A lot of liberal guilt to let go of. Milton Friedman was a big help.
I like the idea of wealth creation as a duty. It’s very convoluted that somehow the era of political correctness led so many to view it as almost criminal.
The one for me that is still a sticking point is taking on employees (vs outsourcing/contracting) in an environment that seems to have a war on wealth creation. Makes me feel like a sucker. WWBRCD?
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The simple fact that we are discussing this in the terms we are shows how bad the situation has become. The notion that it rises to the level of a crime is absurd and psychologically troubling.
Employees are folks you are taking care of. Don’t ever think employees lay in bed thinking about your business. They don’t. They’re not entrepreneurs. No bad there, just truth.
If you can create a company and get the efforts of all to align behind your vision and share the wealth, you are taking people where they would never get by themselves.
The Boss has handed out some huge checks to his folks. Checks they would never, ever have gotten absent his Vision and alignment of everyone’s efforts to achieve that Vision.
The Founding Fathers did just that. No George Washington, the entrepreneurial genius behind the execution of making our Nation — no US of A.
You are never a sucker. You are a conqueror. Making the world a better place and making a buck in the process.
BRC
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I’d go even less politically correct and say that wealth creation as a duty includes the duty of paying the lowest possible amount of taxes. You have to follow the rules or stop playing the game, but as long as you are playing by the rules, you need to minimize your taxes. Wealth in your hands in better taken care than in any politician’s hands.
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Yes, of course. Government serves its rightful owners when it steals the least possible amount of their wealth. Money in the hands of the government is diminished by the inefficiencies of collection, waste, fraud and corruption.
The smallest competent government is the obligation of the government.
Governments do not create jobs. Entrepreneurs and business persons do. More money available to these folks means more jobs. That is certainly true in the leadership lab known as Texas.
Be well.
BRC
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I appreciate your lack of political correctness.