Wednesday, June 2, 2010

What’s at stake in America’s battle over free enterprise.

Arthur C. Brooks   "We also need policies that weaken the free-enterprise system by lowering the rewards it brings to the winners as well as the consequences to the losers. As candidate Obama famously told Samuel Joseph Wurzelbacher — “Joe the Plumber” — on the campaign trail in October 2008, “I think when you spread the wealth around it’s good for everybody.” Adherents to this philosophy believe that the best ways to meet their objectives are forced income redistribution, expansion of the state, or both. This is why the landmark policy initiatives of the past year — from health-care reform to financial-market regulation — have had bigger government and rising income redistribution at their core. Bureaucracy and taxes are not incidental to these policies, and not a mere cost of doing business; they are part of what many of our leaders seek to create and what they see as a better, fairer America." 
   Arthur C. Brooks is president of the American Enterprise Institute and author of the new book The Battle: How the Fight Between Free Enterprise and Big Government Will Shape America’s Future.

No comments: