Don't Kill The Goose that laid the golden egg! DKTG.org
When half the people in this country pay no taxes, the Republican stand of not raising taxes is a call that falls on deaf ears.
When the Democrats claim that they will raise taxes on only the top one percent, the other 99% couldn't care less.
When OWS (Occupy Wall Street) supporters decry the terrible financial disparity between the top one percent of income earners versus the rest of us, redistributing the wealth sounds like a good thing.
But this thinking is myopic and self-destructive. It is the all-too-common, short-sighted "Killing of The Goose That Laid the Golden Eggs"
The "Goose" in this case is our American system of freedoms, including free enterprise or capitalism. Over the two and half centuries since the founding of this great country, our American system has made us the most powerful, most admired, most kind, most just and most wealthy country on the face of the planet, ever!
Be smart! Don't shoot yourselves in the foot by destroying the system. The problems are not the fault of the system. They are the fault of our corrupt politicians. The system can be fixed simply by voting them out of office - from the top down.
The politicians that we, the American people, voted into office and the bureaucrats they appointed, are entirely responsible for the sad economic times in which we find ourselves. The politicians will blame each other and every excuse under the sun, they will decry a lack of regulations, they will blame the greed of Wall Street, the banks, and the big corporations "too big to fail", but in truth, all the blame lies entirely and exclusively only on the politicians in government.
For example, Congress started Fannie Mae and Freddy Mac, the major mortgage lenders. Congress also directed them to back mortgages that were poor credit risks (to increase home ownership). When the inevitable happened, namely that many home owners defaulted, the housing bubble burst, causing high unemployment and the worst recession since the Depression in the 1930's. Though their intentions were good, Congress meddled in affairs that they did not understand and they ignored the warnings of experts. But the blame belongs directly on them.
Missing the Point
The OWS crowd blames the fat cats of Wall Street for their own poverty and inability to find jobs. Certainly their situation is sad and probably no fault of their own. And clearly, they have the right to protest. But their protests are misdirected! This is not a zero-sum game. The money that the workers on Wall Street make does not reduce the money available for the rest of us and they are not responsible for the state of the job market. Our government politicians are the ones who are really responsible for the mess we are in! They love the protesters because the misguided protests seem to take the heat off themselves.
In fact, Wall Street, in no small measure, is responsible for the tremendous growth of the American economy for the past hundred years. It is to their credit that the standard of living in this country far surpasses almost every other country in the world. They provide the means by which entrepreneurs start and build the corporations that employ millions of our citizens. Those corporations also provide the goods and services that improve our lives and make us the envy of the rest of the world.
Messing with Wall Street will not help Main Street; it will be shooting ourselves in the foot.
Class Warfare?
The OWS protesters seem to be saying, "They are rich and we are poor. That's not fair." Does not our Declaration of Independence demand equality for all? The answer is that the equality guaranteed is equality of rights and equality of opportunity, not equality of results. Everyone has the right to work toward becoming wealthy. As the lotteries advertise, no one has a better chance of winning than you. That does not mean it is unfair, when there is only one winner and many losers.
On a deeper level, we should not resent the super wealthy that have been blessed with success by the opportunities afforded by this great country of ours. Because we also benefit in a number of ways. Most obvious is that the super wealthy, directly or indirectly, provide jobs for millions of us. In addition, they give billions of dollars annually to charities that help millions of us. For example, Bill Gates, the Founder of Microsoft and richest man in the country, in addition to having made over two thousand of his employees millionaires, has funded the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, the largest charity organization in the country.
Andrew Carnegie, (1835-1919) founder of what became the US Steel Corporation, was the richest man in the world in his time. He also founded Carnegie Mellon University, one of the top schools in the country and built 3,000 public libraries, giving away almost all of his fortune in his own lifetime. He wrote, "A man who dies rich dies disgraced."
The Evolution of Democracy
Our Constitution was a work of genius by a group of patriotic Americans that led to the creation of our great country, the envy of the world. In recent years, however, various nefarious forces have taken advantage of some of the potential weaknesses of democracy to circumvent the Constitution to the detriment of the country. We have a large percentage of the voters who, rather than making informed choices of what is best for the country are
" Voting blindly exclusively based on skin color or
" Voting blindly exclusively based on party
" Allowing politicians to buy their votes by deceptive TV ads
" Allowing politicians to buy their votes by giving them government handouts
" Voting based on candidate looks or speaking ability without regard to policy on issues
" Voting based on media recommendations without investigating the issues
" Voting based on what they think will improve their personal situation
These things undermine the effectiveness of government ultimately for all of us. Bad voter decisions result in bad politicians in government which result in bad government that worsens life for all of us.
With modern technology we can bring government closer to the will of the people and more directed to the benefit of all of us. Without changing our Constitution or any new laws we can establish a nationwide Congressional oversight organization on the internet that both advises Congress and other members of Government and holds their feet to the fire. This idea is based on the tremendous success of the Open Source approach to software development and maintenance. Open Source allows millions of people to work collaboratively on hundred of thousands of projects, producing very high quality software for free. For example, SourceForge is a web-based source code repository. It acts as a centralized location for software developers to control and manage open source software development. As of July 2011, the SourceForge repository hosts more than 300,000 projects and has more than 2 million registered users. The domain sourceforge.net attracted at least 33 million visitors by August 2009.
We have started a website, DKTG.org that allows citizens to suggest and debate issues and ultimately vote on them. The website will then report the results to the members of congress and rate them on how closely they follow the votes of the citizens. If the site attracts enough citizens, Congressmen will learn that ignoring the citizenry will result in their failing to get re-elected. Our government would then truly become "By the People."
** Killing The Goose That Laid the Golden Eggs is among the best known of Aesop's Fables (Perry 87) and use of the phrase has become idiomatic of an unprofitable action motivated by greed. The English idiom, sometimes shortened to "Killing the golden goose", derives from this fable. It is generally used of a short-sighted action that destroys the profitability of an asset.
In this tale, a man and his wife had the good luck to own a goose that laid a golden egg every day. They soon began to think they were not getting rich fast enough and, thinking the bird must be full of gold, they killed it to get all the gold at once. But when they cut the goose open, there was no gold inside. If they hadn't been greedy and killed the goose, it would have kept laying a golden egg every day.
