Reflections From a Murky Pond

It’s a tired and overused metaphor but one that has become so utterly entrenched in America’s vocabulary that few of us ever even think about it – the wealth pie.

People “want a bigger piece of the pie” or they complain that, “No matter how you slice it, the rich get most of the pie.”

This is a horribly pernicious falsehood. The pie is a lie. It’s a false metaphor that has helped create much of America’s current social and economic woe.

Zero Truth In Zero Sum

The first great falsehood of the “money pie” is that it is predicated upon wealth being a zero-sum game; i.e., there is a finite and/or fixed amount of houses, cars, healthcare, etc. to divide amongst the population, and the more the 1% get the less is left for the rest of us. Once, that held some truth, but now that our personal and national economies are not agrarian-based this is no longer true. Wealth is no longer a constant; it grows, shrinks, and changes with ever increasing rapidity.

Now add to that the fact that no nation, especially not America, is economically isolated. Globalism has expanded the sources of wealth, labor, and materials across nations’ borders. This means that when looking at the distribution of wealth within any singular nation one has to ascertain how much of that wealth came from within its borders and how much of came from exogenous sources. In other words, wealth flows.

Not Even A Crumb

The second and far more destructive great falsehood of the “money pie” is it engenders the belief that wealth owned by society. That is patently false.  Society as a whole doesn’t own even a single crumb of this fictional “money pie.” Society is a process –  a woefully amorphous process at best – and, as such, neither creates nor owns wealth and has no authority to claim it or divide it in any manner whatsoever.

Wealth, that growing, shrinking, flowing, ever changing chimera,  is created by individuals – either singularly or in voluntary association with each other – and morally belongs to those individuals and solely to those individuals. It doesn’t belong to “society” or any other unrelated individuals or groups. To believe otherwise is one of the greatest of evils, that of slavery.

Yes, slavery. If an individual does not have the full right to product of his or her labor to do with and apportion as he or she wills, that individual is a slave and is merely chattel of those who have usurped the authority to dispose of that individual’s product.

Words define and provide structure to thought. Therefor, it’s important to properly define the words that we use. As an example take the word, “Slut.” Given the weight of connotation attached to it, “slut” must be properly defined in society’s collective mind.

Slut
Function: noun
Date: 15th Century
Origin: Middle English slutte

Definition(s):

1. a woman with the morals of a man

Isn’t that all “slut” really means? When women approach sex in the manner that most men do, that’s what society calls them.

Britney Spears – Morally Mannish?

Now that we’ve properly defined the word, “Slut” we can approach sluts in a more rational and equitable fashion and manner. 😉

I firmly believe that it is safe to say that most everyone realizes that there has been significant and ongoing moral decay in the West during the last half century or so, especially in America where people had further to fall. While there is great disagreement over the nature and cause of this erosion of character, all the camps seem to agree that the degeneration of our cultures’ ethical and moral character has occurred and continues to do so.

But, if one boils the issue down to purified essence, the root cause of the erosion of character, ethics, and morals is simply that our society has been twisted in such a way that many people receive that which they need and/or want without needing to earn it or feeling that they have truly earned it.

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The Liberals and Progressives have stepped up their screaming of insults at and about Americans, especially the patriots of the TEA Party, and they’ve stepped up the hand wringing, whining, and moaning at and about Obama.

In their eyes Americans are “terrorists,” “extremists” and “hostage takers” and Obama is “weak,” “indecisive,” and a “turncoat.”

Essentially these domestic enemies hate Americans because Americans stood up for their principles and core values, did as they swore to do despite personal risk, and refused to gracefully capitulate on matters of national importance. Yet at the same time these Liberals and Progressives loath Obama for not doing so.

It’s all too easy to chalk it up to the normal and, by this point, dismissible Liberal hypocrisy. For the Leftists’ rank and file though this might be an erroneous conclusion.

While the people behind them and the politicians working for them are likely being cynically hypocritical, it’s quite possible that the Liberals’ myrmidons actually do have such a cognitive disconnect that they can’t even see the ridiculousness of their juxtaposed positions.

I have a simple question; has, in the recorded history of Mankind, an Atheist ever had an original moral thought?