Left-wing vs right-wing question

Prager: The Left asks, "How do we screw the rich?" and the Right asks, "What's better for society?"

This is largely true, but Prager needs to understand these questions don't come first. The underlying assumptions do.

With the Left, the underlying assumption is that "wishing to see people be equal is good." No one is "gooder" than anyone else, no one is more deserving than anyone else. If A has money and B does not, then the world is out of fairness, and society must take away from A and give to B. Of course, by "society" they mean "the government". The poor, they assume, cannot be responsible for themselves; if they could they wouldn't be poor, therefore they need a savior to take wealth away from the nasty ugly part of society who never worked for wealth and don't deserve it--which isn't limited to people who inherited wealth, but also to the Gordon Gekkos of the world who got rich by cheating everyone around them. Equally evil are the people who own successful businesses and got rich by cheating everyone under them, both the employees and the consumers. And then we can ask, how do we get them? How can we hurt these people and make things even between the privileged and the oppressed? These are all underlying assumptions, unstated but accepted. If you don't believe it, just start listening to the rhetoric about issues and you'll soon begin seeing and understanding these assumptions.

Now, it happens that the Left have decided that the Right is not to be understood in any light but evil. If you ask most leftists you will be told that the right wing hate poor people and want to starve them all to death, want to consign them all permanently to poverty, want to take all their money away and give it to the rich. In fact, we'd like to see them in chains, pickin' cotton in some field, and living under a lean-to made of car doors. We hate the poor and we dance with glee when children go to bed hungry. You can't deny that's how the Left portrays us. If you've never seen Howard Dean making this claim you need to see the video. "Our moral values, in contradistinction to the Republicans, is, we don't think kids ought to go to bed hungry at night." And Republicans do think that. Nice, Howard.

For the Right, the underlying assumption also covers the idea that doing good is good. It's harder to define because it doesn't focus on a central often-repeated line like equality of wealth. It aims at the individuals, at giving us the chance to do our best, and then leaves us on our own to work hard to get to that place. It doesn't make any promises about getting goodness without trying.

I remember the angst that came from the Left about Reagan and the Republicans. "They think you should pull yourself up by your own bootstraps." I heard this over and over again while I was still a liberal. It was a mark of right-wing viciousness, a description of how much they despised the poor, then oppressed, the disadvantaged. And no one ever challenged it, not even those on the right wing.

One day I heard a woman giving a speech. I don't think she was anyone famous, but for some reason I got to hear her. I must have seen her on the TV or else I wouldn't have known she was African-American. She was a great speaker and a strong representative of the conservative position on this issue. "There are people who complain that conservatives want us to pull ourselves up by our own boot straps," she said. "Well, honey, there is NO OTHER WAY TO PULL YOURSELF UP."

That said it all. If you hand someone a lump of money, they will lie back and stick their hand out and demand more. If you don't respond with the more, you will be accused of meanness. If you had gone to the person and handed them a business, even one they asked for, they would destroy it overnight from not knowing or caring how to run it. No good can come of streaming cash to poor people this way, as they almost always just start looking forward to next month's bit of cash. And if you'll stop to think about it, you'll see that society cannot afford for very many people to fail to be or refuse to be productive.

Had this wonderful woman been white I probably would have written her off as a selfish middle-class Republican s.o.b. but I knew when she said "there is no other way to pull yourself up" she had the best interests of "oppressed" and disadvantaged people at heart. I began asking myself about the sense in what amounts to "tough love" from the right wing, and eventually allowed myself to vote Republican and even to call myself a conservative. Loving someone means keeping their best interests at heart; it doesn't always mean stealing from someone else to give them a handout.

Now, in case you think otherwise, both my parents came from very tough backgrounds and managed as a pair to build some wealth. I was born to poor parents but by the time they divorced, when I was seventeen, they had grown fairly wealthy, and then lost it all. As for myself, for some reason they never taught me to focus, train, prepare, work, earn, build, save, and achieve. I managed to learn some of that from my first husband but right now, I've been severely compromised by my health, my loved ones, and my situation. I have had nothing for a couple of years now, I could probably get a hand-out from the government, but I'm going to go to work or build a business (more likely both) and try to get back on my feet.

The Left would like to see the government just hand me some money, but to be honest I know if they did that I'd never get around to getting a job. It's not that I'm afraid of work (I've always worked like a dog when I get a job) but that I can't stand the thought of looking for work.