Inequality: The Defining Lie of the Radical Left

From Roger Simon, at PJ Media, "‘Income Inequality’ — The Biggest Lie of All":

In the last few days Barack Obama has attempted to change the subject of public discourse from healthcare to income inequality,  which he has dubbed “the defining challenge of our time.”

Now he tells us!

Since POTUS hasn’t paid much attention to this problem for the first five plus years of his administration, even with African-American unemployment through the roof and the middle class disappearing from American economic life,  and with Rand Paul (of all people) the only one to come up with a concrete suggestion of how to elevate people out of poverty, as he has recently with Detroit, this should come as some surprise.

But it doesn’t.  The fight for “income inequality” is and has been for a long time the defining lie of modern liberalism.

This is not to say that income inequality does not exist.  Of course, it does.  But what liberalism does is pretend to do something about it, to whine and complain about it, in order to ensure the support of the poor, the semi-poor and minority groups, while doing nothing that changes the substance of their inequality in any permanent way.  Indeed, it often exacerbates it.

Consciously or unconsciously, these liberals may actually want the lower classes to remain the lower classes.  After all, if they bettered themselves, they might leave the Democratic fold.  That wouldn’t do.  So the system goes on.

Meanwhile, for all their pious progressive talk, George Soros gets to keep his palazzo in Katonah (among many others),  Jeff Katzenberg his beach shack in Malibu, and Obama the beach shack that some say awaits him on Oahu.  And we all know about Al Gore’s many eco-friendly homes.  (Oops, I think that one’s now Tipper’s house.)

So, on the surface, all this income inequality chatter is nothing more than hypocrisy, that “homage that vice pays to virtue,” as La Rochefoucauld put it.  But it’s really worse.  It’s cynical and mean because all these so-called liberal solutions to poverty, solutions that have been tried hundreds of times since the Great Society, and probably before, to no avail,  suck the energy from the room, befuddle the media and the body politic and make it impossible for other methods to be tried, as with the Rand Paul idea referenced above.

A great piece (keep reading).

Leftists don't care about the poor. They care about power, and they exploit to poor to gain power and to keep it.

And now that the president's pandered on the issue, in a pathetic attempt to distract from the ObamaCare debacle, idiot regressive leftists are all over it. See Alec MacGillis, at the New Republic, "Democrats Shouldn't Be Scared to Talk About Inequality." Also, from Thomas Edsall, at the New York Times, "Does Rising Inequality Make Us Hardhearted?" (No, it's a just a distraction from the left's epic policy failures.)