No room in America for class warfare By Nolan Finley

Source: http://detnews.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20081012/OPINION03/810120311/1271/OPINION01

Sunday, October 12, 2008

The odds were steeply stacked against my dad ever striking it rich. Born deep in the Kentucky hills, he traded high school for work and war, tried to scratch a living out of poor dirt and finally moved his family to Detroit, whose factories were wide open for cheap, unskilled labor.

He worked his way up to working class, managing to pay the monthly bills with a little help from the local loan office. But he had bigger dreams. He borrowed enough money to buy a laundromat near Wayne State University, and then a second in Delray, and when he punched out of the chemical plant he spent another long shift patching up washing machines.

His vision was of a laundromat empire. And if he hadn't died young he might have got there. But keeping the doors of those two stores open consumed most of what he made at his day job, and in the end, he was worse off than when he started.

Still, when he looked in the mirror he saw a potential rich guy. In his mind, no rungs on the economic ladder were beyond reach. That belief is what has kept generations of Americans striving and climbing; it's the energy that's powered all of our innovation and prosperity.

That's why it's distressing to endure a political season that's made class warfare a central campaign theme.

Populism usually falls flat with American voters. Witness the failure of Al Gore's "people versus the powerful" or John Edwards' "two Americas." We don't identify ourselves by economic class because we hold economic mobility as a core value.

But there's something different about this year. The Wall Street debacle has turned "CEO" into a dirty word and branded anyone in an executive suite as a robber baron. Hefty salaries aren't the pay-off for long hours and personal sacrifice, but ill-gotten gains lifted from the pockets of working people.

Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama has found his treasure in this attitude shift. The wealth redistribution schemes that form the heart of his economic plan -- once red flags for Americans who understood that when they became rich, it would be their money that was being confiscated -- are now embraced as the change we need.

Equalizing income based on need saturates Obama's platform. Nearly every bullet point involves -- paraphrasing the candidate -- giving less to those at the top and more to those at the bottom.

It sets my teeth on edge when I hear him say that because it reveals a belief system that views wealth as a collective asset to be parceled out by the government, not the property of the individuals who earned it.

The obvious outcome of penalizing success is that it destroys the incentive to succeed. Adopting European-style socialism will turn us into France, sluggish and unambitious, with productivity and growth falling as taxes and handouts grow.

My father, were he alive, would be a major beneficiary of Obama's Robin Hood plots. But he'd have rather taken a beating than a government check.

America risks its identity if it tells folks like him to stop reaching for their own reward and instead pick the pockets of those who've already made it.

Nolan Finley is editorial page editor of The News. Reach him at nfinley@detnews.com or (313) 222-2064. Watch him at 8:30 p.m. Fridays on "Am I Right?" on Detroit Public TV, Channel 56.