Opinion: The Progressive Fallacy

The Occupy Movement seems to be developing their central theme, and it has something to do with protesting the general unfairness of life.We now see demands for the redistribution of wealth. To make things "fair for everyone."

Even if everyone had equal opportunity, and were given equal wealth, equal housing, equal healthcare, and even if we gave them equal college degrees.... people are still different.

People have different skills.
People have different values.
People have different talents.
People have different work ethics.
People have different preferences.
People have different levels of intelligence and common sense.

You simply cannot "equally distribute" or socialize human nature.

The smarter people, and the people with the most skills, and the ones willing to work the hardest will rise to the top. The rest will settle towards the bottom.

Even Finland has a wealthy class, despite all efforts to equalize their society.

The best doctors will always earn more than the mediocre ones.
The best athletes will always earn more.
The best entertainers will always earn more.

Human nature is such that people who get free government medical care will pay their own money to get better private medical care if they have the means to do so. They will enroll their children in better private schools, even if they have to work two jobs to do it.

I suppose if you try hard enough you could redistribute wealth. But then you would have to do it again every ten years, because the smarter people would get richer, and the dumber people would get poorer. This can't be a one shot deal. And then you would have to keep redistibuting wealth at regular intervals for the rest of time.

Eventually, the people who work the hardest will stop working so hard once they realize the aren't being allowed to keep the fruits of their labor.  

Generous with Daddy's money! She never earned a cent.

This is precisely why Soviet farmers would only grow enough food to feed their families. Why work harder, only to have the government confiscate it and give it to others who didn't work at all?

Even if you could redistribute all the wealth, you cannot redistribute talent or brains or attitude. It just cannot be done. It simply will not work.

So, once again the progressives have come up with another self defeating idea. Another strategy that cannot work in the real world. Just like their dream of a socialist utopia failed every place it was every tried, this bad idea will fail too.