Socialism

Big government taking over our banks and solving our personal financial problems through government programs such as Social Security and Medicare is a form of socialism. I believe socialism makes people weaker and keeps them weak. In Sunday school, I was taught to teach people how to fish—not to give people fish. To me, welfare and bailouts are the purest form of giving people fish instead of teaching them how to provide for themselves.

— Robert Kiyosaki; Rich Dad's Conspiracy of The Rich

My poor dad grew up to become a socialist. He was school smart but not street smart. He strongly believed the government should take care of people for life.

My rich dad grew up to become a capitalist. He did not finish school, but he did become street smart. He believed in building businesses that provided stable income for his family and his workers' families. He believed that people should learn to take care of themselves. As a capitalist, he believed in teaching people to fish.

— Robert Kiyosaki; Rich Dad's Conspiracy of The Rich

Socialism took control during the last depression. Massive government welfare programs were created. Rather than teaching people to fish, we gave people fish—even rich people.

— Robert Kiyosaki; Rich Dad's Conspiracy of The Rich

If the United States were a true capitalist nation, we would let the economy fall, not prop it up with bailout upon bailout. Bear markets, market crashes, and depressions are the economy's way of hitting the reset button. Recessions and depressions correct the mistakes made and reveal the crimes committed during the boom rimes.

Today, instead of hitting the reset button, trillions of dollars are handed out to the incompetent, the fraudulent, and the obsolete. Bear markets exist to clean out the faults, scams, and inefficiencies that grew from a preceding bull market. Rather than let the bear market do its work, we let the government pay billions of dollars in bailout money to bankers who loaded the world with fraudulent debt when we should be sending those bankers to jail. Businesses like General Motors that grew too fat and lazy during the good times to compete in the bad times are saved from bankruptcy. Executives who are firing thousands of workers are given cash bonuses and golden parachutes as the businesses they were entrusted with protecting and growing instead contract and, as the company's share price drops, investors lose their money.

That is not capitalism. Today's bailout government is socialism—for the rich. In many ways, it is worse than Marxism or communism, because at least those systems had the illusion of being for the people. Those systems at least preached the redistribution of money from the rich to the poor, even if they didn't practice it. Our bailouts, however, rake money from the poor in the form of taxes and give it to the rich. I am not pointing the finger at President Obama. This cash heist has been going on for years. It has become a practice for the very rich to use our government to take from the poor and middle class and to give to the rich. Today, we've made it a practice to tax those who produce and to reward the lazy, the crooked, and the incompetent.

— Robert Kiyosaki; Rich Dad's Conspiracy of The Rich

Poverty is obscene. It is poverty that needs to be reduced - and increasing a country's productivity has done that far more widely than redistributing income by targeting "the rich."

— Thomas Sowell; Dismantling America

When it comes to lifting people out of poverty, redistribution of income and wealth has a much poorer and more spotty track record than the creation of wealth. In some places, such as Zimbabwe today, attempts at a redistribution of wealth have turned out to be a redistribution of poverty.

While the creation of wealth may be more effective for enabling millions of people to rise out of poverty, it provides no special role for the political left, no puffed up importance, no moral superiority, no power for them to wield over others. Redistribution is clearly better for the left.

Leftist emphasis on "the poor" proceeds as if the poor were some separate group. But, in most Western countries, at least, millions of people who are "poor" at one period of their lives are "rich" at another period of their lives -- as these terms are conventionally defined.

How can that be? People tend to become more productive -- create more wealth -- over time, with more experience and an accumulation of skills and training.

That is reflected in incomes that are two or three times higher in later years than at the beginning of a career. But that too is of little or no interest to the political left.

— Thomas Sowell; Dismantling America

There is a fundamental difference between reducing costs and simply shifting costs around, like a pea in a shell game at a carnival. Costs are not reduced simply because you pay less at a doctor's office and more in taxes-- or more in insurance premiums, or more in higher prices for other goods and services that you buy, because the government has put the costs on businesses that pass those costs on to you.

— Thomas Sowell; Dismantling America

Those with that vision do not want to even discuss evidence that students from different groups spend different amounts of time on homework and different amounts of time on social activities. To admit that inputs affect outputs, whether in education, in the economy or in other areas, would be to undermine the vision and agenda of the left, and deprive those who believe in that vision of a moral melodrama, starring themselves as defenders of the oppressed and crusaders against the forces of evil.

Redistribution of material resources has a very poor track record when it comes to actually helping those who are lagging, whether in education, in the economy or elsewhere. What they need are the attitudes, priorities and behavior which produce the outcomes desired.

But changing anyone's attitudes, priorities and behavior is a lot harder than taking a stance as defenders of the oppressed and crusaders against the forces of evil.

— Thomas Sowell; Dismantling America