The paradigm I am unable to crack in the minds of many Americans is the idea that private enterprise, the free market, and ownership of one's own wealth needs to be "fair" to be moral. By whose standards? Who gets to decide who gets how much of other people's wealth? Who decides when the balance is "right?" You? Me? Some government agency?

The very concept of wealth redistribution implies ownership of the wealth by the one doing the redistributing. Why doesn't that bother people? The person who comes to you and demands part of your life to serve the cause of "fairness" is saying that he owns your life.

The second paradigm I cannot seem to crack is that it makes a difference when force is used. In a free market, wealth is created (a critical factor), and moved around by private and voluntary transactions. That it accumulates in the hands of some people more than others goes without saying. Some people are better at making money than others. Is this "unfair?" Who was being forced? Compare that to how the government does it.

If I came over to your house uninvited, pulled a gun, opened your safe, and gave all your cash to the poor, you'd have me hurled into jail. If I stood at the door and asked for the money, it would be a totally different thing.

The Orwellian twist that has been performed by the Left is to make these two actions, on the national scale, completely equivalent. When I complain here about my taxes and my wealth being redistributed, I am treated with the same disdain as a well-off person would be who turned away a person asking for charitable donations. A politician who loudly proclaims he is going give the poor a huge benefit is lauded as though he was spending his own damn money. Liberal politicians are consistently labeled as "generous, caring, benevolent," and all the rest, despite the fact that all they have done is robbed Peter to pay Paul. The gun never seems to figure into it.

Yet no matter how many times I repeat it, I am looked at as though I am speaking Sanskrit. The "Robin Hood Principle" is burned that deeply into the American psyche.

BTW, the heads of Enron were by all accounts committing crimes, and the example is irrelevant. If you want to be consistent, you would say that someone who has earned his way to being a millionaire, like Sam Walton for example, still deserves to have his wealth ripped from him by force and given to those who have not earned it.

Also, if you go back and look at the "abuses" of great wealth in the history of America, you will find that the greatest abusers were those using the government's power over economic activity--a power it should never have had--to serve their own ends. As an example, compare the history of government-supported railroads with those that were purely private.

Right now the lowest zoning official in my town has more power over me, more control over my choices, than the richest man in America.