Like I said, the justifications for redistributing wealth are legion, and dressing them up in semantic horseshit doesn't change anything.

If the "equality of opportunity," (and we're talking financial here, not racial discrimination, or other factors that don't involve money, or redistribution of wealth) was valid, there would be no people who grew up without wealth that ever became wealthy. In point of fact, 80 percent of American millionaires started out without inherited wealth.

Poverty has nothing to do with "God's judgment," or any other weird fatalistic idea that you imagine conservatives believe in your cartoon world. It does have something to do with attitude, and surveys of successful people from ALL backgrounds prove it. Someone in a ghetto has higher hurdles to leap than someone in suburbia. But I can point you to successful people from the ghetto, and lethargic failures from suburbia.

The entire leftist economic philosophy boils down to "You have it. We don't think you deserve it. We have the right to take it from you and give it to people we want to have it."

Everything else is verbal decoration. In order to make this concept moral, you have to destroy the concept that wealth can be earned, and that a wealthy person has the right to his earnings. Most of the semantics is an attempt to do this.

You, Lakoff and others bemoaning the labor situation believe that economic laws are simply opinions, like a favorite color, and not a fact of reality. During the labor heyday of the 50s and early 60s, the U.S. lived in a world where most of the competing nations had been destroyed by war, and the rest were subsistence economies. We could afford to pay a guy a middle-class wage for turning a bolt on an assembly line. Nobody else was there to do it.

Now we have not only billions of people in the world who are plenty willing to turn that bolt instead of subsistence farming, we have many other nations that are as technically advanced as we are, but with lower costs of living, like India. You can't make this go away by pretending it isn't there, or slapping tariffs on their products and hoping the rest of the world likes you enough to buy the same thing as India is selling for twice the price.

It isn't about the minimum wage. Less than three percent of hourly workers work for the Federal minimum wage or less. Raising it is just a political sop to the simple-minded.

Access to education?

K-12 education has not only been free for generations, it's been mandatory in a socialized education system that the Left has run, lock stock and barrel, for decades now.

In constant dollars, the amount of money spent per student in America has tripled since 1960. Meanwhile, teacher salaries, also in constant dollars, have gone up by a factor of 1.4. I leave it to you to figure out where the rest of the cash is going.

Pupil to teacher ratio, always harped on by education "professionals," was 27.4 pupils per teacher in the 1950s. It's 14.6 now.

More here.

Yet each year our education problems get worse, and the only solution we are given is that we should pump more billions into the system, increase the power of the unions, and make it impossible for parents to find alternatives.

If college were somehow made a "right," with the billions that would cost, the value of a degree would drop to the value of a high school diploma, and only liberals would be unable to figure out why.