By Ralph R. Reiland

Monday, May 10, 2010

Off the teleprompter for a few seconds while stumping for financial reform recently in Illinois, President Obama had this to say about incomes: “Now, what we’re doing, I want to be clear, we’re not trying to push financial reform because we begrudge success that’s fairly earned. I mean, I do think at a certain point you’ve made enough money.”

No begrudging of success? That’s what the left does — begrudge, envy and resent, robotically. That’s what makes them leftists.

Obama added a qualifier. There’s no begrudging success if it’s “fairly earned.” And who decides what’s fair?

Ben Roethlisberger got a $25 million signing bonus, and the median annual salary last year for physicians practicing family medicine in the U.S. was $160,000? So 156 family doctors worked all year and their combined paychecks were slightly lower than Ben’s signing bonus. Is the White House OK with that?

Further, should the central committee of White House czars decide how much of Ben’s $25 million was due to the lucky inheritance of a good throwing arm and how much was “fairly earned” for hard work?

And what will they do about Lady Gaga earning more than General Motors?

More troubling than the “fairly earned” dilemma is the “I do think at a certain point you’ve made enough money” idea, especially coming from a president who is explicitly on record as being in favor of redistributing America’s incomes in a downward direction.

It was in October 2008 that candidate Obama, in another unscripted moment away from the teleprompter, told Samuel “Joe the Plumber” Wurzelbacher why he wanted to raise taxes on upper-income households: “My attitude is that if the economy’s good for folks from the bottom up, it’s gonna be good for everyone,” explained Obama. “I think when you spread the wealth around, it’s good for everyone.”

So who decides when we’ve “made enough money”? Should we tell Julia Roberts not to make another movie, tell her she’s “made enough”? Should the czars tell Tiger Woods that he’s way past that “certain point” when he’s earned “enough,” unless he wants to play for free or donate 100 percent of the winnings to the needs of the collective?

Should the government have told the owners of 84 Lumber to stop at 83? At last count, the company had about 4,000 employees in 289 stores in 34 states. Under the controlling and intrusive judgment by the government saying that the owners already had “enough” cars, houses and investments, what good would have come from putting a lid on the company’s expansion, a lid on the hiring of thousands of new employees?

Rather than worrying about who has too much money, Obama should be thinking about what made the United States the most successful nation in human history, both in terms of economic prosperity and individual freedom.

Instead of giving greater power to the central government — the power to decree, for instance, what we should eat, what we should drive, what we’ll be permitted to hear and see, what income has been “fairly earned,” and when at “a certain point” we’ve “made enough money” — the founding philosophy of the United States called for a society based on the exact opposite set of principles.

“Were we directed from Washington when to sow and when to reap, we should soon want bread,” warned Thomas Jefferson. It’s a lesson that was tragically learned firsthand by millions of starving farmers in both China and the Soviet Union.

Ralph R. Reiland can be reached at rrreiland@aol.com or .