Kerry's Class Warfare: "Working Families" vs. "The Privileged"

In his victory speech at the Iowa caucus, John Kerry uttered a line that exquisitely captured a staple of his Leftist politics -- class warfare. "Count the cost that working families are paying while the privileged ride high and reap the rewards," he said. Yet Kerry's policies actually harm productive individuals and engender the worst form of privileged Americans.

The Massachusetts senator routinely speaks of "working families" and "the privileged" in order to wipe out important distinctions between Americans of all economic classes and perpetuate the collectivism and statism he champions.

"Working families" describes poor and middle class people; "the privileged" describes the wealthiest individuals. Used together, these elastic terms are designed to imply a classic socialist dogma: that the wealthy don't work but inherit their riches and maintain this privilege by exploiting hard-working poor and middle class Americans.

Wealth-creation, however, is the product primarily of man's rational mind. The vast riches created by great wealth producers, from Cornelius Vanderbilt and John D. Rockefeller to Sam Walton and Bill Gates, derives from their extraordinary ability to exercise many crucial virtues imperative to large-scale business success. They are prime movers who combined innovative vision and planning that span over many decades, including insightful forecasts about developments in their fields, new technologies and industries, and their competitors. Moreover, they competently assess and choose the efficient business partners and CEOs, devise work strategies that account for their entire work force, and expend many long, hard-worked hours daily, taking little or no vacation time. Combined these with several other crucial tasks they must employ and you have extraordinary individuals in their fields, without whom their businesses -- which create jobs for thousands of less efficient workers -- would likely not exist.

Far from being "privileged," in that their riches are merely handed to them with no effort on their part, America's wealthiest individuals have employed their outstanding abilities and worked extremely hard to produce valued products that have created, expanded or maintained their wealth.

Meanwhile, as Kerry paints America's most productive individuals as privileged, his policies actually punish all hard-working producers and create entitlements for lesser- or non-productive Americans. In his Iowa speech, Kerry raised one such policy: "I'm running for president so that for…every other family in America, health care will be a fundamental right and not a privilege…"

But in reality, like any commodity produced in a free nation, health care is neither a right nor a government-provided privilege. Health care is a commodity produced by individuals such as doctors, prescription drug developers and nurses. Other individuals must work to make the money to receive their services and products. Both providers and recipients have the right only to work and voluntarily trade the values they have produced.

By designating health care a fundamental right, Kerry essentially believes that some individuals (e.g., doctors) must work to provide health care without the recipient having to pay for the service or product, or to receive it at a lesser cost than it took the producer to create these. Whether the issue is taxes, retirement savings, education, Kerry seeks to supplant each individual's fundamental right to pursue what he needs to survive and be happy with the alleged right to simply be handed these needs. In short, Kerry champions entitlements, or, to use his language, privilege of the worst kind -- forcing the more productive workers to produce a commodity for others who are not expected to work for and earn what they need.

In short, Kerry is actually for what he claims he's against: punishing America's most productive workers to provide for a class of privileged welfare recipients.

Americans must reject Kerry's socialist policies that destroy everyone's individual rights and instigate warfare between the producers and the lesser- or non-productive of all economic classes. Instead, we must champion each individual's fundamental right to pursue his own happiness -- that is, to employ his abilities to produce what is life requires and to voluntarily trade his values with others.

Joseph Kellard is a journalist living in New York. To read more of Mr. Kellard's commentary, visit his website The American Individualist at americanindividualist.blogspot.com.