Save the Golden Goose!

It takes a great deal of courage to defend the rich. Those who do are usually quickly pilloried as greedy, selfish, self-interested, fat neanderthal pigs. You know the drill.

Well, one courageous rich person has come forth recently to defend his ilk. He is Ziad K. Abdelnour, President and CEO of Blackhawk Partners, Inc., a high flying and very successful Wall Street investment firm.

You can read his eloquent and excellent blog at (http://blackhawkpartners.com/Blog.aspx?id=42), but the essence of his piece is that rich people are vital to the success of a society and that a society should be judged as much by how it treats its rich as how it treats its poor. The society that harms the rich kills the poor.

In one particularly beautifully phrased section, he eloquently summarizes the problem with our current situation:

"The wealth of America isn't an inventory of goods; it's an organic, living entity, a fragile, pulsing fabric of ideas, expectations, loyalties, moral commitments, visions and people. To vivisect it for redistribution would eventually kill it. As Mitterrand's French technocrats found in the early 1980s, the proud new socialist owners of complex systems of wealth soon learn that they are administering an industrial corpse rather than a growing corporation."

We currently have an administration that obviously has not learned the lesson taught by France's experience. We have a President, and a host of his allies, that seem hellbent on killing the proverbial golden goose. They have a vision for a society where everyone is poor, or nearly so, rather than one that seeks to make everyone wealthy. In a twist on LBJs "War on Poverty", one commentator labeled Obama's initiative as a "War on Prosperity". That is a fairly accurate moniker.

The golden goose is not quite on the chopping block, but he has quite a few hungry, ax wielding bureaucrats giving him the chase of his life.