Wealth and Poverty

From the New PrologueThe United States over the last decade has witnessed a classic confrontation between the forces of entrepreneurial capitalism and those of established institutions claiming a higher virtue, expertise, and political standing. One side subsists on unforced profits of enterprise; the other on rents and tolls and privileges at the Treasury, the Federal Reserve, and the White House. &hellp;The wealth of America is not an inventory of goods; it is an organic living entity, a fragile pulsing fabric of ideas, expectations, loyalties, moral commitments, and visions. To vivisect it for redistribution is to kill it. As President Mitterand s French technocrats discovered in the 1980s, and President Obama s quixotic American ecocrats are discovering today, government managers of complex systems of wealth soon find they are administering an industrial corpse, a socialized Solyndra."