America, the Beautiful

Today, China is set to become to world’s next economic superpower, with Chinese money flooding international markets. It achieved this miraculous recovery through embracing free-market, capitalist policies and eschewing communist economic beliefs. Though China and America may increasingly share the economic podium, they are not the same. America and China may be enjoying similar economic success, but their values could not be more different. Our values define America, not any metric of success. China strives for performance, not the upholding of any values.

America, in my firm opinion, is not and will never be a socialist country. If we do continue this unyielding march to the left, we will be American in name only. The occasion for this article, then, is the friendliness towards socialist thinking shown by the next generation of Democratic presidential hopefuls. Increasingly, hot button issues revolve around income inequality, healthcare, affordability of education, and gun-control. I’ll address each of these, and hopefully some uniform message about American values will emerge.

Communist China had record levels of income equality. They achieved this because everyone was equally poor. Communist party officials seized all wealth by force (regardless of how it had been made) and redistributed it as they saw fit. Being human, many saw it fit to redistribute the cash into their own pockets. This is not an American value but rather a universal principle—people respond to incentives and are inherently greedy. People seek incentives and avoid punishments. Why then, do we punish people for making money? While the government is bad on this note, college campuses are awful. Within many families, parents are choosing not to work (and contribute to society) because they would have to pay more money to colleges if they did. By not working, their family saves money. Even if you wanted to work, why would you? It’d be an inherently irresponsible decision.

While those in communist countries enjoy the same portion of the same pot, those in capitalist countries share different-sized portions of a far larger pot. Frankly, I’d rather have one-percent of a one-million-dollar pot than ten-percent of a ten-dollar pot. In their pursuit of income equality, Democratic candidates regularly pursue the creation of “wealth-taxes.” Time and time again, we see that these taxes never hurt elites. The people that suffer are always the middle class. Marxists believe in a two-class dichotomy. Those with and those without. From this standpoint, it makes sense to tax the rich. However, the world is certainly different than that and we shouldn’t be quick to polarize. The rich are powerful and will always find ways to hide their money. The more money one has, the easier it is to save. Only the very rich have access to offshore bank accounts and expensive accountants. These multi-millionaires (whose ranks include Warren, Biden, and even Sanders) pay a pittance in taxes. Who foots the bill then? The middle class. When a philosophy treats the world as haves and have-nots, it will inevitably create a world in which there are elites and masses and no one in between. This extends to healthcare and education because, like before, someone has to foot the bill—and its not going to be the rich.

Gun control is currently one of the most controversial debates in America. Self-defense tends to be the focus on the debate, but I think that this is irrelevant. Like Hamilton wrote, “the nation which can prefer disgrace to danger is prepared for a master and deserves one.” America gained its freedom through lead and blood, casting off what it believed was a tyrannical overlord. If people are defenseless against their governments, there is nothing stopping them from absolute tyranny. Communist China has extremely tight gun “restrictions” (i.e. nobody has them except military or police) unless you live in basically-unpopulated rural areas. When citizens can’t have weapons, there is nothing stopping communist officials from breaking into houses and beating and torturing whomever they see fit for whatever reason they want to use (which also happened to my family). With no weapons in sight, people cannot resist their governments when they overstep bounds. Our freedom and individual rights are inalienable, but they must be defended at all costs. “Live free or die: death is not the worst of all evils.”

What makes America great is not its wealth nor its equality of outcome. America is an experiment hypothesized on the notion that a nation built on individual rights could ever exist in the real world. Everything after that—from our economic success to our military prowess—is secondary. So far, the results have been extremely promising. The Chinese word for America is Měi Guó, which means beautiful country. In America, everybody is endowed with rights that no one can take away. Everybody has the right to vote and state their opinions. It is a country where, even though nobody is guaranteed success, people have the ability to pull themselves up by their boot straps and make something of themselves regardless of their connections. This is the America my parents longed for when they immigrated to New York following the Tiananmen Square protests. This is the America that shines as a beacon of freedom and economic opportunity to the rest of the world—a world that too often lives in economic hopelessness and omnipresent fear of their governments. We live in a beautiful country. Let’s keep it that way.