Redistribution of Wealth

Bryce Hammond's post here:

Wealth Redistribution

is off-target enough that I wanted to link it and add a few comments here. Since I think he shut down comments on his blog, feel free to continue the conversation here.

A few points-

1. Obama's now famous 2001 interview clearly shows that, as a constitutional law professor, he is critiquing the civil rights movement for relying too much on litigation and the court system in pursuit of civil rights, rather than building consensus through the legislative process. He gives the example that civil rights leaders were never able to get the distributive justice they wanted through the courts, and points out that the legislative process is the more appropriate way to do something like that. This is the overwhelmingly conservative position to take.

2. All six of the countries ranked above the U.S. in the most recent UN standard of living survey have more socialist policies than the U.S. (Sweden, Norway, etc.) So the argument that socialism is doomed to fail no matter what seems untenable without some kind of metric or substantiation.