Did you see the feel-good story on ABC News tonight ('The Power of Half') about the teenage daughter who convinced her parents to give away half of everything they owned on account of she felt guilty after seeing a homeless person on the curb, the more so in that she was riding in a Mercedes at the time? I'll tell you, if I had been the luckless brother in the case, the story would take a whole new twist because I'd be suing Sister Charity for the million dollars that she unilaterally decided to remove from my potential inheritance. Far from a feel-good story, this piece makes me ill, because it is the reductio ad absurdum against muddled leftist thinking about economic matters, this idea that capitalism is a zero-sum game and that a mere redistribution of dollars is the way to fix social problems. If she really wanted to help the poor, she would save her money and grow it into still more money so that she would be in a position to help on an ongoing basis down the road, when she can make the most difference in specific ways of her own choosing, in some emergency situation at present unknowable to her. This clumsy one-time lump-sum payment smacks of moral show-boating, too, especially now that network television is flaunting her as a role model (God help us).

And what about that "half" that she's still holding on to? By her own logic, she has no moral right to that "half" either. Why can't she get by with 1/4 or 1/3 of what she (and her brother) had and give the rest away? For that matter (again, I'm just following her own addle-brained reasoning here) why should she have one penny more than that destitute beggar on the street who inspired her to cash out in the first place? What's with all these "half" measures, then, that these hypocritical American dogooders like to take to the sound of trumpet fanfares on ABC Evening News? Why not check out the Power of EVERYTHING, my dear, and be done with wealth and possessions once and for all, if they really are the evil here that we need to attack?

Why am I speaking out?

Because the ultimate result of this attitude on a national level is a Third World economy -- a nation lacking the most basic needs, wherein everyone lives poorly and without hope of much improvement in their circumstances, consoled only by the spiteful reflection that at least no one else is any better off than they are.

With all due respect to Sister Charity (and all due sympathy for her brother) we need to demonize poverty, not wealth: we need to show others how to attain wealth, rather than try to convince them that wealth was never worth attaining in the first place.