Circulating the wires today is a 2001 Barack Obama radio interview clip concerning wealth redistribution. As with all things political, your perspective and your prejudices will determine your interpretation of this clip.

Some see it as no big deal. Others see it as proof that Obama is all but a Marxist.

I understand the right’s desire to turn this clip into the smoking gun proof that Obama is going to seize our wealth and turn us all into comrades. I think many on the right have convinced themselves that such a nefarious goal is “the truth” about Obama and see evidence of that truth in every Obama utterance, much like many on the left tend to see every George W. Bush move as an attempt to enrich his cronies and advance theocracy.

There’s plenty of reasons to be concerned by Obama’s tricky tax plan, but I’m not going to play along with this “Obama’s a socialist/Marxist” nonsense.

First of all, the clip in question is an intellectual discussion not a policy debate. In many instances, Obama is speaking theoretically. When he does directly address his own philosophies, one of the clear points he makes is a major positive: he believes change should come through the democratic means of legislation rather than the manipulation of courts and the misuse of the Constitution.

On the matter of wealth redistribution, he’s clearly in favor of it. But why is this a surprise? Equality is the central tenet of liberalism. Universal health care. Affirmative action. Gay rights. Welfare. Minimum wage. Labor laws. Hate speech laws. Progressive taxation. They’re all attempts to equalize us. When handled responsibly, the drive for equality promotes a necessary level of fairness within our society. When handled with too much fervency, the drive can trample other rights and lead us towards distasteful moral equivalencies and, ultimately, the kind of totalitarianism spawned by communism.

So, the concern isn’t that Obama supports redistribution of wealth (both parties support it to varying degrees). The concern is with how much redistribution he supports. Are his goals within the American mainstream or are they radical? While I’m sure many believe Obama is hiding his true objectives, I’d argue that his platform gives us as clear a picture as we’re likely to get of how much redistribution Obama desires. And, I gotta say, as much as I dislike the messiness of his tax credits, Obama isn’t suggesting any radical moves. Could he support something more onerous once in office? Sure. But, even with a Democratic majority, there’s little likelihood that anything radical will get through the legislative process.

I think it’s important to note that, like all mainstream American liberals, when Obama talks about redistribution, he’s talking about equality of income. He wants what liberals always want: for the government to give a helping hand to the poor and for the government to place various restrictions on the rich to keep them from centralizing too much of our nation’s wealth.

This is not a radical philosophy. If Obama had used words like “income fairness” or even “wealth equality,” the radio clip in question would have remained on whatever shelf it was found. But “redistribution” sounds scary. It’s this election’s bogeyman word and some are going to keep treating the radio clip like the smoking gun that proves Obama’s wicked plans. As for me, I think I’ll assume the more likely scenario: Obama is a liberal.

Shocking. But true.

This has been one of those oft whispered questions in Washington and beyond, but it’ll most likely never get answered because everybody knows it’s political poison. After all, who wants to be labeled as anti-farmer?

But the reality of the American farmer is much different than those days of a tightknit family working their land for all its worth. That’s not to say that those situations don’t still exist…but…

From Wash Post:

Today, most of the nation’s food is produced by modern family farms that are large operations using state-of-the-art computers, marketing consultants and technologies that cut labor, time and costs. The owners are frequently college graduates who are as comfortable with a spreadsheet as with a tractor. They cover more acres and produce more crops with fewer workers than ever before.

The very policies touted by Congress as a way to save small family farms are instead helping to accelerate their demise, economists, analysts and farmers say. That’s because owners of large farms receive the largest share of government subsidies. They often use the money to acquire more land, pushing aside small and medium-size farms as well as young farmers starting out. [...]

Large family farms, defined as those with revenue of more than $250,000, account for nearly 60 percent of all agricultural production but just 7 percent of all farms. They receive more than 54 percent of government subsidies. And their share of federal payments is growing — more than doubling over the past decade for the biggest farms.

Ultimately, we’re going to have accept that we’re funding a vast corporate infrastructure with welfare checks. It doesn’t matter that these are farmers, it’s still corporate welfare. So either we start to move away from that or we begin to redistribute some of this money so the government isn’t funding the formation of regional agricultural monopolies.

I mean…tell me the following situation doesn’t make your blood boil…

From the perch of his $180,000 six-row combine, churning through cornfields that stretch as far as the eye can see, John Phipps has a rare view of American farm policy. [...]

Today, he calls himself an “industrial farmer” who uses computers, technology and science to get the most out of the 1,800 acres of corn and soybeans he plants in an area of Illinois where the weather and soil are ideal for farming. The strategy has paid off with bigger and better yields.

Yet to Congress and federal agricultural officials, Phipps and his wife, Jan, are struggling family farmers. Last year, the government sent the Phippses a check for $120,000. Thousands of similar checks arrived throughout the Corn Belt, even as many farmers had bumper crops.

Ridiculous stuff. We can do better.

Any farmers out there who want to share their story?

Ethicist Peter Singer has an interesting article in the New York Times magazine on charitable giving. It’s largely a discussion of “how much should one give?” and makes the argument that it is perfectly defensible, on moral grounds, to tax the rich more heavily than the poor and to expect them to donate more.

I’ve been looking for an article like this for some time. I’m nearing 40, and my wife went back to work this year. So we’re starting to hit that point in midlife where our discretionary income is high enough to make serious charitable giving a possibility. Up until now our monetary donations have been small and irregular — several hundred dollars a year, generally. Most of our charity has been about deeds: donating blood, helping neighbors, sending our excess belongings to nonprofits rather than throwing them out or holding a garage sale.

But now we’re starting to think about charity in a more organized way, and Singer’s article offered some thought-provoking ways to think about it.

Some of his more interesting observations:

1. Of the top four charitable givers in United States history, three were/are atheists or agnostic: Bill Gates, Warren Buffett and Andrew Carnegie (John D. Rockefeller, the fourth member of the group, was a Baptist). Further, Buffett’s charitable pledges — about $37 billion — more than double that of Carnegie and Rockefeller put together — after accounting for inflation. Bill Gates’ donations are nearly as large: about $30 billion.

That says nothing, of course, about whether believers or nonbelievers as a group are more generous. But it’s food for thought, as well as demonstrating the scale of modern philanthropy.

2. A lot of people argue that the rich owe much of their wealth to the society that helps them create it, but I’ve never seen the argument laid out in detail. Singer does. He cites Nobel-winning economist Herbert Simon, who estimates that social capital — the prevailing social, governmental and economic conditions — accounts for about 90 percent of what people earn in wealthy societies like ours. “On moral grounds,” Simon adds, “we could argue for a flat income tax of 90 percent.” Simon notes that that would be economically disastrous, but there’s nothing unethical with taxing more heavily those who can most afford to pay.

Warren Buffett explicitly agrees with that logic. “If you stick me down in the middle of Bangladesh or Peru,â€Â? he said, “you’ll find out how much this talent is going to produce in the wrong kind of soil.â€Â?

(continued over at Midtopia)