Never mind, grasshopper

Barack Obama's idea of "neighborliness" is just the newest term for confiscate-and-redistribute liberal economics:

"If I am sitting pretty and you've got a waitress who is making minimum wage plus tips, and I can afford it and she can't, what's the big deal for me to say, I'm going to pay a little bit more? That's neighborliness." If that is Obama's rationale for making the tax code even more steeply progressive than it already is, it's no wonder voters are having second thoughts about his economic aptitude.

"Neighborliness." Perhaps that word has a nonstandard meaning to someone whose home adjoined the property of convicted swindler Tony Rezko, but extracting money by force from someone who earned it in order to give it to someone who didn't is not usually spoken of as neighborly. If Citizen Obama, "sitting pretty," reaches into his own pocket and helps out the waitress with a large tip, he has shown a neighborly spirit. But there is nothing neighborly about using the tax code to compel someone else to pay the waitress that tip.

Taxation is not generosity, it is confiscation at gunpoint. Does Obama not understand the difference?

No, of course he doesn't. None of them do, and they're always trying to come up with a different word to disguise what they're really all about. They're not really "liberal," they're "progressive," and now Obama has hit on "neighborly." At an editorial writers' conference a few years ago, my colleagues were beside themselves with joy because they had come up with "communitarian," as if there were no difference between all of us getting together to build a barn for one of us and taking money from all of us to provide for those who never bothered to try. If you grew up believing in Aesop's tale of the foolish grasshopper who perished because he frittered away his summer, unlike the ants who worked diligently to prepare for winter, then frow up. The ants are the idiots.