I am still struggling with the expanding view of income equality that has captured the core of the new Lefty ideology.
The basic premise of modern Leftism is that we have a tribal need for income equality and the government is the only tool available to acheive this ideological goal.There must be some simple metaphor to eradicate or challenge this dangerous and harmful but deeply emotional proposition.
Many times before I have tried to use the metaphor of nature. For every giant pine there are 1 million blades of grass. That doesn't seem to influence people who have the tribal desire for the equality of all.
The biological metaphor is partly unacceptable because you can't grow a vegetable garden in a pine forest. The pine trees are so efficient at consuming the nutrients in the ground and the air and absorbing the sunlight that vegetables don't have a chance.
To a limited extent, in the commercial world, only a few people could produce the Microsoft miracle or the Google miracle or the Amazon miracle. To the extent that these people were in the right place with the right skills at the right time does preclude others from matching their success in those specific instances. Compared to nature, almost any pinecone could grow in a pine forest. Skill and good ideas don't matter in a pine forest.
In the commercial world, the Apple people were producing a similar product at the same time that the Microsoft product was introduced. The Apple people never came close to the success of the Microsoft people. The Microsoft people did not squeeze the Apple people out of the market. The Apple Lisa was a dramatically inferior product but mostly the problem was that Apple did not understand open systems.
The same was true for Polaroid. Polaroid was a seriously better product than anything coming from Kodak but Kodak was part of an open system photography world and Polaroid, like Apple, was tied to the completely incorrect marketing idea of a closed system.
This actually takes me to the real case that needs a metaphor. Most people do not have the mental or arithmetic skills to know the difference between a zero sum game and a positive sum world. I actually don't know of any positive sum game that can be used to illustrate this difference. All games, except the games we play with ourselves are zero sum games.
Within the world of games, checkers is obviously less of a challenge than chess but both are zero sum games with a finite number of moves. We can respect the mind of the chess player because that finite number is greater than the finite checkers number. That does not make chess any less of a zero sum game.
To some extent Scrabble is a positive sum game, although like chess there is actually a finite number of moves. In the case of chess and Scrabble there are people who are hundreds of times better than ordinary players but no one demands a lobotomy for these masters. A lobotomy is my synonym for income equality taxation.
I am clearly looking for the appropriate metaphors that will penetrate the Lefty brain and help them understand that not only can rich people be justified in a 'positive sum' commercial society but they can move if they don't like the progressive taxation system.