think about how important to the well-being of a community this Commandment is. If you want a donkey, if you want a pot roast, if you want a cleaning lady, don’t bitch about what the people across the street have. Go get your own. The Tenth Commandment sends a message to socialists, to egalitarians, to people obsessed with fairness, to American presidential candidates in the year 2000—to everyone who believes that wealth should be redistributed. And the message is clear and concise: Go to hell. If we want the whole world to be rich, we need to start loving wealth. In the difference between poverty and plenty, the problem is the poverty, not the difference. Wealth is good. You know this about your own wealth. If you got rich, it would be a great thing. You’d improve your life. You’d improve your family’s life. You’d purchase education, travel, knowledge about the world. You’d invest in worthwhile things. You’d give money to noble causes. You’d help your friends and neighbors. Your life would be better if you got rich. The lives of the people around you would be better. Your wealth is good. So why isn’t everybody else’s wealth good? Wealth is good when a lot of people have it. It’s good when a few people have it. This is because money is a tool, nothing more. You can’t eat or drink money, or wear it very comfortably as underwear. And wealth—an accumulation of money—is a bunch of tools. Tools can be used to do harm. You can break into a house by driving a forklift through a window. You can hit somebody over the head with a hydroelectric turbine. Tools are still good. When a carpenter has a lot of tools, we don’t say to him, “You have too many. You should give some of your hammers, saws, screws, and nails to the guy who’s cooking omelettes.” Making money through hard work and wise investment is a fine thing to do. Other ways of making money aren’t so bad, either, as long as everybody who’s in on the deal is there voluntarily. Better sleazy productivity than none. As terrible as Albania’s pyramid schemes were, Albania’s riots were worse. And the Hong Kong of John Cowperthwaite shows that even the most resolutely free-market system makes use of private means for the public weal. If the United States radically reduced the size of its government, eliminated all subsidies, price controls, and corporate welfare, and abolished its entitlement
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