The Myth Of The Level Playing Field

     One of the favorite Leftist whines is that government authority should be used to "level the playing field." They are so committed to the concept that they are willing to forgo fairness, wealth creation, and even jobs for the middle-class in order to achieve it. The point that is missed by those on the Left advocating for government to "level the playing field" is that the free market is self-leveling. It is not within the purview of government to interfere in the private sector anymore than to set boundaries of law. Just as it is not the job of an NFL referee to "level the playing field," if it were they would rearrange the teams according to an equal distribution of talent before the game began.
     The Lefts idea of what "leveling the playing field" means is that everyone succeeds to the same level, and no one player in the market is more dominant than another. But the Lefts obsession with a level playing field springs from their infection with the cancer of equality, which they place above everything else. The Left deliberately misreads the Constitution to support equal outcomes, instead of equal opportunities.
     The more that the Left tries to "level the playing field" through government imposition, the more unequal it actually becomes. They rammed through financial reform legislation (Dodd/Frank) which has shuttered the doors of dozens of smaller community banks because they can not afford the millions in government compliance costs as can their larger competitors. They also used corrupt means to pass health care insurance reform (ObamaCare) which has as its centerpiece inter-generational theft through wealth redistribution from the young and healthy, to the old and sick.
     It is not only under the Obama regime that the Lefts attempt to "level the playing field" has only made things worse for the very persons they claim the leveling is suppose to help. In the last fifty years, since Lyndon Johnson's Great Society that was suppose to end poverty through redistributing wealth, the number of people living in poverty has actually increased, more under President Obama than any other administration during that time. Lyndon Johnson's War On Poverty has succeeded only in transferring 10 trillion dollars from producers to non-producers, hurting both groups and making Leftist politicians wealthy in the process. That is how Lyndon Johnson himself managed to enter the White House as a member of the middle-class and leave as a millionaire.
     The continuation of the myth of the level playing field has allowed greedy Leftist politicians to grow the percentage of the federal budget dedicated to entitlements from barely over ten percent in 1964 to well over sixty percent today. The whole idea of "the level playing field" is illustrative of why Leftist initiatives fail. Behind every Leftist policy is the idea that poverty creates wealth, i.e., government can raise up the poor by lowering the wealthy through confiscatory taxing policy. The only ones who ultimately benefit from the "level playing field" are the Leftists in government who are unable to create wealth on their own and must therefore confiscate it using the poor as a hammer against the wealthy.