Single Most Important Economic Issue of Our Time

"The landscape of capitalism may seem solid and settled and ready for seizure, but capitalism is really a mindscape.  Volatile and shifting ideas, and the human beings behind them-- not heavy and entrenched establishments -- are the source of our nation’s wealth. There is no bureaucratic net or tax web that can catch the fleeting thoughts of the greatest entrepreneurs of our past. Or future.

Wealth is valuable only to the extent that others think it will be valuable in the future, and that depends on running the fortune for the needs of the customers rather than for the interests of the owners. Its worth will collapse overnight if the market believes the company is chiefly serving its owner, rather than the owner serving it, or that it is being run chiefly for the managers rather than for the people who buy its wares. Look at the recent BP debacle and see for yourself.
 
The wealth of America isn't an inventory of goods; it's an organic, living entity, a fragile, pulsing fabric of ideas, expectations, loyalties, moral commitments, visions, and people. To vivisect it for redistribution would eventually kill it. As Mitterrand's French technocrats found early in the 1980s, the proud new socialist owners of complex systems of wealth soon learn they are administering an industrial corpse rather than a growing corporation.

That is why the single most important economic issue of our time – and one that impacts the poor and middle class alike – will be how we treat the very rich among us.

If the majority of Americans smear, harass, overtax, and over regulate this minority of wealth creators, our politicians will be shocked and horrified to discover how swiftly the physical tokens of the means of production collapse into so much corroded wire, eroding concrete, and scrap metal. They will be amazed at how quickly the wealth of America is either destroyed, or flees to other countries."

~Ziad K. Abdelnour, President & CEO Blackhawk Partners, from his essay "Why We Need the Rich: A Message to Americans – and Our Leaders in Washington DC – On Wealth Creation by a Wealth Creator."