Okay, I'm hoping this thought is one of the saner ones because I'm throwing it out there for the world.

The election has me in something of a funk. I'm really concerned that we are going to genuinely screw this one up as a nation. With one outcome, there will be riots. With the other -- well, there will be riots. Keep your powder dry.

The whole issue of Marxism and the redistribution of wealth had me trying to put a tractive example to what I consider the idiocy of the ideology from which it is born. So I did a google search on two numbers --- Bill Gate's net worth and the US population. So here's how the example goes:

Bill Gates is worth $56 Billion. That's the figure off the Internet and probably reflects his net worth prior to the market turmoil that we are presently experiencing. For the sake of my argument, we'll keep the number and move forward, understanding that it might be slightly inflated. The number I got for the population of the United States is 301,139,947 plus or minus whatever individuals have crossed the Rio Grande in recent weeks. Marxism/socialism says that the state has the right to take the $56 billion that is his and redistribute it to his fellow countrymen. It's very simple math, people. That means we would get $186.00 for every man, woman, and child in the country. What positive, lasting effect would $186.00 have for the average American? What permanent, negative effect would taking all Bill's money and leaving him with $186 have on his life? What effect would it have on his company, Microsoft, or on its employees, or on its survival? Due to the sad, irrefutable numbers the raw population statistics clearly display, attempts to redistribute to the large masses of poor from the pockets of the relatively few rich will much more significantly drag down the rich than it will uplift the poor. Moreover, the truly rich, who have homes in other countries, will simply go live there and give up their citizenship if they feel that taxation in America would be significantly more than in the other country of their choosing. A lesson for Obama: when the rich become targets, the rich will become foreigners. You're left redistributing among only the poor, which leads to the next axiom -- no matter how bad you have it, someone has it worse. In a Marxist/Socialist environment, this means you can't have too little for the government not to want to give it to someone less fortunate still. Do you really want to be in this sort of race to the bottom, seeing how efficient so many others are at wasting their time/talents/resources/opportunities? I await rebuttal.