by Llewellyn H. Rockwell, Jr.
LewRockwell.com
“Woke” people claim that they want to wake up racial and sexual minorities to the way they are being discriminated against. Because of past and present exploitation, blacks and other “protected” groups are not getting what rightfully belongs to them. The solution to this is that the better off, especially if they are white, should have their wealth and income seized and given to those they are exploiting.
The woke position rests on a fundamental fallacy. This is that there is a fixed amount resources, so that if the rich have more, the poor have less. But this is wrong. Resources in the free market are not a fixed sum. So long as the economy is growing, everybody can benefit. The ‘protected’ can do better without taking away what the rich have earned. The economist Paul Rubin, who died last month, gives a good account of the fallacy: “Karl Marx called his system ‘scientific socialism’ Modern leftists advocate a similar ideology and call themselves ‘woke’ to indicate that they understand the world better than the rest of us. Yet the worldview of Marxists and woke leftists alike is fundamentally primitive.