This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Monday, November 17, 2008.

I'm Caleb Brown.

President-elect Barack Obama spoke highly of both the private sector and of tax policies that are in many

instances nothing more than redistribution.

Cato Institute Research Fellow Jason Kuznicki argues that redistribution, policies

that move wealth from one place to another, are not simple

matters of mathematics.

They destroy the wealth they are intended to spread around. out.

There are two ways for any individual to get wealthy.

The first is to take some wealth that has already been produced by someone else and claim it for their own.

And honestly, this is a fairly simple way for an individual to get wealthy.

It's easy.

Anyone can understand it.

Almost anyone can do it if they are either strong or clever. It doesn't require any

particular legal order. It doesn't require the consent of anyone else. It

doesn't require any particularly great

social or economic coordination. There's a second way to get wealth though and that's a way that enriches both the individual and the society and that's a much more difficult way that is to create and to exchange and doing that requires both that the individual have some amount of

talent or intelligence or some insight about a market and how he can provide a product or a service more effectively and it also

requires an extended legal and social order that permits exchange that permits

dissemination of information and of goods and services throughout it.

And that's a much more difficult way of an individual to get wealth, but it is the only way

for a society to get wealth.

...