In President Obama’s now notorious December 6 Hugo Chavez speech in Osawatomie, Kansas, he characterized the alternative to his redistributionist Obamanomics as, “The market will take care of everything. If only we cut more regulations and cut more taxes – especially for the wealthy – our economy will grow stronger.  Sure, there will be winners and losers.  But if the winners do really well, jobs and prosperity will eventually trickle down to everyone else.  And even if prosperity doesn’t trickle down, they argue, that’s the price of liberty.”

But this is just shadow boxing with strawmen.  Free market economics is not about a few winners doing really well and then prosperity trickling down to everyone else.  President Kennedy understood what the miseducated Obama doesn’t.  As Kennedy explained the American experience since the early 1700s, “A rising tide lifts all boats.”  The booming economic growth of the free market is the only means of benefitting working people and the poor, far more effective than counterproductive redistribution, which only retards the prosperity of working people, and consigns the poor to a lifetime of dependency.