This Saturday, a group of Marin County, California, women plan to march naked protesting the upcoming war with Iraq. It's a frightening prospect, especially if you can imagine what some of these women look like, naked. Perhaps it's merely a threat, and they hope to scare President Bush into persuing peace instead. "Stop the war, or, you'll have to look at us,..., naked!" Yepper, scares the juice out of me! Works every time.

What I wonder about, is, why can't some women who are worth it make that trip? Women like Pamela Anderson, Claudia Schiffer, and the latest slate of models from Victoria's Secret? After all, if you want the country to sit up and take notice, well, what would be the logical cast of characters?

Unfortunately, it's those with inferior merchandise who over-advertise.

And speaking of women you'd like to see naked, Sheryl Crow expressed her opposition to war--apparently all war, in principle--at the American Music Awards monday night. One gem that floated out of her mouth was, "I think war is based in greed and there are huge karmic retributions that will follow. I think war is never the answer to solving any problems. The best way to solve problems is to not have enemies." Now that certainly is brilliant, isn't it? Takes a lot of deep thought to come up with it. I wonder what you do if your "greedy" neighbor decides, quite apart from consulting you, to take some of your property without asking. I guess that means you created the problem by having an enemy to begin with.

There are some women who should keep their clothes on, and others who shouldn't be handed a microphone.

If you know a modicum of U.S. history, you've run across the name 'Huey Long' and probably not in the most glowing terms, as it should be. Long was a political gangster who, through the late twenties and early thirties, ran the state of Louisiana as though it was his private estate. He first became governor, then a U.S. senator.

Long ran on a platform he called "Share the Wealth." He villified the nation's wealthiest people as thieves, since, according to his speeches, 5% of the population owned 80% of the nation's wealth. He openly advocated stripping people of their wealth and redistributing it to the poor in Robin Hood fashion, with Huey Long, as one of the beneficiaries, only this last plank in the platform was never made public.

Now I'm quite sure that Huey never read Marx. Few American politicians have been well-read in anything. But Long's platform was almost a carbon copy of Marx' rationale for destroying the Bourgeosie. On Marx' view of economics, wealth is a fixed quantity and those who compete for it do so only at the expense of those who lose the competition. So, the more money I make, means that there must be that much less for the rest of you. It's a situation that economists refer to as a zero sum game. The total winnings of everyone in the game is always the same. That fact that one person is wealthy is the cause of another's poverty.

Human nature has a soft spot for laziness and something-for-nothing-schemes, as well as the desire to blame someone else for your problems, so schemes like Long's and Marx' are quick to catch on. Long's constituents ate up the idea that they were poor because 5% of the population was rich. Long organized a chain of "Share the Wealth" clubs that sprang up around the country to push his agenda and ultimately to serve as a spring board to the presidency. People liked the idea that they were poor because someone else was rich, and the only "fair" way to rectify that was to redistribute wealth.

I'm quite sure that most members of today's D[emoc]rat party haven't read Marx either, and most may not know anything about Huey Long. But the mantra they sing in the face of the Bush tax cuts is remarkably the same.

Over the last two weeks I've heard economists, hired as front men by the D[emoc]rats, saying things like, "On Bush's plan, Paul O'neill would receive as a tax rebate what 15,000 lower class American's would receive!" Or, things like, "...the wealthiest 10% of Americans would receive 80% of the tax cuts!"

Shades of Huey Long! It's the same old Marxist mantra--someone else has more than you and that's why you have so little!

But let's set the record straight. Economics is not a zero sum game of any sort. The total amount of wealth in the world is a constantly changing commodity of which no one has any inkling of what the exact amount is. Human beings create wealth and certainly the amount of wealth in the world has dramatically increased over the last two hundred years, and seems to be increasing all the time.

Huey Long's wealthiest 5% of Americans owned 80% of the wealth because they created it! The remaining 95% were stuck with their 20% solely because that was their contribution to the economy, not because they lost out in some economic version of the Oklahoma land rush.

Similarly Paul O'Neill will get a tax rebate equivalent to that of 15000 lower income Americans because he paid taxes equivalent to what 15000 lower income Americans paid to begin with (that is, if we can believe that particular D[emoc]rat statistic). And, of course, the wealthiest 10% of Americans will get 80% of the tax cut because they've paid out 80% of the taxes (again, if we can believe another statistic).

But of course, the socialists of the left never point that out--the initial injustice of the tax code to begin with, that says, because you earn more you should be taxed a higher percentage of your salary. Which brings us to another Marxist mantra: "From each according to his ability to each according to his need" which finds its perfect embodiment in the U.S. income tax.

Yes, Virginia, there are Marxists, and there are politicians who are Marxists even though they may never have read him, and even deny that they are Marxists themselves.

Oh, but back to our story about Huey Long. One August day in 1935, as Huey was emerging from a meeting of the Lousiana Legislature in the State House itself, in Baton Rouge, a doctor by the name of Karl Weiss pumped a .32 caliber slug from a Browning FN model 1900 pistol into Huey's gut. A few days later Long bled to death. Not too long afterwards, the "Share the Wealth" clubs disappeared from the face of the Earth, at least, in that form.

You know, every once in a while, we do get cut a break.