This story broke last week, but if you haven’t heard about it, it’s important you do. If you ever doubted there was a coordinated plot to take down the capitalist system in America, well, you can doubt no more. From Business Insider:

A former official of one of the country’s most-powerful unions, SEIU, has a secret plan to “destabilize” the country.

The plan is designed to destroy JP Morgan, nuke the stock market, and weaken Wall Street’s grip on power, thus creating the conditions necessary for a redistribution of wealth and a change in government. …

Lerner’s plan is to organize a mass, coordinated “strike” on mortgage, student loan, and local government debt payments–thus bringing the banks to the edge of insolvency and forcing them to renegotiate the terms of the loans.  This destabilization and turmoil, Lerner hopes, will also crash the stock market, isolating the banking class and allowing for a transfer of power.

Lerner’s plan starts by attacking JP Morgan Chase in early May, with demonstrations on Wall Street, protests at the annual shareholder meeting, and then calls for a coordinated mortgage strike.

This is real. Rep. Jason Chaffetz (R-UT) sent a letter to U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder asking for an investigation. I know, it’s hard not to laugh at this point. A coordinated effort to take down Wall Street and the entire economic system we all depend on? Of course that’s a big yawner to your Federal Government, which has remained true to form and done nothing about this so far. (I’ll leave it to you to speculate why that might be.)

I’m not going to spend time hyping this thing—you can listen to the recording or read the transcript easily enough. They speak for themselves. Instead, I’m taking this opportunity to zero in on a quick comment Business Insider included in its piece:

Many Americans will undoubtedly sympathize with and support [Lerner’s remarks].

I know that’s right. And that, in some ways, frightens me more than the actual economic terror plot discussed on the recording. Because even if their plot fails—or is canceled or thwarted now that it has been exposed—the same outcome will ultimately occur if we don’t dispel the notion in America that rich people are our enemy and that benevolent government is our ally.

Before I continue with this dangerous post (defending the rich in any form is not a good way to win friends and influence people, I’ve discovered), I offer a disclaimer that shouldn’t be necessary but is because of the class warfare age we live in. I’m not rich compared to the average American. I work two jobs to support my family. I don’t have any burning desire to become rich (though I probably wouldn’t shy away from it if it ever happened). So this post is not some thinly-veiled attempt to protect my stuff.

Now that we’ve gotten that out of the way, I can say this: I don’t care how much money people earn or what they do with it, as long as they’re lawful and honest in all their business dealings. That’s the free-market system. It is not evil and people who prosper because of it are not evil. But to grow their power, the Left has convinced many Americans to direct their anger at people they do not know and who have no control over their lives. It goes something like this: “Rich people are hoarding all their money and giving you and everyone else the shaft. You need Big Government to come to your aid, sticking it to the rich, and setting the world right.

“Vote for me.”

And people do.

Reversing this monumental (and rather impressive, I must admit) con job on the American people is one of the greatest challenges the Tea Party faces. While I don’t think we’re at the point where class warfare fully wins the day yet, we’re getting frighteningly close. Polls continue to show that a disturbing number of Americans support raising taxes on only the wealthy to close our federal budget hole.

This is wrong for so many reasons, both logical and moral. I won’t get into all of them here, but the heart of the matter is this: rich people don’t steal wealth, they create it; government doesn’t create wealth, it steals it. Furthermore, because wealth is created, it isn’t finite. Even if they wanted to, rich people could not stop others from producing their own wealth. Only government can stop the production of wealth. And they certainly have succeeded, using a variety of creative taxes, penalties, and regulations.

Tea Partiers take these truths for granted, but too many of our fellow Americans have bought the Left’s propaganda about government and wealth. They’ve been convinced that government exists to promote fairness by redistributing wealth. But our Declaration of Independence states that “all men are created equal” not that “all men are guaranteed equal amounts of stuff.”

The belief that the Federal Government can and should be the Great Equalizer has led to so many of the challenges we face today. Encouraging animosity toward the rich has created a culture in which we now embrace covetousness as if it’s virtue, not sin. The same people who are teaching others—whether purposefully or not—to despise the rich for having stuff are advocating the solution of … giving other people more stuff. We must combat this mindset head on, taking every opportunity we get with every friend, family member, coworker, churchgoer, etc. to correct the record that rich people are not the enemy, an overreaching Federal Government is.

Otherwise, we will continue to allow the non-producing Federal Government to overburden the producers with high taxes and regulations, ensuring that production decreases, jobs are eliminated, and overall wealth is reduced from TOP TO BOTTOM. American businesses will continue to send much or all of their operations—and the associated jobs—overseas just to stay afloat. We will continue to tax property and liberty through a progressive income tax that discourages the hard work that drives our economy. We will continue to depress the innovation and entrepreneurship that are necessary to solve the various crises we face, ultimately leading to a total economic collapse from which NO ONE will escape, regardless of one’s income bracket. And by the time all those who wanted to “stick it to the rich” discover that they’ve instead stuck it to themselves, it’ll be too late.

The economic terrorists will have won.

And every American will have lost.

Cross-posted at redstatevirginia.com