Parker: Dems’ distaste for success

Another wealthy possible candidate, former Starbucks CEO Howard Schultz, recently has been the focus of skepticism — and not just because he proposes running as a centrist independent. Schultz, on a book tour the past couple of months, has spoken of his childhood growing up in a Brooklyn housing project and his family’s dire circumstances. In his book “From the Ground Up,” he describes a noisy, smoke-and-alcohol-infused household often filled with poker players who kept him up late and his family afloat during destitute times.

The Washington Post tracked down other contemporaries of Schultz’s who grew up in the same housing project to report that it was actually a very nice, state-of-the-art complex. This may be so, but Schultz’s experience can’t be disproved or discredited. When your parents can’t make the $96 monthly rent, you’re not living in paradise.

By the strange political calculus of the income equalizers, Schultz was first too rich and then not poor enough. It would seem that there’s no satisfying the left until everyone is equally miserable.

Even Beto O’Rourke ran into a bit of trouble when he-of-the-barrio (but not really) was revealed to be a prep-school alumnus with a near-billionaire father-in-law. Uh-oh. Can an upper-middle-class guy relate to the poor and lower-class Americans?

One problem with this wealth-as-liability perspective is that we risk losing the considerable contributions of the uber-successful. What would this crowd say today to Democrats John Kennedy or Franklin Roosevelt, both of whom enjoyed inherited wealth? You don’t have to be poor to want to improve opportunities for the less fortunate.

Nor do you need a government program to create those opportunities. As head of Starbucks, Schultz accomplished through free enterprise what some Democrats want to do through government — for “free.” He made sure everyone, including part-time staffers, had health insurance; he paid college tuition for those who wanted to go; and he made it possible for every employee to be a shareholder in the company.

Once upon a time, Americans celebrated others’ success and aspired through grit and sacrifice to improve their own circumstances. No more, apparently. The way some Democrats have reacted to candidates running-for-office-while-being-rich merely illustrates the poverty of their ideas.

The anti-wealth sentiment currently in vogue isn’t, of course, a rational response to challenges. It’s an emotional reaction to politicians’ barnstorming about inequality that, they say, can only be resolved by punishing the wealthy and subsidizing the rest. If you hear enough times that you deserve to have more, you begin to believe it. Inevitably, this means that others must have less.

Thusly, my friends, is socialism born.