Nurture innovation to fix economy

I am regularly dismayed that so many of the letters in the Herald vilify successful leaders and achievers in our nation. I refer to those who are the businessmen and women, innovators and entrepreneurs among us. At the same time, many letters seem to almost canonize citizens who are less successful and, therefore, poorer. These views are reflected in the current “1% vs. 99%” class warfare theme of Team Obama and in the shouts the Occupy Wall Street crowd.

Unlike one of the leading presidential candidates, I do care about the poor — who sometimes are the less-successful folks in our society. But, many of the poor are in that position because of sloth, rejection of education, sexual promiscuity, substance abuse, anti-social behavior and a lifetime of bad decisions. Help those who cannot help themselves — of course. Help the willingly dependent — no.

The antipathy toward the highly successful 1 percent of in our society seems to be based upon an assumption that these folks don’t deserve their success and/or that they have somehow not played fair in their dealings. But, if one examines the facts, it can be seen that most highly successful people have sacrificed, taken risks, played by the rules, and generally worked very hard to earn whatever success they have attained. Our free-enterprise capitalistic system has created economic freedom a high standard of living.

I ask the critics of the “1 percent” (who pay 37 percent of all federal income tax) not to forget that the framework of laws, rules and regulations — within which successful people operate — have been written by generations of Democrat and Republican state and federal legislators. It seems to me that time would be better spent on finding ways to foster more achieving, successful people, not fewer.

Charles F. Falk

Schaumburg