ARTHUR C. BROOKS

FDR created today's 30 percent coalition. Obama wants to finish the job by turning it into a permanent ruling majority. There's nothing new about the Obama Narrative. It is the FDR Narrative on steroids. It is intended to lead to greater statism and political gain.

If you think spreading money around by force seems like an odd definition of fairness, you're not alone.

There is nothing inherently fair about equalizing incomes. If the government penalizes you for working harder than somebody else, that is unfair. If you save your money but retire with the same pension as a free-spending neighbor, that is also unfair.

Free enterprise is essentially a formula not just for wealth creation, but for life satisfaction.

The system that enables the most people to earn the most success is free enterprise, by matching up people's skills, interests, and abilities. In contrast, redistribution simply spreads money around. Even worse, it attenuates the ability to earn success by perverting economic incentives.

Yes, free markets tend to produce unequal incomes. We should not be ashamed of that. On the contrary, our system is the envy of the world and should be a source of pride.

The truth is that relative income is not directly related to happiness. Nonpartisan social-survey data clearly show that the big driver of happiness is earned success: a person's belief that he has created value in his life or the life of others.

The battle is on, and nothing less than the soul of America is at stake.

We will have bigger bureaucracies, bigger labor unions, and bigger state-run corporations. It will be harder to be an entrepreneur because of punitive taxes and regulations. The rewards of success will be expropriated for the sake of attaining greater income equality.

As a political independent, I would gladly vote for any political party dedicated to limited government and entrepreneurship.

Whether we look at capitalism, taxes, business, or government, the data show a clear and consistent pattern: 70 percent of Americans support the free enterprise system and are unsupportive of big government.

The more control you have over your life, the more responsible you feel for your own success - or failure.

In my book I don't just demonstrate that free enterprise is the most efficient way of organizing an economy - which it is. I also show that it's an expression of American values, and, thus, that a fight for free enterprise is very much a fight for our culture.

Each one of our ideas should benefit the people with less power than us.

It is because of capitalism that we can pay for services to poor people that we don't even know.

We're in a political environment of competing pessimisms today.

Leadership matters most, and optimism and unity comes from the leader.

Grand bargains area a bad idea. Grand bargains are usually sought by people who do not want to make any progress.

There are many government takers, some of whom do not know that they are government takers, who just don't want there to be other government takers.

Moral teaching should always be used as a gift and not a cudgel.... It is important that we all be able to share our moral viewpoints without hurting each other. That is what is wrong with political discourse today.

This is the greatest country in the world for people who want to work, but we have to make sure that this is always true..

Conservatives have long stayed away from fairness debates.

Conservatives are better talking about opportunity and growth in the abstract, while liberals talk more about poor people. Right now we [americans] need a good, optimistic, conservative opportunity ideology that is totally geared toward lifting up the poor. That's what I most want to see in candidates.

The key to happiness is not being rich; it's doing something arduous and creating something of value and then being able to reflect on the fruits of your labor.

There's a general intuition around the nonprofit world these days that younger generations are less likely to join. But I have found in my research that that's quite wrong.