Matt Towery points out something disturbing in his Townhall column today:

A Gallup poll released this week shows that almost 60 percent of adults in America believe that wealth is distributed unfairly, with over 50 percent saying that "the rich" should be taxed heavily to accomplish a fair distribution of resources.

This news coincides with reports that the economy may well be starting to sputter and with the nation once again gripped by acts of terrorism. The results of this poll are stunningly ominous for our future as a nation that in any way will resemble what most of us have grown up knowing.

This notion that wealth is to be redistributed is fast replacing the older American notion that wealth is created, earned, or made. Redistribution posits somebody somewhere who doles out wealth.

Unfortunately—and shockingly—we are moving in that direction. Money is sent to the federal government and redistributed in the form of programs.

President Obama would like to see even more money sent to the federal government and distributed to favored groups.

How did it happen that so much of the nation became committed to the notion of redistribution?

Towery’s explanation bears quoting at some length:

First, those who believe in free enterprise and hard work and happened to have control of much government in the first decade of this millennium overplayed their hand. They stretched our nation's capacity to wage war, and refused to keep a watchful eye on Wall Street, banks and the Federal Reserve, while at the same time expanding domestic spending by the federal government. Their actions often enriched big industries with backdoor programs disguised as efforts to supply cheaper drugs to those on Medicare or cellphone access to the indigent.

When everything fell apart in late 2008, a crack in the door was opened for legitimate political candidates and leaders such as Barack Obama to begin uttering softened versions of sharing wealth with a neighbor or whomever.

President Obama meant what he said, and his comments were representative of what had become years of similar thought among many in the fields of public and private education, a world with which he had great familiarity.

This school of thought began in earnest during the boom years of Ronald Reagan, which are now cast in documentaries as years of excess and greed. Throughout the 1990s, this concept of wealth redistribution and "fairness to all" was quietly gathering support among academicians. This, even as a Democratic President Bill Clinton — who as recently as 2011 was openly questioning a mentality of taxing people in a down economy and never dared to consider the concept of wealth redistribution as a general philosophy — presided over years of great prosperity.

The thing that frightens me most about the redistributionist school is that it fails to take into consideration what be its ruin–and ours,too if they continue in dominance: before wealth can be redistributed, it must be created. President Obama's policies thwart the creation of wealth.

Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan understood the necessity for liberty, which creates prosperity.  

Sign (as noted by Towery) of the times: few  complained that the United States sent a fairly low-level delegation to Lady Thatcher’s funeral earlier this week in London.

She and Reagan were the examplars of free-market policies that free up people to create wealth.