By Steve Byas

To paraphrase Adam Smith, the patron saint of the free market, the only moral way to gain wealth is by serving others. A novelist gains wealth by writing a book, a professional athlete gains wealth by running down a field with a bag of zipped-up air, and a plumber gains wealth by stopping a leaky faucet. All are serving others in some way.

Any other way of gaining wealth is either luck or theft, whether by outright robbery or fraud. Frederic Bastiat (pronounced like Chevrolet by the way) called government wealth transfers legal plunder.

Who knows how many residents of the United States participate in legal plunder through social welfare programs? While someone who buries his grandmother in the basement and continues to collect her social security checks for 17 more years is certainly a thief, he is small potatoes compared to those who use their political connections to get the government of the United States, or the state of Oklahoma to pick the pocket of the taxpayer, directly or indirectly.

When I was in Boston a couple of years ago, I stood at the spot where the Sons of Liberty through tea overboard into the harbor. Unfortunately, while most Americans have heard of the Boston Tea Party, few understand it was an early example of a protest against what is now often referred to as crony capitalism, or as I prefer to call it, political capitalism.

Using their influence over Parliament, many stockholders in the British East India Company (including some members of Parliament), convinced Britain's legislators to give them what we now call a bail-out. They were granted a monopoly on the sale of tea in the colonies.

In his historic veto message concerning the re-charter bill for the Second Bank of the United States (a prime example of political capitalism), President Andrew Jackson wrote, "It is to be regretted that the rich and powerful too often bend the acts of government to their selfish purposes. Distinctions in society will always exist under every just government. Equality of talents, of education, or of wealth cannot be produced by human institutions."

Jackson said that government should protect wealth, "but when the laws undertake to add to these natural and just advantages, artificial distinctions, to grant titles, gratuities, and exclusive privileges, to make the rich richer and the potent more powerful, the humble members of society -- the farmers, mechanics, and laborers -- who have neither the time nor the means of securing like favors to themselves, have a right to complain of the injustice of their Government."

Of course, these elite political capitalists got their revenge on Jackson when they put his picture on the twenty dollar federal reserve note.

Oklahoma has its share of political capitalists. The Oklahoma Legislature has picked winners and losers in the market with specialized tax credits that only the politically-connected can obtain.

If you oppose these political capitalists you are slandered as "anti-business," and if you are a legislator, you can expect a low score on the RIED Index.

Human Events, the national conservative weekly, exposed Oklahoma's T. Boone Pickens in an article which ran last spring. The article condemned "subsidies to politically favored businesses in the energy area."

An amendment to a $109 billion highway bill would have "enriched" certain natural gas-related companies, and taxed consumers of natural gas to pay for those subsidies. The amendment failed, but according to Human Events, it would have benefitted wealthy backers of the measure including leftist billionaire George Soros and Pickens.

Fortunately, what Human Events called "an unusual coalition" of the Left and Right opposed the measure in the Senate.

Pickens, Pickens' wife, and an executive of Pickens' company have donated over $15,000 to Rep. Bill Bilbray (R-California), a major supporter of the subsidy, according to FEC reports. Pickens' generosity is not confined to Republicans. Clean Energy Fuels employees have given almost $20,000 to members of Congress who support the NATGAS Act subsidies, including money to Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, one of the nation's top Democrats.

Kevin D. Williamson, in his Politically Incorrect Guide to Socialism, wrote, "In the case of oil socialism, those looking for a place at the planners' feeding trough include Oklahoma oil billionaire T. Boone Pickens." Williamson interviewed Pickens in 2010, to discuss Pickens' effort to have Congress mandate that "18-wheel tractor-trailer trucks operating in the United States switch from using gasoline to using compressed natural gas."

The cost to retrofit the trucks on natural gas would be enormous, and Pickens' plan would cause the taxpayer to cough up a subsidy of sixty-five thousand dollars per truck!

When Williamson expressed "skepticism" at Pickens' plan, Pickens responded by essentially questioning Williamson's patriotism: "Well, you must be in favor of foreign oil. You must be in favor of the Saudis."

Pickens' BP Capital hedge fund is heavily invested in natural gas as well as oil, but Pickens was quoted in the Associated Press, "I don't have any profit motive in this. I'm doing it for America."

Perhaps it should not be surprising that Pickens expects special preference because of his enormous wealth, and his generosity toward building the Oklahoma State football program. It was just a few years ago that Pickens ordered some of his employees to dig up a portion of someone else's driveway. It seems that Pickens had written in the driveway concrete when he was a little boy. Usually the political capitalists are not that direct when they take from what Andy Jackson called the farmers, laborers, and mechanics to pad their own bank account.

The next time you hear a political candidate called "anti-business," I would suggest that you dig a little deeper into what the accuser means. It could be that the accused is the real believer in the free market, and the accuser is the political capitalist.