After having been castigated for being uncertain about exactly how many houses (or how much real estate) his wife owned, John McCain has now spoken up in his own defense. I was delighted to see that he took issue with an idea that there's something wrong with his wife inheriting property:

"...I am blessed and very proud that [his late father-in-law] Jim Hensley, a war hero, a man who barely graduated from high school, was able to pass on to his daughter what he struggled for and saved for. That's the ambition that all of us have for our children and grandchildren. If someone wants to disparage that, they are free to do that."

Implicit in (and inseparable from) the attacks was the Marxist notion that property and money are evil, that the more you have the more evil you are, and that unearned property is more evil (and thus more deserving of shame) than earned property.

Americans forget that the ability to bequeath or give away whatever property you have does not make the property evil; it's a basic attribute of property ownership under a free economic system.

What you cannot alienate freely is not yours.

This has traditionally gone to the heart of a major distinction between the parties, with the Democrats taking the position that citizens are allowed to have only that property that the government allows them to keep. This fosters resentment towards those who have more wealth, by making it look "unfair."

Even Republicans (especially some of the red-meat conservative commentators) succumb to this disease; I cannot count the number of times I have seen Democrats and liberals attacked or shamed for having wealth. Usually this takes the form of calling them "hypocrites" for having their own money while advocating taking it away from other people, and while I understand the temptation, the logic is similar to the way the left attacks conservatives caught engaged in sex acts of the sort they'd publicly disapprove. However true the claim of hypocrisy may be, it is a bad tactic for three reasons:

it bolsters the Marxist position that wealth is evil; and

buttresses the undeserved feelings of guilt from which too many wealthy liberals are already infected; and

advances insidiously the mistaken (in my view) notion that Christian economic principles are in accord with Marxist doctrine.

Hmmm.... I guess they're also supposed to cringe in the face of bumperstickers like the one I saw yesterday which said "Who would Jesus bomb?" (Sometimes I worry that certain Christians want a more Mohammad-like interpretation of Jesus, but that's as disturbing as it is off-topic.)

The point is that opposition to wealth has an ugly toehold in American culture, and unfortunately it crosses the political spectrum. It would not surprise me to learn that wealth or class-based attacks have been mounted against Cindy McCain even from right wing commentators, but I'm in no mood to check. (It might upset me.)

I'm just glad to see McCain's statement of support for economic freedom.

MORE: Dick Polman advises populist Democrats to "employ this shorthand at every opportunity":

Out-of-touch McCain is so rich, he doesn't know how many houses he has.

Unfortunately, class warfare populism has a long history as an effective tactic...