By DAVE HAMRICK
Editor-at-large

How would your life change if someone suddenly handed you a million dollars? (Those who are already millionaires will have to insert whatever dollar figure would make their eyes light up).

If the experiences of many lottery winners are indicative of how most of us would handle such good fortune, your life would change, not for the better, but for the worse.

I don't have anything statistical, but I've read more than a few accounts of those whose lives have been made miserable by the unexpected infusion of large amounts of cash.

First, their former friends come with hands out wanting loans or outright gifts. Failure to comply is seen as stinginess. Even if they “forgive” you for not being more generous, your friends tend to drift away because they can't afford to go where you can go and do what you can do.

If you keep your job, coworkers resent you for taking a job from someone else when you don't need one. If you retire without having some really good outlets for your creative energy, boredom eats at you and alcohol and drug problems are definite possibilities.

Move to a nicer neighborhood and you're looked down on as nouveau riche. Stay where you are and the snobbery works in reverse.

A lot of people who find themselves in this situation end up penniless and miserable after blowing or losing all the money, I'm told.

Now, in case you were thinking about giving me a few million, please don't hesitate. I am positive that, unlike most people, I would be able to make good, responsible use of new-found wealth in creative ways that would provide plenty of fulfillment. Really.

Seriously, though, I can't help thinking that those who are so bent on redistribution of the wealth in our society should consider the frailties of human nature.

Suppose we took all the unencumbered wealth in the country and distributed it evenly among the population. There are only about 300 million people in the U.S. now, right? And there are hundreds of billions of dollars lying around, so I'm sure it would be extremely conservative to guess that each person would get at least a million bucks.

So why don't we do it? Just take it away from the rich and give it to the poor and not so rich.

If you agree with the current administration's basic approach to financial issues, then I can't think of a single reason you would object to doing just that.

There is no difference between that approach, for instance, and giving a tax cut to people who don't pay taxes. (What really steams me up is that it's conservatives in Congress who came up with the tax cut for the taxless idea, to appease President Clinton and make it harder for him to veto their bill... and it was pointless because it didn't even work.)

The basic concept of any welfare program is redistributing money from those who earned it to those who didn't. And no, liberals, giving a tax cut to people who actually pay taxes is not the same as a welfare program. Being allowed to keep more of the money you earned is not the same as receiving money that someone else earned.

In spite of all this, I'm not opposed to all welfare programs. We're a compassionate country and, yes, I do believe that there are circumstances under which it's all right for the government to use its enforcement power to exact taxes from the majority of us in order to improve life's prospects for a few of us.

But that doesn't include the current insane, enslaving welfare system that keeps people beholden to the government (and therefore under the government's thumb) for generations.

It's tempting, though, to contemplate a true redistribution of wealth. Just this once, we would say, we will give everyone an equal start. Every single man, woman and child gets a million, two million, 10 million... whatever the math works out to be. For children, we would hold it in trust until their 21st birthdays so nobody could blame future poverty on their parents.

We all know what would happen. The only question is how long it would take for pretty much the current distribution of wealth to reestablish itself.

One further thing I can guarantee. In five, ten or 20 years when a whole new poverty-stricken group of Americans had emerged, they would find a way to blame it on somebody else.

It's just human nature.

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