As the late Adrian Rogers said, "you cannot multiply wealth by dividing it." An economics professor at a local college said that he had never failed a single student before, but had recently failed an entire class.
That class had insisted that Obama's socialism worked and that no one would be poor and no one would be rich - a great equaliser.
To counter this, the professor said, "OK, we will have an experiment in this class on Obama's plan".
All grades would be averaged and everyone would receive the same grade so no one would fail and no one would receive an A.
After the first test, the grades were averaged and everyone got a B.
The students who studied hard were upset and the students who studied little were happy.
As the second test rolled around, the students who studied little, studied even less and those who had previously studied hard, decided they wanted a free ride. So they too studied little.
The second test average was a D!
No one was happy.
When the 3rd test rolled around, the average was an F.
The scores never increased as bickering, blame and name-calling all resulted in hard feelings and no one would study for the benefit of anyone else.
All failed, to their great surprise, and the professor told them that socialism would also ultimately fail because when the reward is great, the effort to succeed is great but when government takes all the reward away, no one will try or want to succeed.
Couldn't be any simpler than that.
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15 comments:
ouch! simplistic....
Excellent post Fausty.
Yes a little simplistic but a perfect example for the die hard uncompromising communists.
Myself I am a pragmatic social democrat.
Not a commiunist or a Libertarian.
Both communism and Libertarianism are too simplistic, unatural and dogmatic and are doomed to fail.
Great post! That's the kind of simplicity this stuff needs to be explained to appeal to the masses.
The ones that can read English that is.
A brave professor - I imagine his superiors weren't too pleased....
Yep, that captures it quite nicely. It's how the failure of farming redistribution in communist Russia was explained to me.
Socialism is merely the cult of indolent selfishness trying to outdo human nature.
Very interesting. However, it isn't true.
http://www.snopes.com/college/exam/socialism.asp
It is simplistic, but that's the point.
Thanks FMW & CS.
Microdave, that particular lesson would seem to be good value for money. I bet his students never forgot it!
Etd, I'm a conservative libertarian - ot a thoroughbred. It's rare to find people whose beliefs match exactly some ideology concocted by others. They're usually hybridised, according to our life experiences.
Well put, Dick.
It doesn't have to be true, Bryce. It rings true because it exemplifies human behaviour. Think of it as a parable.
I would disagree. It only exemplifies human behavior to the extent that it is true. I can just as easily imagine a class in which the opposite happens.
I'm far closer to libertarian than socialist, but I think an overly simplistic story such as this does not convey much and serves as a poor persuasive tool.
Then again, the audience for this blog likely does not consist of those who support socialism, so the story's effectiveness as a persuasive tool doesn't really matter. I will admit that I got a chuckle out of it so, in that way, it probably did achieve its end.
A very inciteful, if simplistic, illustration of the folly of socialism. However, it would have carried much more weight had the professor behind the mask revealed himself. Was this character, Zorro, and his subjects, the school for scoundrels, a genuine experiment or a supposition? The source please?
Actually Bryce, and Fausty, we conducted this experiment at my school in our economics class along with many other similar scenarios for all the different ideologies to prove that none work perfectly.
Admittedly in this one we found the end result was scraping a pass at 52%, after a dip into failure, but it still proves the point as at the start there were people scoring in the 90's.
I'm currently looking for my old notes and I'll be doing a summary on them either tonight or tomorrow.
Sounds like someone started off with an answer and arrived at it with a nice, but made up, story, to illustrate a principle that reality has already done a better job of proving. Take the British Economy from 1945-1980, for example.
Simplistic children's stories are nice for children. Reality is often a lot more complex. Like the reality that hardly any policies of the current administration bear more than a passing resemblance to socialism.
Trying to reduce any set of government policies into one word is simplistic and completely inaccurate.
These policies, flawed as they are, can be more effectively critiqued by actually discussing what they do, or do not do, and how they do what they are supposed to do. But simply calling it socialism is both intellectually dishonest and inaccurate.
If you consider these policies socialist, then you would equally consider the late Bush administration policies socialist, you would consider the Reagan era defense posture socialist, the massive governmental subsidization of the banking sector since the 1960s socialist, and all other programs, republican and democratic alike, that use government funds to foster private enterprise socialist. Government guarantees to banks, private and public, is socialist in this sense, but so is the massive government spending on research at universities that leads to private patented technologies from medicine to machinery.
Ultimately, this is simply a matter of line drawing. Conservatives decry socialist tendencies in "liberals" when they spend money on public services like health and education, "liberals" decry totalitarian tendencies during conservative governments when those governments increase military/defense spending and create new, Orwellian governmental agencies like DHS to monitor "subversive" activities without sufficient constraints and oversight.
Only imbeciles would think that any modern governmental system of taxation and spending would neatly fit into "socialist" "totalitarian" labels. It far too complex for this sort of reductionist simplicity.
Whether or not the story is true, it defines socialism beautifully, JFisher.
A great many of this government's polices socialist in nature - the edging out of the private sector in schooling, the surveillance, the police state, the nationalisation of banking - to name but a few.
I disagree. Most things have complexities, but can be described in simple enough terms which enables them to be easily identifiable to a listener/reader. A dog, for instance, has much in common with many animals and is quite a complex item. It has many varieties and comes in all shapes and sizes.
And yet, it can be described in a sentence.
Socialism, too.
Newpaper cartoons, frequently communicate an idea - in a glance.
What you are missing (whether deliberately or not) is that this article is an illustration.
The arguments in your last few paragraphs don't hold water.
You can hardly compare the conditions under which we live (thanks to Labour) as being comparable with those of the Reagan era.
We have been living under the illusion of capitalism. A state-skewed market is not a free market at all - therefore it is not capitalism. The whole idea about markets is that supply and demand determine price. Where has that notion been since 1997 - or even prior to that?
Your last paragraph strongly suggests that you support the Democrats.
I always understood that insurance was protection against something that might or might not happen (e.g. fire, theft), and assurance was protection against something that was bound to happen sooner or later (e.g. death).
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