An economics professor at a local college made a statement that he had never failed a single student before, but had recently failed an entire class. That class had insisted that Kamala’s socialism would work and that no one would be poor and no one would be rich, a great equalizer.
The professor then said, “OK, we will have an experiment in this class on Kamala’s plan”. All grades will be averaged and everyone will receive the same grade so no one will fail and no one will receive an A…. (substituting grades for dollars – something closer to home and more readily understood by all).
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 had studied even less and the ones who studied hard decided they wanted a free ride too so they studied little.
The second test average was a D! No one was happy.
When the 3rd test rolled around, the average was an F.
As the tests proceeded, 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.
To their great surprise, ALL FAILED 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.
It could not be any simpler than that.
There are five morals to this story:
1. You cannot legislate the poor into prosperity by legislating the wealthy out of prosperity.
2. What one person receives without working for, another person must work for without receiving.
3. The government cannot give to anybody anything that the government does not first take from somebody else.
4. You cannot multiply wealth by dividing it!
5. When half of the people get the idea that they do not have to work because the other half is going to take care of them, and when the other half gets the idea that it does no good to work because somebody else is going to get what they work for, that is the beginning of the end of any nation.
Winston Churchill once said, “Socialism is a philosophy of failure, the creed of ignorance, and the gospel of envy, its inherent virtue is the equal sharing of misery.” Or “The inherent vice of capitalism is the unequal sharing of blessings; the inherent virtue of socialism is the equal sharing of miseries.”
4 comments
For an interesting and informative look at the track record of actual attempts at implementing socialism, read Joshua Muravchik, Heaven on Earth: The Rise, Fall, and Afterlife of Socialism (Encounter Books, 2019).
Capitalism works with people as they are; socialism, with people as we wish them to be.
Yes, incentives matter.
Actually, what is in the economic works is sustainable development–we will be told what resources can be used, who can use the resulting output (via social credit score) by a group of self-anointed technocrats. A.K.A., technocracy. Fewer people, too. Less freedom. AI will coordinate. No market prices.
Nailed it. A while back I worked with a young man who advocated total reduction of the world’s population to no more than 10 million humans as hunter gatherers. When I asked him how that would be accomplished he had no answer. I also asked him who would decide who lives or dies he also had no answer.
Sure you did.