Sharing the Wealth

[Ispbear]

An economics professor at a 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 Obama's socialism worked 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 Obama'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.



Remember, there IS a test coming up. The 2012 elections.

These are possibly the 5 best sentences you'll ever read and all applicable to this experiment:
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

[Switchback]

Great post!

[Samuel]

That needs to be put out there on every freaking media outlet!

[JoetheGI]

Remember, there IS a test coming up. The 2012 elections.

The damage has already been done, and IMO, there's no fixing it.

[ET109]

Obama is no more socialist than his Republican adversaries are economic anarchists. It amazes me how good and bad people think he is, when he's really not much of anything.

Also, I hate parables.

[mobrien316]

Obama is no more socialist than his Republican adversaries are economic anarchists. It amazes me how good and bad people think he is, when he's really not much of anything.

Also, I hate parables.

Obama has specifically stated, "Sharing the wealth is a good thing." His health care plan is pure socialism, and he believes that people with a lot of money (which I think he feels is anything over forty or fifty thousand per year) have a social obligation to share that money with those "less fortunate".

Maybe you have a different different definition of socialism than I do, because to me Obama's words and actions peg him as a socialist.

[pafindr]

I saw a video that had the "reporter" on a campus doing interviews about sharing the wealth. The students went on about how good of an idea that is and blah blah blah.
The reporter then did the whole thing about sharing their grades and they got angry saying that it's a totally different thing. They worked hard for those grades and someone shouldn't just be able to take that grade away from them.

I'll see if I can find the video.


***
I couldn't find the one I originally saw but this one is close. The sound quality isn't great because of a lot of background noise.

You Tube

[marinepilot]

I saw a video that had the "reporter" on a campus doing interviews about sharing the wealth. The students went on about how good of an idea that is and blah blah blah.
The reporter then did the whole thing about sharing their grades and they got angry saying that it's a totally different thing. They worked hard for those grades and someone shouldn't just be able to take that grade away from them.

I'll see if I can find the video.


***
I couldn't find the one I originally saw but this one is close. The sound quality isn't great because of a lot of background noise.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lOyaJ2UI7Ss

These guys are really awesome with their videos, they run a site called exposingleftists dot com, and they are always going to college campuses (due to them being bastions of liberality) and asking things like should conservative radio hosts be banned from broadcasting, redistribution of GPA's (like pafindr posted above), and other good stuff to show just how UNINFORMED these self-important liberals truly are!

Check them out, it's worth a bunch of laughs and also will get your scratching your head thinking "How silly can people truly be?"

[pafindr]

These guys are really awesome with their videos, they run a site called exposingleftists dot com, and they are always going to college campuses (due to them being bastions of liberality) and asking things like should conservative radio hosts be banned from broadcasting, redistribution of GPA's (like pafindr posted above), and other good stuff to show just how UNINFORMED these self-important liberals truly are!

Check them out, it's worth a bunch of laughs and also will get your scratching your head thinking "How silly can people truly be?"

I watched a couple of the videos but had to stop. It turns my stomach to see that level of stupidity and I get really aggravated. LOL

[marinepilot]

I watched a couple of the videos but had to stop. It turns my stomach to see that level of stupidity and I get really aggravated. LOL

I can completely understand that reaction...

[1depd]

My kid keeps asking about equalizing income and wealth. His most recent question involved just having a middle class with no wealthy and no poor. He was wanting to know if that would be a healthy economy. I constantly go back to one of two examples. The first is his grades. He works hard for the grades he receives and I ask him if he'd like to have every one of his A's dropped to a B and everyone of his B's dropped to a C so those who are getting D's and F's can have their grades increased. Of course his response is no. I asked him how long he would continue to work hard for his grades if they wee just going to be lowered. He answered not long. We had a discussion of socialism not long ago. He voluntarily made the comment that he would prefer to be one of the people who didn't work for the things they get and let the people working hard give him everything. I then asked how long he thought the people working hard would continue to do so, if most of their efforts were going to support someone who wasn't doing anything and reminded him of the grade analogy. He came up with the correct answer of not long.

I'm doing what I can about the next generation not being socialist, but I can tell he is getting some socialist ideas from kids he hangs with.

[oscarmitre]

Socialism is about social ownership of the means of production in an economy, as opposed to the means of production being in private hands. It says nothing about equality of wealth. The idea of a forced equality of wealth is ridiculous. In a socialist economy, just like a non-socialist economy (barring the slave economy of course), the individual contribution of a person has an economic value. In a socialist or command economy, just as it is in a capitalist or mixed economy, there will be a higher economic value placed on some job roles over others. The differences may not be as huge as they are in some capitalist economies but the differences are there.

The parable, sorry to say, is not applicable to real life, it is, however, useful propaganda for the status quo to remain the status quo. Whatever you do, don't think for yourself, the ruling class hates you when you do that.

[retdetsgt]

It says a lot about incentive though. The welfare state created by LBJ here created a class of people who literally existed on it. The bankruptcy of Europe right now says a lot about it too. Expecting the government to provide you with everything simply doesn't work in the long run.

I suspect if Bill Gates and others like him worked for the government, the PC's wouldn't have evolved into what they are today.

[mobrien316]

I suspect if Bill Gates and others like him worked for the government, the PC's wouldn't have evolved into what they are today.

I completely agree.

Capitalism works very well, in that an individual's desire to make money drives them to provide goods or services that other people want. If the individual sets his prices too high, or provides inferior quality goods or services, they won't make money.

Of course, the government has screwed up a huge portion of that with regulations designed to "protect" everyone from consumers to workers. And the massive amount of litigation this country puts up with helps screw things up pretty well, too.

[retdetsgt]

The only regulation I kinda like are the anti trust laws. Capitalism doesn't work when there are monopolies. Unfortunately, they've gone by the wayside. In 1974 AT&T was broken up, but now they are nothing compared to Frontier, US West, etc who have merged into giants like the oil companies..

Money is a lousy way to keep score, but it is what it is. A CEO making $400 million a year I doubt lives better than one only making $250 million a year, but it's a sign of prestige and success. In a government environment, there wouldn't be the incentive.

One regulation I would like to see is a limit on the percentage an attorney can get from a settlement. That would probably slow down some litigation. I was in a class action suit against a company who cooked the books to raise the stock prices before the executives dumped their stock. I lost about $5k and they settled for $400 million. I got a check for $27, the vast majority of the money went to the law firms looking for people to join the class action. I'll never do that again.