What it boils down to, the Republican versus Democrat, the conservative versus liberal, issue is: should each individual or family earn his or its own way, and receive the pride and maturity that goes with it, or should each individual or family be handed everything, so that he or it can take everything for granted and be spoiled rotten?
No one gave my parents anything. When they began, they lived in “Vetville”: local terminology for “sink or swim.” And if you sink, nobody’ll care or do anything about it. Nobody.
Typical liberals “feel so sorry” for young people today. Why? Because they don’t have two computers, two cars, a house, two TVs? My parents had NO computers, NO TV, NO house, ONE car: and she had to drop him off at college before going to WORK. As people said at the time, my mother got her PHT: “putting hubby through”: she worked a fulltime job putting him through college because his college education was delayed by his service in World War II. Theirs is called “the greatest generation”: why do you suppose that is? Because they worked and sacrificed and MADE IT ON THEIR OWN. (What a pity that my parents didn’t live long enough to hear that their generation had been appropriately and thusly labeled).
Typical liberals point out that prices were much lower in those days. Yes, but so were salaries, the point that they conveniently omit.
As I’ve mentioned in other essays, I was a teacher for twenty-two years. Let me give you a classroom analogy to illustrate why socialism is a very bad form of government. Since socialism rewards the slackers and penalizes the workers, if I were to put socialism into effect in the classroom, I would give the slackers, the class-disrupters, and the potential delinquents all As, and then I would give the hard-working, dedicated, successful students all Fs: in other words, THE EXACT OPPOSITE OF WHAT THEY HAD EARNED. That is what socialism does: it gives back the exact opposite of what each individual merits. Consequently, it inspires anyone with half a brain at all to say, “Why should I contribute, when I can just sit on my butt and let the dedicated fools support me?” Ask yourselves: is that truly the kind of world that we want to create?
