I saw this on Facebook, and wanted to get some responses. Is the following dead-on? Over-simplified? Over-exaggerated?
Let me know what you think.
“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 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.”
~ Josh
jonathan
January 11, 2012 at 3:58 pm
I think it’s a little exaggerated, but it definitely gets the idea across. It’s good that people want to help the poor in this country … but I don’t think any kind of socialism is the answer.
Joshua Benson
January 11, 2012 at 4:26 pm
My initial response is that this oversimplifies the current debate on socialism. Yes, if ALL incentives are removed then an economic society will quickly collapse. That’s pure socialism, which virtually no one (especially not Obama) agrees with. On the other end, almost no one argues with pure capitalism either, which would enable greedy people to amass huge amounts of wealth while disadvantaged people would be left to starve and die. We need to find the perfect balance of mixed capitalism, one that maintains incentives while not neglecting the poor in society.
After all, background does matter. We love success stories like Mark Zuckerberg creating a company in a dorm room and becoming a billionaire, but let’s face it: he went to a private high school with a $50,000 a year tuition cost. By the time he started facebook, his parents had invested over half a million into his education. Kids growing up in poverty can’t compete with that, and often become stuck with minimum wage jobs that can’t cover food and healthcare costs because they didn’t have excellent education or their parents were poor role models.
Shouldn’t we be seeking a system that maintains an incentive structure while not neglecting those in need?