Saturday, April 4, 2009

Socialism - Good on Paper, Not in Reality

An economics professor at Texas Tech said he had failed very few students but had, once, failed an entire class. That class had insisted that 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 socialism.""All grades will be averaged and everyone would receive the same grade meaning, obviously, no one will receive an A." They all agreed to this. After the first test the grades were averaged and everyone got a C. The students who studied hard were upset and the students who studied little were happy. But, 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. 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 dismay the professor failed them all. Then he sent all of them this note: "A socialistic government will 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." - Original author unknown. Submitted by Jeff.

1 comment:

  1. Comment: Thanks Jeff, so true. Our politicians have completely forgotten the key principle of incentive, or I should say they have it completely backwards. Companies do bad, get a bailout. Teachers suck, unions protect them at the children's expense. Slacker Steve doesn't want to get a job, stay on welfare. But the true economic strength of this country: the small business owners who work hard, take risks, and create wealth for themselves and others, get burdened with ridiculous regulations and punished with out of control taxes. Clueless truly seems like the understatement of the year in describing Washington right now. I can't believe there can even be debate on capitalism vs socialism. If only we could do an experiment: Blue states try socialism, Red go back to true capitalism.....oh wait, there was a country split in half that already tried this.....East and West Germany. Case closed....for those with common sense at least. JRD

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