My wife’s sister’s husband forwarded this in an e-mail to me. I thought the story made a great point about where our country is headed.
An economics professor at a local college made a statement that he had never failed a single student before but had once failed an entire class.
The 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 would be averaged and everyone would receive the same grade so no one would fail and no one would receive an A.
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.
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.
All failed, to their great surprise, 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.
Couldn't be any simpler than that.
2 comments:
I liked this a lot. But it seems to work in other countries, right? Or no?
Trust me, I don't want to be going this direction but I want to know if/why it works elsewhere.
I found it interesting that the LDS church has a hard time doing 'service' projects in other countries because it takes away someone's job. Its hard to serve. Sad.
Hi Erin - Kyle's brother here.
Socialism does not work in other countries in the long term. In countries like Sweden, Finland, etc. I has worked short term because they have small, homogeneous populations that buy into the system and are willing to trade their freedom (and ability to earn and keep their own money) for the stability they think they get from Socialism.
They run into serious problems when something pops their little homogeneous "bubble". For example, when the EU started admitting Eastern European countries (and will soon admit Turkey), immigrants started flocking to these countries due to their generous socialist systems. But the local populations (Swedes, Finns, etc.) are having problems with this because, while they are willing to redistribute their income to other Swedes, they are not willing to share with Turks, Croates and other immigrants ("these benefits are for us, not for them"). This problem is highlighted in Kyle's example.
The other major problem is that Socialism stunts creativity and innovation. You wonder why you hear the phrase "American Ingenuity" and "American Entrepreneurship" and "American Innovation", but you don't hear much about "Russian Innovation" or "Finnish Ingenuity". There still is innovation and ingenuity in these countries, but it is much less common, because the Socialist systems do not reward innovation and ingenuity (also highlighted in Kyle's example).
Sorry for the long response, but your question caught me in one of my "moods".
Kirk
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