Someone sent me an interesting analogy via email today. It’s an adaptation of one of Aesop’s most popular fables known as The Ant and the Grasshopper. While I’m sure this work could be improved upon, it is thought-provoking in light of our federal government which seems intent on penalizing work and the accumulation of wealth by those who take risks in business and are self-reliant.

I quote this adaptation below (original source unknown) for you to ponder on the political implications. Please share your thoughts after reading this adaptation of the Ant and the Grasshopper.

OLD VERSION

The ant works hard in the withering heat all summer long, building his house and laying up supplies for the winter.

The grasshopper thinks the ant is a fool and laughs and dances and plays the summer away.

Come winter, the ant is warm and well fed. The grasshopper has no food or shelter, so he dies out in the cold.

MORAL OF THE STORY: Be responsible for yourself!

MODERN VERSION

The ant works hard in the withering heat and the rain all summer long, building his house and laying up supplies for the winter.

The grasshopper thinks the ant is a fool and laughs and dances and plays the summer away.

Come winter, the shivering grasshopper calls a press conference and demands to know why the ant should be allowed to be warm and well fed while he is cold and starving. CBS, NBC , PBS, CNN, and ABC show up to provide pictures of the shiveringgrasshopper next to a video of the ant in his comfortable home with a table filled with food.

America is stunned by the sharp contrast.  How can this be, that in a country of such wealth, this poor grasshopper is allowed to suffer so?

Kermit the Frog appears on Oprah with the grasshopper and everybody cries when they sing, ‘It’s Not Easy Being Green….’ ACORN stages a demonstration in front of the ant’s house where the news stations film the group singing, “We shall overcome.” Then Rev. Jeremiah Wright has the group kneel down to pray to God for the grasshopper’s sake.

President Obama condemns the ant and blames President Bush, President Reagan, Christopher Columbus, and the Pope for the grasshopper’s plight. Nancy Pelosi & Harry Reid exclaim in an interview with Larry King that the ant has gotten rich off the back of the grasshopper, and both call for an immediate tax hike on theant to make him pay his fair share.

Finally, the EEOC drafts the Economic Equity & Anti-Grasshopper Act retroactive to the beginning of the summer. The ant is fined for failing to hire a proportionate number of green bugs and, having nothing left to pay his retroactive taxes, his home is confiscated by the Government Green Czar and given to the grasshopper.

The story ends as we see the grasshopper and his free-loading friends finishing up the last bits of the ant’s food while the government house he is in, which, as you recall, just happens to be the ant’s old house, crumbles around them because the grasshopper doesn’t maintain it.

The ant has disappeared in the snow, never to be seen again.

The grasshopper is found dead in a drug related incident, and the house, now abandoned, is taken over by a gang of spiders who terrorize the ramshackle, once prosperous and once peaceful, neighborhood.

The entire Nation collapses bringing the rest of the free world with it.

MORAL OF THE STORY: Be careful how you vote in 2010.

Someone emailed me this image yesterday. It is entitled “Government Snow Plow” and includes the caption “Designed by the same people designing the health care reform” below the image.

I think this picture cleverly depicts the often staggeringly inefficient results of non-market-based interventions within our economy. Over time a truly free market weeds out most waste and excess. Conversely, politicians like to hand out favors (our Founding Fathers called it largess) using our money and thus perpetuate, and expand, government waste.

I don’t know who to attribute this image to but it sure is clever. I also feel the email’s health care analogy is pertinent. Think about this: how can we trust our federal government to manage the entire nation’s health care system for 300+ million people when they can’t even take good care of a few million veterans? What think you?

I wish I knew who to credit with the following idea but I do not. It is, however, so simple and yet so profound that I wanted to share it with everyone. Friends, this is something we should do. I quote:

Like most folks in this country, I have a job. I work, they pay me. I pay my taxes and the government distributes my taxes as it sees fit. In order to get that paycheck in my case, I am required to pass a random urine test (with which I have no problem). What I do have a problem with is the distribution of my taxes to people who don’t have to pass a urine test.

So, here is my Question: Shouldn’t one have to pass a urine test to get a welfare check because I have to pass one to earn it for them?

Please understand, I have no problem with helping people get back on their feet. I do, on the other hand, have a problem with helping someone sitting on their a** — doing drugs, while I work. . . . Can you imagine how much money each state would save if people had to pass a urine test to get a public assistance check?

I guess we could title that program, ‘Urine or You’re Out’.

Now that’s some good thinking and would save far more than it costs! What do you think?

I read where another guy expanded this concept a bit and proposed that all college students receiving government aid should likewise be required to take a random urine tests if they received public money. Hey, let’s expand it further and say that all financial executives getting bailout money should also have to pass random urine tests. Oh, and don’t forget — let’s urine test the guys in Washington who are handing out our money! They really must be high on something to think we can borrow our way out of the mess they created.

I just read something powerful from a pamphlet by William J. H. Boetcker (1873-1962) and entitled The Ten Cannots. It was originally published in 1916 but I feel its message is very fitting to us today and especially now during the 2008 Presidential election cycle. Here are the “10 cannots”:

1. You cannot bring about prosperity by discouraging thrift.
2. You cannot strengthen the weak by weakening the strong.
3. You cannot help little men by tearing down big men.
4. You cannot lift the wage earner by pulling down the wage payer.
5. You cannot help the poor by destroying the rich.
6. You cannot establish sound security on borrowed money.
7. You cannot further the brotherhood of man by inciting class hatred.
8. You cannot keep out of trouble by spending more than you earn.
9. You cannot build character and courage by destroying men’s initiative and independence.
10. And you cannot help men permanently by doing for them what they can and should do for themselves.

I wish all in government and those aspiring to positions in government would take these simple yet powerful concepts to heart. Voters would be wise to do the same.

Please note: The above quote is often wrongly attributed to Abraham Lincoln.

Sometimes a picture really is worth a thousand words. I think the example on the left does just that regarding the seemingly complex concept of socialism and wealth redistribution. In my opinion, it sums up the functional basics of socialism very well.

Under a socialistic system, government (or the “community,” as socialistic proponents like to say) collects resources through “progressive” taxation. Stated another way, government levies an increasingly higher tax burden on those earning or owning more assets. In reality, though, socialism looks a lot like armed robbery since the threat of collective force is used to confiscate a person’s wealth.

It is also worth noting that, according to Marxist theory, socialism is the transitional stage between capitalism and communism.

Please note: I do not know who produced this graphic and thus cannot provide appropriate credit.

I’m tired of hearing Democrats say we should raise taxes on the rich or the rich should never receive a tax cut. To make matters even more frustrating, they often state this sentiment as if there’s something evil about being rich. Here are three things to consider before embracing the “tax the rich” notion.

1. Only people who earn more money than they need can afford to hire others.

Excessively taxing the rich kills the economy. Have you ever seen somebody barely scraping a living from paycheck to paycheck start a business and hire employees? Can poor people offer health insurance plans and pay benefits? Of course not. They don’t have any extra money to risk or invest. Excessive taxation of the rich takes their investment capital away which harms the economy.

2. The rich enlarge the economy by their consumption.

Let me illustrate this point by an example. Following the 1993 Clinton tax increase a large surcharge on the sale of new luxury yachts was imposed. That luxury tax almost put the the American yacht construction industry out of business. Who builds the yachts? The rich? Of course not. So guess who was laid off when nobody was buying yachts? The lower class yacht construction workers suffered for that tax (and from the government’s point of view it raised almost no revenue because domestic yacht sales dried up).

3. Who decides what qualifies as rich and how much to confiscate?

Taxing the rich is a Marxist income redistribution scheme. It punishes work, risk and capitalism. It deprives poeple of their individual freedoms and personal property rights. In a free society government has no right to decide who needs how much money and what amount they get to keep.

In conclusion, excessive taxation of the rich is like killing the goose that lays the golden egg. It’s also like poisoning the village’s only water well just to get even with one person. As in both of these cases, the greed and jealousy inflicted via excessive taxation on a select few ends up hurting everyone.

Remember this simple fact whenever a political candidate or government official tells you he or she will give you something: Government does not have anything to give that it does not first take from somebody else.

It’s an axiomatic truth that our government cannot give us anything unless it first takes it from somebody else. In order for government to own something, it has to take money (taxes) or property (via a legal provision known as eminent domain) from citizens. Once taken, it is then considered “government property.”

Simply put, government extracts resources from producers (ex: income tax, corporate taxes) and spenders (ex: sales tax) to fill the public treasury. That is necessary and proper for legitimate government functions authorized by the Constitution and provided for by law. However, some political candidates and government officials have the audacity to go beyond that and say they’re going to give us something out of the public treasury. That’s such a lie! It’s not theirs to give. Even a tax cut is not giving us something — it’s simply taking less of something that was ours to start with.

The bottom line: It’s our money that they’re spending in Washington! The same is true for our state capitol, city hall, county courthouse, school district or whatever level of government. Think about this next time you vote.

Recently somebody suggested that Presidential preferences are like this: “The ‘right’ wants a President they can have a beer with. The ‘left’ just wants someone really smarter than them.” My reply was something like the following:

I think its deeper than the “beer and smarts” analogy suggested above. The right wants to know confidently that their key principles (the “3 pillars” of free markets, national security and social conservatism) are held at a core level by the President and they (the President) won’t waver on them. They don’t care much about physical appearance, TV image, speaking ability, etc. as long as these core principles are not abandoned. Delegation as a leadership style is fine and a “hands off” approach by government preferred for most issues. In a nutshell, government is not to do much more than safeguard these principles and protect us from evil nations.

The left, on the other hand, wants somebody who feels their pain and is smart enough to fix everything that is wrong. That means somebody with an Ivy League education is preferred since only they are smart enough to hold such power. They must look good on TV and be respected by other players on the world stage so they don’t embarrass us. They also have to speak well to soothe us and make us feel comfortable after convincing us that they feel our pain and want to help us enjoy life.  Image and perception are everything as long as the economy is good and we are safe from all harms including natural disasters like hurricanes and dirty water. Risks are to be eliminated and the federal government is the ultimate safety net for everybody. Everybody should be equally happy.

I know that’s a light-hearted, broad-brushed view of things; however, I feel it does point out many core differences between liberals and conservatives. What do you think?

The death penalty exists to put a tangible value on life and punish murderers. It is a social contract: If you kill an innocent person then you are not worthy of living. In effect, your actions in committing murder forfeit your life. Period.

Enforcement is the responsibility of the state. Who but the state can enforce such a social contract? We surely don’t want the family or mobs taking justice into their own hands. Thus it becomes the state’s responsibility to enforce the value of life by removing those who broke that contract and committed murder.

What about deterrent? With the death penalty the goal of deterrent is this: the one who murdered once will not be allowed to murder again. Simply put, he is deterred since he will not live another day to murder again.