Buying the lie: 'Something for nothing'

I suppose it was just plain greed that got us to this point.

Isn’t that one of the Seven Deadly Sins? So maybe we should not be surprised to see the country brought to its knees by avarice.

But it’s not the “greedy” bankers and industrialists whom we have to blame. Remember, it’s the bankers and industrialists who create the jobs that give the rest of us an opportunity to make something of ourselves in the first place. Sure, some of them will earn their place in hell, but those few people could not bring down the whole country.

For that, we must blame ourselves.

Because it was our own greed that made us think we could get something for nothing. We fell for a fairy tale — that it was possible for everyone everywhere to have everything they need to be happy — and that the government is the fairy godmother who will make it all happen.

This guaranteed two results — it legitimized stupid greed as a way of life, and it made the government all-powerful as the arbiter of every transaction between two people.

It also put us on an inexorable path of destruction as the government bought happiness for everyone by spending someone else’s money. At first it was called a progressive income tax; then it was called borrowing; soon it will be called bankruptcy. Today it is called Greece; tomorrow it will be California.

Somewhere along the line, most people became afraid to call it what it really is — redistribution of wealth.

Of course, that sounds harmless enough, doesn’t it? Barack Obama even got elected president on a platform of “spreading the wealth around.” After all, which man wants to deny his brother if he does not have enough? So, yes, sure, take a little of mine to make the life of my brother easier.

But that is the camel’s nose under the big suffocating tent of socialism.

Everyone wants a home; therefore everyone is entitled to a house. Everyone wants an education; therefore, college should be made as close to free as humanly possible. Everyone wants to live forever; therefore, health care should be a right, not a commodity.

But if we no longer use the market system to determine the value of what we all want, then how exactly do we pay for anything? If the government pays for everything we want, then where is the government getting the money to square the account? Not from you or me! After all, why should we be the ones working for a living when our neighbor is living on the dole. What’s good for my neighbor is good for me. If he gets a handout, then I want one too, only bigger.

Mind you, no one wishes to be greedy.

No. Heaven forbid. I just want what I have coming to me, not a nickel more or less. But the problem is that what you have coming to you may not be the same as what your neighbor has coming to him. Through a variety of reasons — luck, skill, genius, hard work — each of us gains a different amount of the benefits that life offers.

In fact, you don’t really have ANYTHING material coming to you — not as a simple result of being alive anyway. You just get the right to life, liberty and the PURSUIT of happiness, as some wise men once put it. How you use your life and liberty was once the key to how successful you were in pursuing happiness, but not anymore.

Today, the government tells you what you can and can’t do, and they don’t want you to get too far ahead of your neighbor. Even the illegal neighbors from Mexico or elsewhere, we are told, have a legitimate claim to “keeping up with the Joneses.” It doesn’t matter if they earned it or not — they want it. After all, why should they look over the fence — or the border — and see things they don’t have? Why should Americans get all the breaks? Isn’t everyone entitled to a “fair share”?

There’s another name for that, of course, and it’s been around for thousands of years. When we complain about what our neighbor has — when we try to get our “fair share” that we haven’t really earned and have no right to — we have begun down the road to war, the road to pillage and the road to barbarianism. Isn’t that why the Bible warns us explicitly, “Thou shalt not covet.”

Of course, try telling that to the modern man or woman who not only thinks that the Bible is an out-dated rule book, but doesn’t even have a mind big enough to conceive of a God in the first place.

But when man makes himself God, that’s when you get systems like communism and socialism and Nazi-ism. Those are all instances of man making the rules, determining what is fair, meting out justice — and they are all examples of pure evil.

Ayn Rand, the philosopher and author who lived under the strictures of communism in her early years, somehow managed to predict the decline of America into the thralldom of socialism even when we were at the height of our economic power as an engine of capitalism.

Her descriptions of the faltering, dying gasps of American enterprise in the 1957 novel “Atlas Shrugged” are so accurate that it should bring a tear to your eye. We have really made a mess of things, as we bought into the notion that work was no longer a suitable gauge of value. The words of a former worker who is now an unemployed tramp, in the latter part of “Atlas Shrugged,” sum up the horror of creeping socialism brilliantly:

“At first, I kept wondering how it could be possible that the educated, the cultured, the famous men of the world could make a mistake of this size and preach, as righteousness, this sort of abomination — when five minutes of thought should have told them what would happen if somebody tried to practice what they preached. Now I know that they didn’t do it by any kind of mistake. Mistakes of this size are never made innocently. If men fall for some vicious piece of insanity, when they have no way to make it work and no possible reason to explain their choice — it’s because they have a reason that they do not wish to tell. ...”

The reason, of course is stupid greed. Not the Horatio Alger greed of someone wanting to work hard in order to provide a better life for himself and his family, but the lazy greed of wanting to do nothing — or as little as possible — and still being given a good life by someone else’s hard work. That greed is impossible, unworkable, unsustainable — as corrupt as a Ponzi scheme, as delusional as a perpetual motion machine. But there is a sucker born every minute, as Rand explained:

“There wasn’t a man rich and smart enough but that he didn’t think that somebody was richer and smarter, and this [socialistic] plan would give him a share of his better’s wealth and brain. But while he was thinking that he’d get unearned benefits from the men above, he forgot about the men below who’d get unearned benefits, too. He forgot about all his inferiors who’d rush to drain him just as he hoped to drain his superiors. The worker who liked the idea that his need entitled him to a limousine like his boss’s, forgot that every bum and beggar on earth would come howling that their need entitled them to an icebox like his own. That was our real motive... but we didn’t like to think it, so the less we liked it, the louder we yelled about our love for the common good.”

Oh yes, the “common good.” That is the oldest trick in the con man’s repertoire — appeal to pity, appeal to humanity — dig deep into your pocket in order to help some poor starving schlep in far-away Africa or Asia, forgetting that you are only one meal away from hunger yourself. But the rhetoric falls apart when you analyze it. The common good can’t be served effectively if one man has to be impoverished in order to enrich another. Giving what is mine is called charity; taking what is mine is called theft.

Maybe that’s why millions of Americans are finally fed up. They’ve caught on to the Ponzi scheme at long last. The unfunded pensions. The shrinking Social Security fund. The endless bailouts. The billions of dollars going to Greece to ensure that Greeks can maintain their unsustainable mendicant lifestyle. The looters in government grabbing every penny that isn’t nailed down. And if you challenge them, it’s you who are the problem! It’s you who are chastised as selfish and dangerous!

“Do you care to imagine what it would be like, if you had to live and to work, when you’re tied to all the disasters and all the malingering of the globe?” asked Rand’s jobless philosopher-tramp in “Atlas Shrugged.”

“To work — and whenever any men failed anywhere, it’s you who would have to make up for it. To work — with no chance to rise, with your meals and your clothes and your home and your pleasure depending on any swindle, any famine, any pestilence anywhere on earth. To work — with no chance for an extra ration, till the Cambodians have been fed and the Patagonians have been sent through college. To work — on a blank check held by every creature born, by men whom you’ll never see, whose needs you’ll never know, whose ability or laziness or sloppiness or fraud you have no way to learn and no right to question — just to work and work and work — and leave it up to [those in power] to decide whose stomach will consume the effort, the dreams and the days of your life. And this is the moral law to accept? This — a moral ideal?”

Count me out.

It’s time for Americans to return to the principles of thrift and industry that made us great and turn our backs on the socialism, Marxism and communism that pretend to offer easy solutions to every problem. Greed in the service of hard work is one thing; greed in the service of theft is quite another.