Go Down Moses
by John Wolf
A quote by the late Dr. Adrian Rogers, 1931–2005
"You cannot legislate the poor into freedom by legislating the wealthy out of freedom. What one person receives without working for, another person must work for without receiving. The government cannot give to anybody anything that the government does not first take from somebody else. 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 my dear friend, is about the end of any nation. You cannot multiply wealth by dividing it."
I received this quote the other day and it got me thinking:
All in theory very correct. The problem comes in how you feel about slaves and masters. One can't become wealthy without taking advantage of someone else. The system is suppose to have a certain amount of money in it that is static (well, except nowadays). The money shifts towards those that are skilled at taking it away from others—all legal of course, leverages, derivatives, etc., emotional driven stock prices verses actual balance sheets from the invested companies.
What do you do with those that are not mentally acute to cope with complex financial systems? If there is any compassion in the society, there will be some giving—take charities, the abused, mentally ill, the ignorant, the disabled, a thousand categories.
How does society balance the desire to be well-off against the pain of those that can't find their way without help? It's hard to identify the freeloader that is both clever and lazy. Poor is poor no matter how much wealth is shifted that direction, because the poor don't know how to hold onto that dollar—thus they remain poor.
Education is the great equalizer. But our country is poor in education, therefore, we are seeing this middle ground fill up with so many assuming that the government will save them. They haven't learned how to cope on their own, because we don’t teach them. The schools are full of entertainment, social clubs, and activities directors.
What schools should be doing is teaching academics—how finance works, applied statistics, how to write and understand words, so you can think. All the rest should be left to secular clubs and organizations.
Excellence should be rewarded not snubbed by marginalizing those that have talent. But this would be admitting that we aren't all created equal when it comes to competing in the market place—maybe we will face reality someday.
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The ideal situation would have motivated talent create stable economies so that we CAN support those that have to be carried. It's called social justice.
It is clear that this social experiment called American and the democratic fragile creature placed in our care is in jeopardy, because we are confused by reality and want to wish away the stumbling blocks of the real world. We grow dumber with each graduating class and less ethical with ever new financial instrument design to maximize gains for the mysterious stock holders. (Who the hell are these people anyway? They can't all be evil child beaters.)
We want all kids to become standardized superheroes with Hollywood looks and PhDs in everything. That's nonsense. Why make nonsense our national goal. Wouldn't it be better to channel the talents arriving on the scene in the direction that talent is bound to go anyway and avoid that person's personal anguish of having to be driven to drugs and become a dropout from a system that is so unrealistic that you recover from this abuse around age 30, if you don't die first, to realize the system lied to you and you gravitated in the direction you wanted to go in the first place.
We want to rubber stamp humans. That will never happen to anyone’s satisfaction. Why not optimize their individual talents so they can give back to the world what they do best, whether that be building a rocketship or recycling our waste. That's all you can ever hope for.
That is what the Renaissance was all about. That's what brought mankind from the Dark Ages into the realm of reason. Please, somebody flip on a light and get us out of this darkness then those that yearn to be government groupies wouldn’t even exist. People with talent and support from there peers will want to produce and all these idealistic theories could be put to rest.
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John is an eRagSheet journalist, author, and musician.
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