(Borrowed from the FB page of my senior from Sainik School Satara, Pravin Sathvara)
An economics professor at a local college made a statement that he had never failed a single student before, but had recently failed an entire class. That class had insisted that Obama's 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 Obama's plan".. All grades will be averaged and everyone will receive the same grade so no one will fail and no one will receive an A.... (substituting grades for dollars - something closer to home and more readily understood by all).
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.
As the tests proceeded, 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 surprise, ALL FAILED 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.
Could not be any simpler than that.
These are possibly the 5 best sentences you'll ever read and all applicable to this experiment:
1. You cannot legislate the poor into prosperity by legislating the wealthy out of prosperity.
2. What one person receives without working for, another person must work for without receiving.
3. The government cannot give to anybody anything that the government does not first take from somebody else.
4. You cannot multiply wealth by dividing it!
5. 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 is the beginning of the end of any nation.
Can you think of a reason for not sharing this? Neither could I.
I beg to differ on two counts.
ReplyDeleteFirst, Obama never announced a social plan of any kind. The closest this description approaches is either the bailout or the Fair-Tax proposals. The former is contrary to the story, while the latter is still only a proposal, and a hotly-debated one at that.
Second, if the story were to indeed correctly mirror the current economic situation, the grades would be a combined pool., yes. But the top-scorers would be the ones deciding how those grades were to be distributed. In the current scenario, top-scorers have given themselves As, A+, A++, A+++, and so on ineach subsequent exam, while those scoring lower have ended up dropping in a downward spiral with their motivation disappearing at each step. Would you want to be a student who could never score higher than a D----, no matter how hard you tried?
Superficial comparisons. Half-knowledge. Dangerous.