It was true back in 2011, and it is still true today. Conservatives believe in the honor and dignity in work. Progressive don’t believe in a hand-up and are willing to supply a hammock forever.
Sidenote: I once told a person that if I got laid off from my software company, I might come looking to him for a job and that I’d be willing to clean his toilets. He looked at me really funny like until I told him about the honor and dignity bit.
I came across this via Cafe Hayek a while ago and stored it away. I just came across it again, and what Armen Alchian and William Allen said about history and poverty reminded me of someone else’s take on this (emphasis mine):
Thousands of years of recorded history present a persistent story of poverty and tyranny, with an occasional experiment in personal freedom and opportunity being fulfillingly productive. If we are to foster the good society and its responsive, efficient economy, intellectual competence must be married to high character. Otherwise, we will defeat ourselves by generating increasingly efficient gulags.
It is clear that a Society that maximizes an individual’s self and economic Freedom is a successful one. Everyone profits from everyone else’s industriousness in seeking out opportunities to fulfill their dreams and take care of their families (re: their “self-interest” which the Left always perverts to “selfishness” to those that are successful and inflame others to high levels of Envy).
However, over the last two decades, it is clear that our Society is becoming far less free and certainly no longer a “high character” one at an ever increasingly rapid pace.
…and immediately thought of Robert Heinlein’s quote that said it a little bit plainer. In trying to find that quote, up popped a post of mine written way back in 2011 that is as relevant as it was back then. I would suggest that you read it – not for my “wit and wisdom” but for the comments from entrepreneurs that were throwing in the towel as Government was making it too hard to succeed.
The Heinlein Quote:
“Throughout history, poverty is the normal condition of man. Advances which permit this norm to be exceeded — here and there, now and then — are the work of an extremely small minority, frequently despised, often condemned, and almost always opposed by all right-thinking people. Whenever this tiny minority is kept from creating, or (as sometimes happens) is driven out of a society, the people then slip back into abject poverty.
This is known as “bad luck.”
– Robert A. Heinlein
Again, go read the story of the wanted-to-be mine operator and the jobs he wanted to give to people that were BEGGING him to take them on. But because of the Left’s whining about just about everything, after sitting there listening at the government hearing, he threw in the towel realizing that it would be too expensive because the Left was going to MAKE it too expensive.
It was happening back then and it is still happening today.
