This is a GREAT parable, one I received via email from the great Paul Mannix and one that sparked an interesting exchange I'll share here;
A Realization and My Dog
From Danasic’s Blog on SodaHead
http://www.sodahead.com/other/my-dog/blog-227619/?page=1&postId=5222095#post_5222095
My dog sleeps about 20 hours a day. He has his food prepared for him. He can eat whenever he wants, 24/7/365. His meals are provided at no cost to him.
He visits the Dr. once a year for his checkup, and again during the year if any medical needs arise. For this He pays nothing, and nothing is required of him.
He lives in a nice neighborhood in a house that is much larger than He needs, but He is not required to do any upkeep.
If He makes a mess, someone else cleans it up. He has his choice of luxurious places to sleep. He receives these accommodations absolutely free. He is living like a king, and has absolutely no expenses whatsoever.
All of his costs are picked up by others who go out and earn a living every day.
I was just thinking about all this, and suddenly it hit me like a brick in the head, Holy S#!t, my dog is a illegal Democrat!
H/T to Paul Mannix for sending this via email and to Danasic at SodaHead
A Liberal Acquaintance Responded;
That’s not how liberals and Democrats LIVE! It’s what they want for us EVERYONE!
Why should we all be reduced to mere “wage-slaves”?
Why shouldn’t we all have our most basic needs provided for free by a benevolent government/owner who cares about and for all of us?
What exactly is wrong with that vision?
My Response;
Well, since you asked, it is WORK, those labors you deride as “wage-slavery” that provides all the commodities (things) that satisfy our most basic needs and our less basic desires.
Food, clothing, shelter, heath care, etc. are ALL provided by a combination of investment Capital and individual labor/effort supplied by free individuals who sell their labors for the wages they receive.
The Command (government-run) Economy has NEVER worked and it’s been tried in a wide variety of methods across virtually all of mankind’s history, first in the form of Monarchies, then in dictatorial Theocracies and finally in secular Centralized States or Tyrannies, from the freely elected Third Reich, to the revolutionary Maoist government of Communist China, to the equally revolutionary and tyrannical former USSR and its satellites, like Albania and Bulgaria...in EVERY case, those command economies failed miserably.
The original United States (that is the USA up to around 1912 when Bernard Baruch and J. P. Morgan forged the current heavily government-regulated market-based economy) was the ONLY human society to run counter to the command-economy and the many tyrannies common to mankind’s history. The USA was founded on the principles of private property rights, free and open markets and individual self-ownership and the complete personal responsibility that comes with that.
That total personal responsibility makes seeking a benevolent owner/provider, not only UN-American, but fundamentally ANTI-American, as well.
America’s Founders didn’t create or “come up with” the idea that the people, the individual owns what he/she produces and the ideas they come up with, they merely recognized that (1) those are inviolate (sacred), innate principles that exist absent governments, democracies, or any other manmade parameters and (2) that adhering to those principles is the best way to produce the MOST prosperity for the MOST people.
The Command Economy can only function so long as the government is empowered to force, or “draft” ALL of its people into the kinds of work it feels it needs and that it deems each is most suited for. That kind of “labor draft,” or state-slavery is the most fundamental violation of personal freedom that can exist.
In short, there is simply no way for us to have even our most basic needs met “for free,” any more than there is a way to make it rain root beer. It just can’t happen, as all our needs are met by the production of commodities that must be produced via the labors of others and those who provide those labors are best off when they own their own labors and are responsible for their own needs regardless of how much or how little their labors are valued in the open/free market.
There is no short-cut. There is no better, or easier way...and universal “state-slavery” is certainly not a viable option to EVER consider, given its long and complete history of abject failure.
