Success

Dear Leader's recent attack on success has, as expected, produced a flood of rebuttals. This is a particularly good one. Southern Man will leave you with a couple of quotes and encourage you to read the whole thing...

Yes, the President was wrong, and I’ll give you some numbers in just a moment to prove it, but he was also boring. What he said is what progressives have said for more than a century. It wasn’t true in Soviet Russia, in Nazi Germany, in fascist Italy, in poor and oppressed Cuba, or in starving and shivering North Korea. It has not been true anywhere nor at any time. Free markets bring innovation, health, and prosperity for any who will work hard enough to get it. Collectivism brings stultification, sickness, and desperate want for everyone.

So why do people continue to attempt socialist solutions? One answer is that they are not very smart...

Barack Obama wants us to live in an America of his imagining — a magical land of perfect equality where the laws of economics and human nature do not apply, where everyone gets his own unicorn and the only ones who have to pay are the mythical “rich”, who toil endlessly to provide for us all without complaint.

The US has long had a diamond-shaped class spread, with a large middle class and relatively small populations at the bottom and the top - and getting to the top requires lots of hard, hard work. Collectivist nations are as most populations have been for most of the history of humanity - pyramids, with most at the bottom and a very few at the top. But the top of a collectivist nation is a very, very good place to be. It may be that Dear Leader and his ilk are actually very, very smart and are simply playing the long game to ensure their position at the apex of that pyramid.

And for those who think that government and infrastructure are essential to the success of a business, read what John Kass has to say about his immigrant father and the grocery business that he and his family built through grunt hard endless labor (emphasis mine):

There was no federal bailout money for us. No Republican corporate welfare. No Democratic handouts. No bipartisan lobbyists working the angles. No Tony Rezkos. No offshore accounts. No Obama bucks. Just two immigrant brothers and their families risking everything, balancing on the economic high wire, building a business in America. They sacrificed, paid their bills, counted pennies to pay rent and purchase health care and food and not much else. And for their troubles they were muscled by the politicos, by the city inspectors and the chiselers and the weasels, all those smiling extortionists who held the government hammer over all of our heads.

Some government is necessary. Big government is a burden on everyone. Big, corrupt government - which is pretty much what we have today - is downright evil. But Dear Leader thinks that we can't succeed without it.

In Southern Man's opinion this election is a referendum on big government. Sadly, the choice is between the party that wants big government and the party that wants bigger government.