SHARING THE PIE - NOT WHAT OUR COUNTRY WAS FOUNDED ON

Yes, I lured you in here thinking you'd see a piece of home made pie, but what I have to write tonight is personal, and it pertains to the election, and the future of our great country. If you've had your fill of political blogs and the news, come back in a day or two for something lighter. But sometimes there are things I have to say, even if only I read it.

"Most Americans don’t want much. They don’t want the whole pie. There are some who do, but most Americans feel blessed just being able to thrive a little bit. But that is becoming even more out of reach. The truth is, in order to get things like universal health care and a revamped education system, then someone is going to have to give up a piece of their pie so that someone else can have more." - Michelle Obama

Let's all work harder to share the wealth with our less able brothers Michelle believes, while wearing a $900 suit. I too ponder on such sentiments, usually when I've re-read Atlas Shrugged, a book perhaps meant to be historical but becoming more prophetic.

The present state of our nation, the political events, and ideals of today are so grotesquely irrational and so disturbingly true to the base points of the book, that it can't be anything else.

If any of you haven't read Atlas Shrugged it is a book written decades ago that shows what happens to the world when the men of the mind - the originators and the innovators in every line of rational endeavor - go on strike and vanish, to protest again an altruist-collectivist Society, what our generation more popularly calls "the nanny state".

There are two key passages in the book that sum it up well. The first is a statement of John Galt:
"There is one kind of man who have never been on strike in human history. Every other kind and class have stopped, when they so wished and have presented demands to the world claiming to be indispensable - except the men who have carried the world on their shoulders, have kept it alive, have endured torture as sole payment, but have never walked out on the human race. Well their turn has come. Let the world discover who they are, what they do, and what happens they they refuse to function. This is the strike of the men of the mind, Miss Tagger. This is the mind on strike."

The second passage, which explains the title of the novel is:

"Mr. Rearden, said Francisco, his voice solemnly calm, "if you saw Atlas, the giant who holds the world on his shoulders, if you saw that he stood, blood running down his chest, his knees buckling, his arms trembling but still trying to hold the world aloft with the last of his strength, and the greater his effort the heavier the world bore down upon his shoulders, what you you tell him to do?"

"I. . . I don't know. what . could he do" What would you tell him?"

"To shrug".

My work has value. My mind has value. I won't do it for free. Those that do that, are amateurs (coming from the Latin amator - meaning lover), not professionals. As a professional I expect to be paid. Nor will I do it to pay the rent and gas and food of those who aren't willing to put forth their own effort to the best of their own ability. A hard working person, down on their luck, I will help in many ways. I've added to the tip jar of many a hard working blogger, caught up in exploding cars, dysfunctional pets, and bad experiences with Comcast. I've helped people in my community, neighbors, suddenly and through no fault of their own, out of a job, with food and/or child care while they went to an interview; with assistance with crafting a new resume and getting them some job contacts. I volunteer. Helping those that actively worked to help themselves.

But do not ask me to support, through work or taxes or even my time, which has value of its own, a class of people who only wish to take, simply because they feel they are owed it for breathing, for crossing the border illegally, or for being a specific race, creed or religion.

Now Mrs. Obama and her party say that the "rest of us" will have to give up a little more so there can be more for those that "don't have". I was getting a hair do while out of town for a wedding and the person cutting said she was voting for Obama because then she'd have "free day car for my kids and free health care for my kids", (she had multiple kids with various fathers I gathered from the pictures and her conversation). I replied "great. . now who is going to PAY for that day care and health care?"

She looked puzzled.

I quietlyreplied "I AM. So that will mean I won't get a $50 haircut, I'll get a $11 haircut somewhere else, and less often, and forget the highlights and all the rest, I won't be able to afford it any more with the increase in my taxes. So will many of your customers. So you could make half the money and won't have money for gas to work. But Obama will get you free health care. Good luck on the eating thing"

She failed to note the irony and as she had a pair of shears pointed at my head I felt it prudent not to expound any longer.

As this election looms, we are in a struggle between capitalism and socialism attractively packaged as "change". With someone and their supporting party, talking of controls and "sacrifices", taxes, and coercions they would impose, what arbitrary powers they would enact, what "social remedies" they would hand out, without really telling us, the American people, what groups these gains would be expropriated. What they do imply, though with their vague promises of health care, and free education and free this and free that, is clear. That is, with the help of increased taxes and more from the pockets of the working classes, their power over a nation's economy, any kind or degree of said power, rests on the basic principal of statism, the principal that the working man's life belongs to the state.

Obama talks about Change. Obama talks about freedom. Freedom in the political sense means freedom from government coercion. It does NOT mean freedom from an employer, from a landlord, freedom from the laws of supply and demand, or freedom from the laws of nature. Laws which do not guarantee prosperity to every man.

It means freedom from the coercive power of the state. Freedom to use your abilities the best you can to craft a life for yourself to the best of your ability. It means freedom to protect that which you have earned, from other people, in a manner that's true to the Constitution that founded this country. It means freedom to own a weapon responsibly. Certainly if Obama and Biden have their way, I wouldn't own a gun, making it even easier for someone to take what I have at the point of theirs, be it literal or figuratively.

The American political system was not based on "sharing the pie". It was based on a moral principal that defined what made America great; on the principal of man's inalienable right to his own life - meaning, the principal that man has the right to exist for his own sake. Not sacrificing himself or his or her family to others by force nor sacrificing others to himself without free will. Social interactions are not done by handouts but by trading, men dealing with others as traders, by voluntary choices to mutual benefit.

The American economy, was not built up by "sharing". What is unique in America is we were the first to use the phrase "to make money", no other language has that phrase used in that manner, in history, men had always thought of riches as a static quality to be seized, begged inherited, shared or looted, or obtained as a favor. Americans were the first to truly grasp that wealth has to be created. Created with the efforts of individuals, who improved our world through hard work, and effort and earned money from it as a byproduct.

What this "change" appears to me to be is a social system based on the "nanny state", an altruist type society, with its code of self sacrifice, rather than the building of individual wealth, the antithesis of capitalism. It is socialism, which, in all it's mutated forms, fascism, Nazism, Communism, treats us as a sacrificial animal to be plundered for the benefit of the group, the tribe, the state. The final product of which would be a country in which the best and the brightest put down their thinking caps, and let their talents languish, as they derive no personal benefit from it.

A society in which, after giving and giving, so that all have a "piece of the pie", the best and the brightest, as well as the hardest working, will finally shrug.