I began this piece with one of my favorite Churchill quotes as it fits rather nicely with what follows a little later. While the younger generation seems willing to embrace socialism - mainly because they really don't know any better - they really have no understanding of what it truly entails or its bloody history.
With that in mind I have to quote another man who has a full understanding of socialism and its failures, in this case Bill Whittle. It was while speaking at high school in Palos Verde, California that he was able to get past any incipient hostility the students felt towards a conservative speaker and show them some long ignored truths about some of the things they believed. One of the subjects he covered was socialism and he explains how he addressed the subject in response to a question from one of the high school students, a Bernie Sanders “true believer”.
And this kid couldn't understand it. He couldn't understand it, and I finally said, "Listen. Socialism and Bernie Sanders is based on the politics of envy." And I have come up with – most of the work is so derivative. Mostly it's just regurgitating things that Dr. Hansen says over there and trying to find a way to elaborate on it like it's actually my stuff, but this particular analogy I came up with on my own, because I wanted to demonstrate to these kids the power of envy. And how, if you understand the power of envy, you understand what drives the socialist impulse throughout history.Bill goes on to relate a very important point – the kids loved it. They got it. Bill Whittle undid years of programming performed upon those kids in indoctrination centers we call schools with one single example of how socialism uses envy as a justification to steal other people's stuff and 'gift' it to others as a means of gaining power, and with it, use it to steal even more stuff from those who earned it. He shows how it tries to destroy the individual and empower the collective even though it is the individual who has the power and the drive to enrich everyone else. All the collective does is bring everyone to the lowest common denominator, something to which no one should strive.
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And I said, "Fine, let's get to the envy thing," because this is the point I wanted to make. Here's my example that I came up with. I think it's a really good example. I'm going to show you the power of envy and I'm going to demonstrate it in your own heart. You're not going to have to look at it from the outside. You get to feel it from the inside. Here it goes. Ready? Let's say that you worked in an insurance company for 25 years and you're up on the eighth floor and you're just one person in a cube of 100 cubicles and you've been doing this slog for 25 years. And at the end of the day on a Friday, the boss and the CFO come up to you and they say, "Bill, I just want to have a minute with you." And you think, "Oh, God, what have I done?" And he turns to you and he says, "Bill, we've been watching you for 25 years now. You've worked your tail off for this company. You've done nothing but work hard. You've never complained. You've gone above and beyond the call of duty. Everything you've done has been wonderful and to reward you for your hard work over a lifetime, I talked with our CFO here, and we want to present you with this check for $100,000.00. Taxes have already been paid on it. Thank you very much for everything you've done for us." And off they go. Well, what's your reaction to this? Slightly more tony crowd than some of the crowds I've talked to, but $100,000.00 is $100,000.00 that you didn't have a minute ago and you did not expect that you were going to have. You suddenly find yourself with a check for $100,000.00. What do you do? Well, you're elated, and you're elated because all of a sudden you have options you didn't have before. You think about all the things that you can do, and you're as happy as you can be, so you get up, not wanting to be too much of a jerk about it, but you get up and you call everybody else. "You guys, you won't believe it." The rest of the staff comes around.
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You say, "You won't believe it. The President was just here. He thanked me for 25 years of hard work and he gave me a check for $100,000.00," and everybody else in the crowd says, "He came to our desk and he gave us a check for $250,000.00." Hold onto that thought. Hold onto that thought right there. That's the flaw in the human heart. That's envy. Because if everybody else on the floor got $250,000.00 and you got $100,000.00, you're not $100,000.00 richer anymore. You're $150,000.00 poorer. That absolute total complete net gain that had given you so many opportunities and so much joy that was nothing but gain, nothing but good for you, that $100,000.00 bonus is now a source of pain for you because other people got more. And you don't think about what you could do with $100,000.00. You think about what you could have done with $250,000.00 and then the thing really starts. Then you start saying, "Susie got $250,000.00. She's late every day. I do half of her work for God's sake. John is an alcoholic. I mean I'm correcting his work. He gets $250,000.00 and I get a measly $100,000.00. What kind of a cheap organization is this anyway?"
And it flips your perspective and it's powerful, because when I said that business about everybody else getting a check, you could hear a groan go through the room. I don't care what other people make. I care what I make. What they make has no impact on me, and the reason it hurts in this example is because it's a gift. Somebody gifted you $100,000.00, but they gifted [someone else] $250,000.00, so that person thinks more of [them] than they do of you. But if it turned out that they gave it to Susie because she worked from 6:00 in the morning to 10:00 at night for 25 years and she'd been there on weekends and everything and she got $250,000.00 and you only got $100,000.00 you'd be okay with that because it would be based on merit. So when you're handing out free stuff that's taken from other people by coercion, you're driven by the sense of envy. They've got more than I do. I should have some. It's theft and you can make a case, and I believe it, that you could find a group of people who would say, if you took an entire group of employees at the insurance company and you said that everybody has to accept the check or nobody gets the check, you would find people, I'm telling you, who would turn down $100,000.00 tax-free because the idea of everybody else getting $250,000.00 is intolerable to them. We call these people Democrats and there's something wrong with them. There's something wrong with them. They're busy thinking about other peoples' lives because they don't feel like they have any control over their own. We want everybody to be free. We want everybody to be masters of their own destiny. We believe in the individuals. We believe if you protect the group, then that group can be protected and other groups are not. But if you protect an individual, everybody's protected. If you protect the individual -- the first Jewish businessman in the beginning of the Nazi onslaught. If you have legal protections around the individual, the first time somebody tries to tell John Rabinowitz that he can't practice law, he says, "No, no, no, no, no, no, no. You don’t get to do this to me. I have inviolate personal freedoms and you can't touch me." And then you don't get the Holocaust. When you protect groups, and you support other groups, now you have a target for your envy. Is it the Jews? Is it the Kulaks? Is it the intellectuals? Is it the one-percenters? You've got to have somebody you can get ginned up and hate about. Got to have somebody you can envy. You've got to have somebody you can steal from and you've got to make sure that those people are perceived as having stolen their wealth, because if they earned their wealth, you taking it is stealing. But if they stole their wealth, you taking it is justice. That's how it works.
All I can suggest is to read the whole thing, or better yet, watch the video as it gives a better feel for what Bill taught.