In Defense Of Profit

 

Fact: we’d still be stuck back in the Dark Ages if it wasn’t for the profit motive. Why spend all your time, effort, and money/resources to invent something if there isn’t a chance of a big pay-off? It would make no sense. The cons would far outnumber any pros. Work-reward and risk-reward analyses would clearly show the trouble would not be worth it.

And we would still be defecating in outhouses because Mr. Crapper wouldn’t have invented the flush toilet. There would be no internet, smart phone, automobile, airplane, or gas grill. Dentistry would involve a couple shots of whiskey and…a lot of blood. Why struggle to come up with a better way, better widget, or to give superior customer service, if there is no reward for doing so-- and, in fact, an overwhelming likelihood of failure?

Socialists/Marxists/Communists simply misunderstand or deliberately reject human nature. All of history has proved this so. Young people are no longer taught factual history. AWFULs don’t care or reject it anyway, seduced by the lack of meaning in their lives and their consequent desperate need to feel virtuous or superior in some way.

Communism has never “worked,” except to kill off millions of people. More than 100 million souls in the Twentieth Century alone. That this may or may not have been the original intention matters not. Ask the families of those who perished.

The West, in history’s single greatest and most painful irony, became so wealthy because of Capitalism, free markets, and the profit motive, that the vast majority of its citizens no longer had to worry about staying alive or even working particularly long or hard… and became entitled rather than grateful. If the remote doesn’t work and we have to get up off the couch to change the channel on our big-screen televisions, it is a crisis. We have become soft, lazy, and infected with a perverse form of empathy, an empathy we shower not on those who deserve it, but on the most indigent, law-breaking, immoral, and violent.

There is yet another layer to lazy and indigent, as exhibited by those countries that have benefitted from the absolute protection of America to the extent they created cradle-to-grave welfare states instead of seeing to their own defense. That several of these nations mock or even appear to disdain America today is proof of their moral rot. As with all long-term welfare recipients, they have surrendered their dignity and autonomy, along with their work ethic—whether they know it or not. My heart hurts when I observe the stage four sickness of the soul that has enveloped Germany and England, once strong, proud nations that are mere pathetic shells of what they once were. And it pains me to no end when I see the same thing occurring in the erstwhile Land of the Free.

The best thing that could happen to the budding Socialists in the U.S., especially the young ones, is to spend a week at a time abroad in various other countries. Put a blue-haired, nose-pierced, Fidel Castro-loving college kid in Lebanon for a week. And then Niger, Syria, Afghanistan, North Korea, Chad, and Eritrea. And perhaps Venezuela. See if that whining snowflake comes back to the U.S. after a couple of months and continues badmouthing his homeland.

Progressivism…isn’t. It is regression towards chaos and immorality.  Communism isn’t a cure, it’s a disease. A fatal one. 100% of the time. And, like all diseases, it is more likely to be overcome if caught and treated early. Do we have the will to do this? Or will we keep our collective heads in the sand because it is easier to do just that?

As the great G.K. Chesterton said, “A civilization is not destroyed by wicked men; it is destroyed by weak men who cannot defend what is good.”

It is up to us in the West to decide. Do we save our nations, the most successful on Earth…or condemn them to the trash bin of history?