Forget Joe the Plumber.....

What about sweet little 5 yr old Hadassah Jones?

Almost a year ago, Senator Obama visited the campus of North Carolina Central University. I was reminded about this event when looking at an older article from the Obama Mama's website that was posted the day after Senator Obama's visit there.

After giving a speech to a crowd in the football stadium, Senator Obama was preparing to leave without taking any questions. Hadassah Jones was crushed when Senator Obama said that he would not take any questions from the media. It actually brought tears to her eyes. That was why she was there after all. Upon seeing her sobbing, Senator Obama relented and granted her an exclusive interview. That interview was one of the first times Senator Obama went on the record talking about his socialistic plans to redistribute wealth. He got away with it that time, because no one was really paying that close attention to him yet.
What Senator Obama actually revealed in that interview was his form of socialism. Senator Obama gave the little girl a quick overview of his plan for universal health insurance coverage and better education. Then he explained his view that the wealthy should pay the expenses of people who are not wealthy:

"We've got to make sure that people who have more money help the people who have less money," Sen. Obama said. "If you had a whole pizza, and your friend had no pizza, would you give him a slice?"

In this explanation Senator Obama revealed his belief that the people who work hard and become successful in this world should help those who are in need. I agree with that. It's a moral imperative that we should help those less fortunate than ourselves. Absolutely nothing wrong with asking folks to do so. But when Senator Obama said "We've got to make sure that people who have..." he is taking a radical position because now he is speaking in code for using force and the police power to enforce this moral imperative. Make sure = force.

Is that the American dream? Work hard, be a success and then let Big Brother take your hard work and give it to someone who may not have any inclination to work at all?

Senator Obama tries to cover over the force factor by asking her about a slice of pizza. He described a moral imperative that we as decent people ought to do. But who could argue with that? Of course we ought to. And we do! Americans are the most generous people on Earth. We get the pizza analogy.
Let's use the pizza analogy again, in the same way as he described making the haves give to the have nots. I will rephrase the first part using pizza:
"We've got to make sure that people who have more pizza help the people who have less pizza." In other words, force the people who have pizza to share. So perhaps then the second part could have been explained more honestly by asking her if she has a pizza and someone wants a slice, should she be sent to prison for not giving away a slice?
Maybe he should ask her a fair question. Something like:

"If your mother gives you a pizza every week for cleaning the kitchen, taking the trash out, washing the car and cleaning your room whose pizza is it? And say it is 10 slices. Whose pizza is it? What if it's two slices? What if it's twenty? Then imagine your friend who does nothing all week. She just sits around her house and plays video games and eats potato chips. At the end of the week, she doesn't have a pizza, but she wants one. How much of YOUR pizza should you be forced to give her every week? And how long will you keep working hard to have your pizza distributed among those who don't bother?"

Isn't that what we are talking about here? That's socialism.

An even better analogy would be a small business that 5 year olds would understand. Lemonade stands. Imagine her buying lemons and sugar and setting up a stand in the hot sun, working all day while her neighborhood friends are playing in the fire hydrant, or in the air conditioning playing video games, or some other fun activity. Any one of them could have set up a lemonade stand, but they didn't want to. Now along comes Constable Obama and counts how much her lemonade brought in and he takes half of it (after costs of course) and distributes it evenly among the neighborhood children who spent the day doing nothing. Does that make her hard work pay off more for her, or for the other children?

That's what Senator Obama is proposing we do as a nation. And no one seems to understand why that is bad for entrepreneurship.