By Craig R. Smith, Chairman Swiss America
April 25, 2011
When I shared simple free-market principles with the eighth graders about how to start a business or how to attract and create investment capital with a great business idea, their eyes opened as wide as saucers. They sat up in their chairs and became attentive. They actually started answering the questions I posed and became fully engaged. They saw another world than that of welfare, a limitless world.
Our children yearn to be productive. They want to learn. To them, making a contribution to the country would be the greatest statement of self-confidence they could make. Our underprivileged kids want to break the cycle of poverty the government has created and perpetuated. I watched the great potential in each of these students come bubbling to the surface when I exposed them to a life which believes in free-market capitalist principles, not government assistance and a continuance of poverty.
One young man talked about buying nickel bags of crack from his dealer and selling them for $10 to make a profit. He mentioned how now he sees his business is much like any legitimate business where you take a product, mark it up and make a profit. While one is illegal, both methods produce a profit, the mother's milk of business. The light bulb went off, and now I see this young man as a potential market maker, not a junkie maker.
For the first time, he saw profit as a good thing and not an evil like Mr. Obama rails about in his class warfare speeches. He saw me as someone to look up to, not an evil, greedy suit. Wow, was it exciting. Until then, I never realized these kids actually believe the lies the left is telling about business and profits.
Mr. Obama and the left must stop with the Robin Hood mentality. We have taken from the middle class and the rich and have given to the poor. All that does it create more poverty.
As dependence on government increases, society becomes more divided. Mr. Obama has used this great Lincoln quote many times, "A house divided against itself cannot stand." Yet he is out raising millions of dollars using class warfare as his signature causing a greater and deeper division among our people. We are all in this together, not separately.
If we are going to balance our budgets and pay off our national debt, we must abandon every last welfare policy. Each has failed. Before FDR we didn't have welfare and people survived. We didn't have people dying of starvation. I'm sure his motives were good, but they were wrong. "Give a man a fish" is not as effective as "teach a man to fish."
In between FDR and BHO, there was a shining light from the Democratic Party trying to stop the madness of falling for the lie of welfare. JFK wanted us to, "Ask not what your country can do for you; but what you can do for your country." I agree with JFK.
It's time to take the fork that leads us to freedom. It is time for welfare statists to be firmly rejected by the electorate and return America to free markets, hard work and personal responsibility while we still can.
If we wait any longer, it will be too late.
