Vlademir Lenin and I

When a little girl plays house it’s all fun. You get to clink your tea set and lay your dolly in the cradle, yet you can drop it all and run out to play whenever you want.

You can do this because there is a mommy around to put the toys away and dredge up the gooey cracker crumbs from dolly’s mouth.  Someone makes it all possible and someone cleans up the mess.

This musing comes as a result of visiting a famous statue of Vlademir Lenin on a street corner in Freemont in Seattle, Washington.

The statue was originally erected in Czeckoslovakia, in collaboration with the Russians, but was quietly taken down after the revolution. An English teacher from Issaquah, Washington, found it is a refuse pile (dustheap of history???) and purchased it to bring to the states. More of the story can be read here.

Now the perpetual children in Freemont can hang out in groovy coffee shops paying extra for their organic brew, professing the sensitivity and good intentions of socialism, and even communism, and turn a blind eye to the atrocious results of those systems, because they were lucky enough to be born in a land of freedom and entrepreneurs, a justice structure and a Bill of Rights.

I have heard people spit out the word ‘Capitalism’ as if it were a slur, while they enjoy the rewards of it every day.

Capitalists don’t get rich on their own. Yes, they dream big and they take risks, but in order to expand their dreams and be productive they need people. They train workers, they purchase land, they build. They scoop up in their wake others who need a steady income, who try to be dependable though they might not have the genius, strength, or desire to start a company of their own.

Redistribution of wealth does not create wealth. It never has and never will.

Not that wealth is the most important thing. It is merely a side effect of FREEDOM.