CRS
Chandler, Arizona, United States

There's an old saying. If you don't want someone to join a crowd, you ask them, "If everyone were jumping off of a cliff, would you?" Well, I have. So my answer would be "Yes". True story.
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The Lemonade Stand Analogy Against Socialism Doesn't Work

Sunday, May 16, 2010

this entry brought to you by radiohead, "like spinning plates"


There's a documentary called Jesus Camp, and there's a brief part in it where a boy in a Fundamentalist Evangelical household and he's watching a video. Now, the movie doesn't dwell on this, it's merely giving context for the people you're going to be spending time getting to know over the course of the movie and the kind of lives they live. The video is made for children, it has Dinosaur puppets explaining, in a mock News Cast, how Global Warming isn't real. We get to see about 30 seconds of what he's watching, and what's incredibly remarkable is how well you can see how lie-based it is, even in such a brief moment. I can't say that I was surprised to find out that Fundamentalist Evangelicals were teaching their children outright lies and fabrications, but it was still unsettling to me to see a professionally made video proudly promote the exact opposite of the truth. When you come across these people in mixed company, their leaders tend to hold back the crazy. But when they're amongst themselves, they are completely and utterly unashamed about it, and seeing that never ceases to be appalling to me.

My wife and I were flipping through the channels the other day and we settled, somehow, on the Christian channel, and we saw something almost exactly like what we saw in Jesus Camp, only we got to see the whole thing, and it was mind boggling how consciously deceitful it was. It was about how Socialism isn't just not promoted by the Bible, it is outright against Christianity. And they trotted out expert after expert, and each person was nakedly lying. None of these people believed the things they were saying. They were obviously deceiving people, because their arguments were obvious cover-ups for holes in their philosophies. I was absolutely amazed at the kind of brutal and obvious bullshit these Evangelicals were willing to give to one another when they knew nobody else would be watching. As an example of how these people must've known how wrong their logic was, they purposefully mixed the definitions of Communism and Socialism together as if they were the same thing whenever their argument needed it, and repeatedly, in every single case of needing "scary socialist" montages to accompany their scary words, would put in images of Hitler and the Nazis along with Stalin, Hugo Chavez, Mao, and Castro. Also, in an entire half hour about how Socialism was against the foundation of Christianity, they never once quoted Christ himself, except to say that Christ didn't mind taxes.

Still, arguing with these people about the Bible is a pointless exercise, because 1, you can make the Bible say anything you want, especially when you don't even quote the dude who the religion is supposed to be based around. There's insane shit in the Bible. People excused slavery for hundreds of years in that exact fashion.

But what did get up my buttress as an incredibly lazy, nonsensical argument conservatives has used against socialism for two or three generations: The Lemonade Stand analogy. The thing is, core conservative values, at least the ones that aren't batshit insane or very obviously selfish on their face, often sound rational when you initially hear them, and that's exactly how they fool people. The problem is the moment you think about them one level, they instantly fall apart.

To wit: Let's say little Timmy has a Lemonade stand. After a full day of hard work, he's made eight full dollars of profit. His friends little Susie and little Johnny and little Billy didn't help out at all and sat around while little Timmy did all the hard work. Now, at the end of the day, he has to split the money evenly amongst them all, so everybody has two dollars, including Timmy, who did all the hard work.

Now that's not fair, is it?

Except that isn't actually a very fair analogy at all, and also, that describes Communism, not Socialism. But the real problem is that in the above analogy, all four children live in the same neighborhood and live, roughly, in the same income area.

This is a closer analogy:

Let's say little Timmy has a Lemonade stand, where he made the lemonade from lemons already in the fridge, sugar already in the pantry, and water that comes for free out of his faucet, already paid for by his parents. Now let's say he works hard at the lemonade stand and makes 8 dollars in profit. Little Susie is from a broken home and whose mother works two jobs just to keep a roof on their head. Little Johnny's father has just been laid off, and little Billy's mother has taken a turn for the ill, so suddenly their expenses have tripled and their income dropped.

Now let's say Timmy's mother comes out and tells Timmy, "You know, all of your expenses are paid for. You live in a house that is already paid for, you eat food that is already paid for, you go to school that is already paid for, you have absolutely no expenses. You don't need all of that money. You can take one dollar of it and split that into three, and give each of your friends 30 cents each, so you'll have 7 dollars instead of 8. That seems perfectly fair."

Now, little Timmy could be a spoiled brat and say "BUT I DON'T WANNA! IT'S NOT FAIR!" and stomp his feet, in which case his mother just takes the stupid dollar and hands it to the kids anyway. Or he could, if he was raised right, say to himself, "I don't really need that dollar anyway, seven dollars is just fine for a hard day's work, especially if the other dollar is going to help out my friends and they can eat food tonight while I rest comfortably in my house that I did nothing to achieve."
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with love from CRS @ 9:19 AM 

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