THE CONSERVATIVE VIEW

BY RUSSELL TURNER

HARD TIMES

I can remember my grandfather making the statement that everyone needs to endure some hard times so that they would appreciate the good times. If you believe the latest crop of socialists in the political arena, you would think that all you have to do to have prosperity is to just turn your life over to them and they would take care of everything. The effects, if they weren’t so tragic, would be comical.

While we spend millions on government education, we have created a class of people that are completely ignorant of the capitalistic economic system that our country was founded upon. When they see someone provide a service or sell a product they automatically assume that the money they take in is 100% profit; they cannot understand the expenses that the business owner has in order to generate that income. To prove the point just look at the new business startups in this country, the vast majority of the new business seldom survive over a year. Throughout my career I have been involved in several ventures, some of them were profitable and some not so profitable. Those experiences gave me the insight and knowledge to avoid mistakes in the future.

We continue to hear the mantra about spending more on education and we are told that somehow that will solve any and all of our problems. What we are lacking is the basic knowledge of business and the laws of supply and demand. What I am talking about is simple basic knowledge. It reminds me of trying to learn higher math skills; I found that it is essential to completely understand the basics, without the basics higher math will be totally useless. I can remember my father once telling me that he hated to see me do some of the hard dirty work that I did as a young man, but he knew that those jobs would make me appreciate the better times when they would come along.

Today we are hearing socialist politicians promising everything for everyone. If we as a nation are foolish enough to elect them, we will have a population that thinks they are entitled to everything they want and will not appreciate the good times that were developed by hard work. I have had some hard times in the past and I can say from experience that it was not fun, but those same hard times made me stronger for the future. When you hear the liberals talk about making the rich pay their fair share, those rich individuals probably had some very hard times in their past but they had the discipline to learn and overcome the hard times. Even God himself does not promise us smooth sailing all of the time, hard times is just one of the things that makes us who we are.

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