Suppose you have a family - a spouse and children - and a job at which you work hard, for a reasonable wage, a home and an automobile, for which you worked hard, and other reasonable possessions acquired through your labors. You work hard, you take care of your family, you pay your taxes, you give to charity.

Now suppose that you have a brother - who is intelligent, strong and healthy, but never applied himself in school and dropped out in the tenth grade - who comes to visit you for a few days. You put him in one of the children's rooms, and double the children up in the other bedroom. At the end of his stay, he just stays on, day after day, week after week. You keep asking him when he's leaving, but he won't give you a straight answer. He has no job, so you also keep suggesting that he look for one, but he says he's tried and he's tired of looking. You happen to know he hasn't looked very hard, and that on the few occasions when he did have a job he would fail to report to work or show up late, fail to do the tasks assigned him, and was soon fired.

Because your brother is not working, you ask him to do some chores around your house, such as mow the yard and take out the trash, but he never gets around to doing any of them. Instead, he lies around the house, eating your food, watching your TV, and taking up one of the children's bedrooms. Furthermore, his behavior is wearing off on the children. They have become disobedient, following their uncle's example. They are not keeping their room clean, and their grades at school are falling.

Finally, you have had enough, and you tell him to get out, and be gone that day before you get home from work. But when you get home, there he is, lying on the sofa watching TV. You angrily demand that he get out immediately, but he refuses. You grab him by the back of his shirt and belt, wrestle him to the door, throw him out into the street, then throw his suitcase out behind him.

A few minutes later, you hear a knock at the door, and open it to find two police officers standing there. Your brother has called them and reported that you assaulted him and threw him out of his residence. The police hear your side of the story, then tell you that they could take you to jail, because your brother has a scratch on the back of his neck and a bruised knee. They instruct you that you cannot kick your brother out of his residence, despite your protestations that it is your house, not his. They tell you that because he has no other address, this is his residence, and warn you not to attempt to throw him out again, because if you do they will arrest you and put you in jail for violating his rights.

You then hire an attorney to evict your brother, but the judge rules that since he has no other residence, and since you have no rental or lease agreement, you cannot evict him. You then sue him for reasonable room and board, but the judge rules that as a member of your household he cannot be made to pay you for anything. You appeal to every form and source of relief you can think of, but no one will help you. They all tell you that any effort to evict your brother from your house or to stop feeding him would be a violation of his rights.

At this point, your spouse's mother suffers a stroke, and because neither she nor you can afford private care for her, you and your spouse determine that you must bring her to live with you. Your brother files a complaint against you, stating that once again you are trying to evict him, so that your mother-in-law can have his bedroom. The federal government informs you that you cannot evict him just to move her in, so you have to place her in a nursing home, where she quickly deteriorates and dies.

To add insult to injury, the government further informs you that you must pay for any clothing, transportation and medical needs he has and, when he complains that the bedroom he occupies is too small, without a private bath, they direct you to add a new, larger bedroom onto your house and to equip it with a walk-in closet and a bathroom larger and nicer than your own. You find yourself stuck with your deadbeat brother for life.

What has just happened to you? How can all this be? Congratulations, my friend!! You have just been administered a dose of SOCIALISM and WEALTH REDISTRIBUTION!!!

Copyright November 13th, 2011, by Tom Woodard

NOTE: All one needs to do to understand this tale of woe is to transform the "you" in the story to those who work, create, and produce, and the "brother" to the 'entitlement' class. In no way is this story meant to demean the very young, the elderly, and the truly disabled in our society, as the inclusion of the "mother-in-law" illustrates. It is a cautionary tale illustrating the destructive consequences of Socialism to those who are able, but who, because Socialism affords them the alternative, choose not to contribute to society, but only to take from it, and from the rest of us, who are forced to care for them, in addition to ourselves and our own. As Margaret Thatcher so ably said, the problem with Socialism is that it fails when you run out of other people's money.
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