God forbade...must reading!

Luck and Pluck





  Written in 1869, Luck and Pluck was the first of a series of Horatio Alger stories about young men cheated of their inheritance or otherwise cast adrift, and had to make their way through their own efforts.




  Most people know what "luck" is and understand how it contributes to success, but many Americans have forgotten the role of "pluck." The dictionary defines pluck as "courage or resolution in the face of difficulties."



  As Louis L'Amour had one of his characters say, "It's awful hard to stop a man who knows he's right and just won't quit." We sometimes call it, "hangin' in there." As Casey Stengel put it, "80% of life is just showing up."



  Before the welfare rights movement feigned sense, "income" meant a reward that came through hard work. If you were lucky, you'd get a lot of income, if you weren't lucky, you wouldn't earn as much, but pluck was an essential requirement for receiving income.



   Up until the mid 1960's, people were expected to work for a living; very few people believed that society owed anybody anything.



    Our fathers were good, religious people, and did not mean to foster atheism when they talked about luck, and gave a half-way assent to its Godless reality. If the universe were an infinite chaos; if order had no throne in its wide realm; if universal law were a fable of fancy; if God were a Babel, or the world a Pandemonium, there might be such a thing as luck. But while from the particle to the globe, from the animalcule to the archangel, there is not a being or a thing, a time or an event, disconnected with the great government of eternal law and order, we cannot see how such a game of chance as the word luck supposes can be admitted into any corner of the great world. Luck! What is it? A lottery? A hap-hazard? A frolic of gnomes? A blind-man's-bluff among the laws? A ruse among the elements? A trick of dame Nature? Has any scholar defined luck, any philosopher explained its nature, any chemist shown us its elements? Is luck that strange, nondescript unmateriality that does all things among men that they cannot account for? If so, why does not luck make a fool speak words of wisdom; an ignoramus utter -lectures on philosophy; a stupid dolt write the great works of music and poetry; a double-fingered dummy create the beauties of art, or an untutored savage the wonders of mechanism?

 
  If we should go into a country where the sluggard's farm is covered with the richest grains and fruits, and where industry is rewarded only with weeds and brambles; where the drunkard looks sleek and beautiful, and his home cheerful and happy, while temperance wears the haggard face and eats the bread of want and misery; where labor starves, while idleness is fed and grows fat; where common sense is put upon the pillory, while twaddle and moonshine are raised to distinction, where genius lies in the gutter and ignorance soars to the skies; where virtue is incarcerated in prison, while vice is courted and wooed by the sunlight, we might possibly be led to believe that luck had something to do there. But where we see, and see everywhere, the rewards of industry, energy, wisdom and virtue, constant as the world turns, we must deny in toto the very existence of this good and evil essence which men have called luck.



  Was it luck' that gave Morse his telegraph, Fulton his steamboat, or Franklin lightning? Is it luck that gives the merchant his business, the lawyer his clients, the minister his hearers, the physician his patients, the mechanic his labor, the farmer his harvest? No man believes it. And yet many are the men who dream of luck, and did sometimes humor the whims of visionary cowards and drones.



  They look upon the world, not as a great hive of industry, where men are rewarded according to their labors and merits, but as a grand lottery, a magnificent scheme of chance, in which fools and idlers have as fair a show as talent and labor.





  Although our economy expands over time, the economy produces a fixed number of dollars in any given year. Regardless of your political philosophy, you have to recognize that a dollar spent painting lines on streets is a dollar which is not spent on education; a dollar spent keeping people in jail is a dollar which is not spent manufacturing cars, and so on.




   The question of our enormous prison population is not really one of economics, but it has inescapable economic consequences. As Americans increasingly lose the habit of self-control and can only refrain from violence by being thrown in jail, crime and punishment add to the unproductive burden on the economy as a whole, just as surely welfare supports unproductive people by placing the burden on those who work.




  Goods and services have to be produced before people can consume them. Economically speaking, it doesn't matter why a given individual doesn't produce anything, what matters is how many workers there are to support all the people who don't work. If there aren't enough worker bees to support the drones, any hive eventually runs out of money.




    This is not a new issue. Let's look at some principles, articulated long ago:



You cannot help the poor by destroying the rich.

You cannot strengthen the weak by weakening the strong.

You cannot bring about prosperity by discouraging thrift.

You cannot lift the wage earner up by pulling the wage payer down.

You cannot further the brotherhood of man by inciting class hatred.

You cannot build character and courage by taking away men's initiative and independence.

You cannot help men permanently by doing for them what they could and should do for themselves.


- William J. H. Boetcker




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