[High Praise! to According to Hoyt]

NOTE: This excerpt references a poem by Rudyard Kipling called “The Gods of the Copybook Headings” that I’ll link here and explain via a Wikipedia quote:

It contains “age-old, unfashionable wisdom” that Kipling saw as having been forgotten by society and replaced by “habits of wishful thinking.”

The “copybook headings” to which the title refers were proverbs or maxims, extolling virtues such as honesty or fair dealing that were printed at the top of the pages of 19th-century British students’ special notebook pages, called copybooks. The school-children had to write them by hand repeatedly down the page.

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Government produces nothing. It doesn’t build that. It doesn’t build anything. It can’t. Government is force. It can, on threat of that force, seize enough of what someone produced to give to someone else. Even when it “builds” roads or power plants, it does so with confiscated wealth and at the expense of what the owners might have done with that wealth. (They wouldn’t have? How do you know? Remember status. Throughout history humans have funded research – often in useless stuff – and paid for innovation. How do you know left to its own devices private capital wouldn’t have created neighbordhood-sized nuclear plants? Or who knows what? The one thing we know is that nothing done by government has ever come in on time or under budget.)

When governments start thinking in terms of “feeding the hungry” which in our day becomes “giving things to the continuously redefined poor” what it is actually doing is reducing the number of people working in the productive sector. Between the bureaucrats working to redistribute wealth and the people working to keep getting the handouts, a huge contingent of people is removed from the productive sector.

When that number reaches the point where the productive sector can’t keep up, a crash ensues. An Earth-shaking Kaboom, you might say. The “you” in the poem is collective in this case. “You” individual might survive for a time, without working, given a very wealthy society. But no society can remain wealthy when it doesn’t “work” – ie. When it produces nothing. And eventually the gods of the copybook headings, in fire and terror return.

In the Carboniferous Epoch we were promised abundance for all,
By robbing selected Peter to pay for collective Paul;
But, though we had plenty of money, there was nothing our money could buy,
And the Gods of the Copybook Headings said: “If you don’t work you die.”
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It’s a good poem. Give it a read.