Sloth and Innovators

We listen to the panegyrics to The God State, how we have to make America competitive. We want America to be competitive for-- The State, for the State to be competitive, not the individual. We want the individual to contribute to the State by being more productive.

When we play the music, "Hail to the Chief", we are actually saying, "Hail to the State".

President Obama said in his weekly radio address on August 1, 2009 that he wants policies that will create innovations to make America strong. How about policies that makes the individual strong instead of just America?

Mr. President, the government cannot create policies that create innovations. It can create policies that inhibit innovations. If you want innovations, reduce the rules and regulations that inhibit innovations. If you want innovations, start rewarding the innovators instead of punishing them with higher taxes. Innovations come from human curiosity and greed. It was not government policies that made James Watt innovate and make labor easier for billions of humans. It was the desire to make a better product and get rich doing so.

As a nine year old I watched my dad walk behind two mules that pulled a single row plow. Because of the industrial tycoon, Henry Ford, I was able at age 12 to plow two rows using a ford tractor. I could do the same work in a few hours that it had taken my dad days to accomplish with his mules. Thank you Mr. Ford for your innovation. You saved billions of hours in hard labor. Innovators that invented artificial fertilizers; Liebig, Townsend, and Lawes, with your Ford tractors, helped increase crop yields that have fed billions of people.


"Lycurgus, the lawgiver of Sparta, is reported to have reared two dogs of the same litter by fattening one in the kitchen and training the other in the fields to the sound of the bugle and the horn, thereby to demonstrate to the Lacedaemonians that men, too, develop according to their early habits. He set the two dogs in the open market place, and between them he placed a bowl of soup and a hare. One ran to the bowl of soup, the other to the hare; yet they were, as he maintained, born brothers of the same parents. In such manner did this leader, by his laws and customs, shape and instruct the Spartans so well that any one of them would sooner have died than acknowledge any sovereign other than law and reason. " Étienne de la Boétie, The Discourse of Voluntry Servitude (written 1549)

I think humans are like the dogs in the above example. We praise freedom, and brag about how we are the greatest tribe at protecting freedoms, but we will give it up for an easier life. We give up our freedoms and become sloths, and great panhandlers, as long as someone will feed us, provide us with shelter, and finally, health care. Why should we bother with the stress and hassle of producing these things for ourselves when we can vote to have someone plunder them for us?

We become servants of The State, wearing their baubles like a show horse wears a decorated bridle, with a bit in his mouth to keep him from being a wild stallion. So many adornments on the chests of so many men it makes them look like an Eagle Scout with all his awards. They are often men who are war enablers, men who kill anybody a politician tells them to kill, and men who sold their souls to the State for free room and board and a chance for glory.

Charles Tolleson