photo #9308060

Panel one is sunrise. The barn is red, the tomatoes are fat, the cabbage is heavy, and a young farmer is grinning while a politician plants a sign in the dirt. This farm now belongs to everyone.Panel two is six months later. Same ground, gray sky, dead stalks, broken fence, and five people pointing fingers at each other. I thought you were watering it. I thought he was. I assumed someone was.That is socialism in a nutshell, and it has never needed more than half a year to prove it.The pitch always sounds generous. Free college, free care, free housing, an equal share for everyone at the table. Nobody ever asks the second question. Who plants it, who waters it, who pulls the weeds at five in the morning when nobody is watching.The answer is nobody, because the reward for doing it got taken away in panel one.When a thing belongs to everyone, it belongs to no one. The man who works twice as hard eats the same as the man who sleeps in. So he stops working twice as hard. Then he stops working. Entitlement is not a character flaw, it is the predictable response to a system that punishes effort and rewards waiting.And when the harvest fails, government never looks in the mirror. It looks for a villain. Sabotage is suspected. Hoarders, speculators, wreckers, whatever the word happens to be that year.The Founders understood this, which is why they built a republic on private property. Property is what turns a citizen into a caretaker. Brutus warned that when government stretches too far from the people it governs, public business becomes nobody's business, and nobody's business gets neglected.Poverty is the only equality socialism ever delivers. Everyone gets the same empty field.The good news is that the fix is not complicated. Give a man a fence line and a deed with his name on it, and he will be out there at sunrise without anyone posting a sign.