Given the current disdain for Capitalism in favor of the virtues of Socialism by those who may not know, this small offering.
It happened 58 years ago, but I remember it as though it were yesterday. I was four years old. I remember the dictator’s military coming to my home with rifles drawn, looking for my mother’s college friend, Nydia, for opposing the government. I remember the tanks in the street and a relative being sentenced to 18 years in prison for speaking out against Fidel Castro. It was then that we decided to escape Castro’s oppressive regime.
I remember arriving at the airport. My mother was disrobed and searched to ensure that nothing was being taken from the state. I had a small, cheap camera that I was hoping to keep. Castro’s police thought otherwise. You see, the concept of ownership was nonexistent. It all belonged to the state. The government took what it wanted, and let us keep what it believed we needed.
We immigrated to the United States in 1961 to escape Castro’s regime. As I grew older, I observed a country transformed to a nation of victims. A new paradigm was emerging. A paradigm that was surprisingly similar to the central tenet of the Communist Manifesto:
“From each according to their capacity, to each according to their need.”
I observed striking similarities emerging in the opinions voiced in editorial pages of the written media, in what was being taught or not taught in public schools and at the university level, in the censorship of opinions considered too politically incorrect to express, in the support of programs that redistributed wealth, and in the elimination of personal responsibility from public discourse.
Without exception, the blame was on taxpayers who were seen as too greedy for wanting to keep more of the money they earned.
One question: what is your fair share of the money I earn?
I have a solution. Perhaps we should contribute our entire paychecks to the government. It can then return to us the amount it believes we deserve.
BEWARE WHAT YOU WISH FOR.