Guest AuthorImagine you are the ant in Aesop’s famous fable.
You have always done what you needed to do to plan for tomorrow. You stashed away assets for that inevitable rainy day, delaying instant gratification to provide for your own welfare over time.
You have spent a lifetime embracing what Max Weber described in his seminal work, “The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism,” as “In practice this means that God helps those who help themselves.”
Weber’s wisdom was in seeing how dedication to an inner belief could result in hard work, frugality, and the richness of risk-taking through work.
To him, the “spirit of capitalism is best understood as part of the development of rationalism as a whole.”
So as a rational creature, you behaved like Aesop’s ant and squirreled away assets to be used tomorrow.
But when tomorrow comes, you find yourself surrounded by Aesop’s grasshoppers. Profligate spenders, never worrying about nor planning for the needs of tomorrow, but quick to look to you to share your hard-earned bounty.
What is the frugal ant to do? To not share labels you as unfair, stingy, and miserly. You can quickly see that the socialist grasshoppers will ridicule you, claiming you are hoarding precious resources that should be redistributed to others who have not dedicated the time to create wealth.
Of course, you realize that others, through no fault of their own and through the vagaries and misfortunes of life, do need assistance and for this you gladly tithe. However, tithing is not enough so the collective also seeks to tax your riches and redistribute what you have earned to those perceived to be in need.
This fable came to mind this week when I read of a proposal by two professors at public universities in Illinois who seek to nationalize the endowment created by the private institution, the University of Chicago.
The professors are employed by a system of grasshoppers in Illinois, a state teetering on the brink of bankruptcy. Their covetous thoughts appeared in Crain’s Chicago Weekly.
They perceive the endowment to be like the ant’s stash. Their claim is that the public colleges and universities are desperate for cash, (in large part due to the profligate spending by the state government over time, while neglecting shrinking resources and populations), and that the public institutions lack proper endowments and effective fundraising operations.
Of course, ignored in their plea is just how little anyone in charge has focused on the future, nor have they built the mechanisms for seeking private donations and contributions from alumni. In their minds the public institutions “contribute to the public good” and so, therefore, all assets, wherever located, should be made available to meet their public needs.
Their cry is that the University of Chicago is “wealth hoarding,” while ignoring the reality that both the state and the public universities have failed to plan for a stormy day. Clearly one man’s “hoarding” is another’s “rainy day fund.”
We are beginning to see the seeds of this kind of thinking in the national political discourse as well. First come the use of the terms “income disparity” and “wealth disparity” as pejorative terms. To be successful means you are now a part of the “establishment,” never mind how much effort you invested in your success. You are now made a target for those who covet your goods, a violation of the 10th Commandment.
Apparently these two professors must have ignored any religious training because they call for the nationalization of the endowments of any wealthy private colleges and universities. Their concept is ripe with socialist value when they call for this because wealthy individuals have decided to fund projects at the University of Chicago, an apparent sin in their list of commandments.
They contend that “offering mass amounts of private wealth to already hugely wealthy private institutions is scandalous,” while most of Illinois’ public institutions have “no big donors on the horizon.”
Clearly their lust for the goods of others is driven by huge budget shortfalls in Illinois and the inability of the state to even pass a budget. They claim the “public good” is not being met since they also claim that in Illinois the public universities serve greater numbers of “working poor and first generation college goers.”
National data shows this to be false. Private colleges and universities have larger percentages of such students, in large part due to their ant-like behavior in seeking assets and squirreling them away for other needs.
Thomas Sowell once wrote “One cannot prescribe to anyone whether he should follow an ethic of absolute ends or an ethic of responsibility.”
I sense that his meaning captures the dilemma of these two professors. Their absolute ends are magnified when this kind of discourse becomes prevalent in a national election. To those who covet, there is always a greater need for your money and always someone who knows how to spend your assets better than you do.
It is up to us to decide whether the path of the grasshopper is more efficient than the path of the ant, but to modify Margaret Thatcher’s famous anti-socialism phrase, “pretty soon you run out of ants.”
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Ed H. Moore resides in Tallahassee, Florida, where he is perpetually awaiting a rebirth of wonder. Column courtesy of Context Florida.
