Piggy-backing off of yesterday's post, I would like to outline some differences between Reality and "the Big Rock Candy Mountains," a fictional paradise in an old hobo ballad:
In the Big Rock Candy Mountains: "the handouts grow on bushes and you sleep out every night."
In Reality: wealth does not simply grow on bushes, but must be produced with hard work. As a corollary, handouts to some must come from the hard work of others ...and you can't sleep out every night because in reality it rains sometimes.
In the Big Rock Candy Mountains: "the sun shines every day, on the birds and the bees and the cigarette trees, where the lemonade springs, where the bluebird sings."
In Reality: the weather is not always good, cigarettes are expensive (and taxed like crazy on top of that), and you have to make lemonade yourself from lemons that someone harvested from a tree, which was carefully tended to on a farm somewhere.
In the Big Rock Candy Mountains: "all the cops have wooden legs and the bulldogs all have rubber teeth and the hens lay soft boiled eggs."
In Reality: you got a ticket last week for speeding which you only did after you whipped around that jerk in the left-lane going fifteen under who never gets ticketed for that. And when dogs bite, it hurts. And you have to boil your own eggs.
In the Big Rock Candy Mountains: "you never change your socks and the little streams of alcohol come a-trickling down the rocks."
In Reality: Your feet smell. And you have to change your socks and wash the dirty ones. And you've got to pay for alcohol with money you had to bust your back to earn.
In the Big Rock Candy Mountains: You get anything you want.
In Reality: You get what you work for.
The Big Rock Candy Mountains: aren't real.
Reality: is.
Socialists live in the Big Rock Candy Mountains.
Capitalists live in Reality.
