The little Corvette by Don Frost

     Some of the stuff you find on the internet is of dubious authenticity, truth, and/or accuracy. I received the following in an email from a friend who doubtless found it on the internet or someone else found it on the internet and passed it on to him. Whether the tale is authentic, truthful, or accurate is irrelevant. It could be pure fiction, but it speaks to an undeniable and universal truth.

            A name accompanied the story – Tom Nicholson – though it is unclear if he was the author. Regardless, here it is with minor editing, and commentary added:

“A guy looked at my Corvette the other day and said, ‘I wonder how many people could have been fed with the money that sports car cost.’

“I’m not sure,” I replied. “But it fed a lot of families in Bowling Green, Ky., where it was built. It fed the people who made the tires. It fed the people who built the battery. It fed the people who made the electronics that went into it. It fed the people in the copper mine who mined the copper for the wires. It fed the people who made the insulation for those wires. It fed the people at the Caterpillar plant in Decatur, Ill., who built the trucks that hauled the copper ore.

“It fed the trucker who hauled it from the plant to the dealer. It fed the people working at the dealership and it fed their families. But I have to admit, I really don’t know how many people I helped feed by buying that car.”

The story, whether it’s fact or fiction, illustrates the basic difference between capitalism and Socialism, conservatism and liberalism. Give the $50,000 the car may have cost to a soup kitchen and it will give you a pleasantly warm and fuzzy feeling for having done a good deed. And when your “liberal” friends applaud you for such an unselfish act that warm feeling will well up again. But the money would be gone in couple of weeks and the kitchen would need more and so would the people it feeds. But if no one ever bought the very expensive Corvette and, instead, donated the cash to any number of charities, what would happen to the workers in Bowling Green, Decatur, the dealership, and on down the line who benefitted from the purchase of the Corvette? They depend for their very livelihoods on people to buy that car for without buyers, they’d join the line at that soup kitchen.

Socialism/liberalism: A temporary solution to a permanent problem.

Capitalism/conservatism: A permanent solution to a permanent problem.