COMPETITIVE

COMPETITIVE

Life, in order to exist, is competitive. God’s answer to Jeremiah was, “If you have raced with men on foot and they have worn you out, how can you compete with horses? If you stumble in safe country, how will you manage in the thickets by the Jordan?” (Jeremiah 12:5). The Apostle Paul added the following (I Corinthians 9:26-27), “I do not run like a man running aimlessly; I do not fight like a man beating the air. No, I beat (subdue) my body and make it my slave (made fit) so that after I have preached (run) before (in front) others, I myself will not be disqualified for the reward.”

Life is tough and it becomes more so when we are not mentally and physically fit to stay in the race. Our race is for survival and beyond. We must earn our daily bread and deserve to earn it. The idea that I deserve something for nothing is absurd. God laid down this principle, “In the sweat of your face shall you eat your bread” (Genesis 3:19).

The Apostle understood it to mean, “If a man will not work, he shall not eat” (II Thessalonians 3:10). What about being disabled? I am disabled and I cannot physically compete in my old profession. What was tragic and still is that the government has a policy that encouraged me to live on disability. It was up to me to be retrained mentally to the point that I was able to compete in my newly chosen field and I am still at it after fifty years. There was nothing I could do when an accident took the use of my hands, but I could stop humanitarian progressivism from crippling my mind and make me fully dependent on the government. The government is far too lenient, even with the sick that are lazy.

The idea that the government has the right to offer a livelihood to those that neither deserve it nor earn it is very disturbing and prohibitively costly. Jesus, in The Parable of the Workers in the Vineyard (Matthew 20:1-16), gave us an example we could learn from. First and foremost, it is up to the employer to hire, fire and pay what has been agreed upon. Secondly, workers must make themselves available to employers that can employ them. Thirdly, they need an attitude that is grateful for having had a chance to be employed. Fourthly, the employer (landowner) could not pay more than his vineyard could produce. The assumption that employers earn high returns, therefore able to pay what employees demand is also absurd. In my ignorance, I asked a close friend how many percent he earned in the flooring business. He was puzzled and slowly replied, “there are no percents only one tenth of one tenth of a percent.” It was a tenth of a penny per tile.

What is true of a business is also true of a nation. It too must compete with other nations. The world no longer accepts the western competitive ways. In order to compete the West must lower the value of its produce. It no longer can support $70.00 hourly wages and compete with nations where workers earn $5.00 per day. Neither can it subsidize high wages with taxes coming from workers that earn on an average $10.00 per hour. Particularly, our unionized nation is in a dilemma from which there is no escape. The attempt to solve it with capitalizing on the wealth of a handful of rich people shall end in a temporary solution. This nation is on a path that the competitive nations were on before. That is why they are on the rise and this nation is on the decline. The $ 5.00 a day world may increase to $ 5.00 an hour, in time. Imagine how close they would be to the minimum wage of this country. The problem is that even welfare recipients live above the minimum wage level. Imagine what must happen to all those well-paid recipients before this nation becomes competitive?

Competition cannot be achieved via a distribution of wealth. It is an unnecessary fear. The high wage earners that are sanctioned by the government will never relinquish their standard of living willingly. The greater fear ought to be the devaluation of the Dollar. We lived during such a time in Germany. Money had become worthless and people traded their goods just to live. We escaped from the Soviets with horses. One horse we traded for food and a carriage and with one I taxied people from the train station to the country, looking for food. There were many small farms active in the black market. In the attempt to devalue and equalize, the rich got richer and the poor poorer. There was one unnoticed phenomenon. The politicians that had run the country into the ground, had managed to hoard enough collateral to rise to the top, after a cooling period. Our politicians are fully aware of the impending difficulties ahead and they are making friends with mammon (Luke 16:8-9). What are the people going to do? There are no more small farms as they were during the depression. Restarting gardening may be a blessing in disguise.