Interesting e-mail I got today..........




An economics professor at a local college made a statement that he had never failed a single student before but had once failed an entire class.

That class had insisted that socialism worked and that no one would be poor and no one would be rich, a great equalizer.

The professor then said, "OK, we will have an experiment in this class on socialism. All grades would be averaged and everyone would receive the same grade so no one would fail and no one would receive an A.


After the first test, the grades were averaged and everyone got a B.

The students who studied hard were upset and the students who studied little were happy.  

As the second test rolled around, the students who studied little had studied even less and the ones who studied hard decided they wanted a free ride too so they studied little.  

The second test average was a D!

No one was happy.

When the 3rd test rolled around, the average was an F.


The scores never increased as bickering, blame and name-calling all resulted in hard feelings and no one would study for the benefit of anyone else.  

All failed, to their great surprise, and the professor told them that socialism would also ultimately fail because when the reward is great, the effort to succeed is great but when government takes all the reward away, no one will try or want to succeed.


Could not be any simpler than that.

He's got that right.  Remove incentive from the equation, and it all falls apart.

Sounds right. Good story.

He's never failed a single student?  I find that hard to believe.

That's one way of making everyone see the Truth about socialism.

Response:

That whole premise is completely impossible.  No Child Left Behind makes sure that would never happen!

_MaH

Fuck everybody else. I'm in it for me and mine. What's mine is mine and what's yours is yours, so let's keep it that way.

That's exactly how it works.  This is a great example.

Good Post.  Hope the students learned their lesson.

The story may or may not be true, but this is the type of thing that would have to come from an econ professor.  God bless them.

just searched for this and ran across a snopes message board.   The version on the board says it happened at Texas Tech.  

Saw this response, and I threw up in my mouth a little..

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A professor should know better, that has nothing to do with socialism. Socialism is about cooperative ownership of the means of production. It says nothing about the ownership of private property, so there is still an incentive to do well.

Besides, regardless of all this, what would most people prefer, to be a garbage collector or to be a respected scientist? There are rewards other than money.
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This is a GREAT post OP.

Colleges almost never fail anyone.  It's bad for business.  Adminstrators come down on professors who do it to any but the most egregious blow-offs.



This is a great post though.