Halloween

I never understood Halloween. It never made sense to me. We would dress up in costumes and go house to house in our neighborhood, knocking on the doors, asking the mothers and fathers who answered for a piece of candy from the bowl of candy they just purchased the day before, meanwhile, their kids were knocking on your door asking your mother for the candy that she bought the day before. So, your mother spends $50 buying candy to give out to the neighborhood kids so her kids can go out in the neighborhood and bring back $40 worth of candy from other kids’ parents.

I always thought why didn’t we save everyone the trouble and just have our mothers give us the candy from her bowl. I used to leave the house on Halloween with an empty bag and see the bowl full of candy sitting on a table next to the front door, and I would return three hours later with a bag full of candy and see our candy bowl was now empty. Why couldn’t I have just dumped that bowl of candy into my bag and be done with it. Everyone would end in the same place and I wouldn’t have had to traipse around the neighborhood for 3 hours.

Halloween is a lot like socialism. They both don’t make sense. We are expected to give the fruits of our labor to everyone else in society with the expectation that we would enjoy the fruit of everyone else’s labor instead of just enjoying the fruits of our own labor. One of the problems is that there is always a disparity is the fruits of labor, just as there is disparity in what is given out and what is taken in on Halloween. Your mother may be giving out full sized Hersey bars or Reese’s Peanut Butter cups while the neighbor down the street is giving out open Candy Corn or a “healthy treat”. In socialism, the surgeon who is saving people’s lives is compensated the same as the hospital janitor. The strawberry picker who picks 20 baskets of strawberries is compensated the same as the picker who picks one basket of strawberries.

The potential for corruption that plagues socialism is played out every Halloween. There was always that one family on the block whose kids went out and trick-or-treating all over the neighborhood coming home with bags full of candy, while their parents turned the lights off in their home and went out to dinner, giving no candy to anybody. Socialism drives people into believing they can receive everything they need from government without producing anything for the rest of society.

There were also kids who would dress in one costume, go to every house in the neighborhood, run home, change into another costume and hit all the same houses all over again. There will always the people who are scamming the system, filing duplicate claims or fraudulent claims, double dipping, scheming ways to take more than they deserve or are allowed. They see the opportunity and exploit it. You can appreciate their hard work and ingenuity, but it is still theft. They would be better served in a capitalist system where hard work and ingenuity are rewarded.

The worst was the kid who would come to the house where the owner left a bowl full of candy out, and he would dump the entire bowl of candy into his own bag leaving nothing for anyone else. In the end, the only way socialism works is if everyone is looking out for everyone else as much as they are looking out for themselves. But that is impossible because very few people ever do that. Too many people will take as much as they can get away with especially when it comes from government. No matter what they say, they will always look out for themselves over everyone else. Most people are charitable only out of convenience not self-sacrifice, and the ones who are self-sacrificing for everyone else will be exploited by those who aren’t.

Halloween is just a fun ritual one night per year and the stakes are very low. No one really gets hurt from the schemes, the scams, the lazy. Imagine if we had to conduct our daily lives like Halloween. One family on the block would give out steaks for dinner while the next night another family would give out spam and another would disappear when it was their turn to provide the meal. And it would be even worse if the government takes control because they would not root out and expose the fraudsters and the lazy, they would codify them by law. It would become a government backed exploitation of the hard workers and the producers, and that is why socialism always fails because socialism becomes a game of getting as much as you can get for as little work as possible while capitalism demands works and production to get the things you need to live. One produces equal poverty while the other produces unequal prosperity.

__________________________________________________________

Mr. Garrett is a graduate of Princeton University, and a former NFL player, coach, and executive. He has been a contributor to the website Real Clear Politics. He has recently published his first novel, No Wind.