You Did Not Learn All You Needed to Know in Kindergarten

[Geee]

American Thinker:

In 1988 a fluffy lightweight book by Robert Fulghum , a Unitarian Universalist Minister, hit the best seller lists. Its thesis was that everything you really need to know you learned in kindergarten. The top three items were "Share everything; Play fair; and Don't hit people."

These precepts might be fine for kindergarten pupils in Washington State where he resides, but as a template for grownups living 2011, it falls laughably short of practical. We can be charitable without sharing equally; we should play fair (for example, foregoing intensive interrogations of prisoners captured in battle) only when those who want us dead play fair, and we should hit back at people who are trying to kill us.

Fulghum might be a pleasant man and an amusing seat mate on a long distance flight, but he'd be a preposterous ally in a life and death battle and not the sort of person whose redistributionist views make for sensible budgeting or social planning. In many ways this infantile view of the world has been adopted by the willingly blind who parade about in giant papier mache heads waving banners which say nonsensical stuff like "Ground drones, End Wars," or who fly first class to UN conferences where they tell the West it is responsible for sharing what its citizens -- by dint of their labors, thrift and adherence to rational social organizations -- have accrued with the rest of the world, including spendthrifts, mountebanks and layabouts. The notion being , I suppose, that in impoverishing ourselves the West will provide more wealth for the world's dispossessed.

In fact, we know that excess capital provides the best means of financing the creation of new technologies that enrich the world and improve life and the environment for all. Simply dividing the wealth pie further will impoverish us all, and, in fact, generally just ends up in the hands of corruptocrats building up Swiss bank accounts or adding on to villas in Cannes. Picture the Oil for Food Scandal under UN aegis on an even grander scale.