About the Desire to Acquire

From Robert Ringer, writer and best selling author:

"Though it possessed many flawed premises and opinions masquerading as facts, the recent "Time" magazine front-cover story on ambition prompted me to reflect on the subject. The essence of the article was to explore the factors that are most responsible for some people being ambitious and others not.

The Time authors asked, "Why are some people born with a fire in the belly, while others ... need something to get their pilot light lit? And why do others never get the flame of ambition going?"

Every family - particularly every large family - has its extremes when it comes to ambitious children and those who seem mentally lethargic. Sometimes, children can be so different that it's hard to believe they came from the same parents. I've had six children, so I can vouch for this phenomenon.

Unfortunately, the Time article also stated, "Of all the impulses in humanity's behavioral portfolio, ambition - that need to grab an ever bigger piece of the resource pie before someone else gets it - ought to be one of the most democratically distributed. Nature is a zero-sum game, after all. Every buffalo you kill for your family is one less for somebody else's; every acre of land you occupy elbows out somebody else."

I feel morally obliged to temporarily sidetrack myself here, because this kind of Marxist rhetoric is precisely what deters the underprivileged from doing the very things they need to do to lift themselves up. Ignorant, left-wing college profs have been teaching such gibberish to malleable-minded college kids since the days of the Greek Empire, while at the same time shameless and/or ignorant politicians have been brainwashing the parents of those same children.

Tinseltown celebs, of course, are also quite vocal when it comes to this class-warfare con. But since they have such large slices of the pie themselves, most people don't take the showbiz crowd seriously.

In truth, any honest, half-intelligent person in this day and age of highly visible entrepreneurial wealth creation certainly realizes that neither nature nor business nor life itself is a zero-sum game. In every country where the zero-sum game has been played out, the results have been catastrophic.

The list is a long one and includes, among others, the former Soviet Union, Albania, Romania, Hungary, East Germany, China, North Korea, Cuba, and Mozambique. And everyone on the list has three things in common: torture and suffering for the masses, special treatment for the anointed privileged class, and failed economies. Unfortunately, Western societies seem intent on following the loud voices of the zero-sum-game crowd down an egalitarian path that leads only to real communism (as opposed to theoretical communism, which is but a fairy tale).

What these pinheads cannot seem to grasp is that those who create wealth almost always do so by creating value for others. Or, to continue the metaphor, they increase the size of the pie. That's why the poorest families in the U.S. have the means to buy state-of-the-art television sets, DVD players, video-game consoles, computers, cellphones, and an endless collection of other electronic products that are strictly discretionary in nature - i.e., they are not necessities by any stretch of the imagination."