The Best Doesn’t Come Cheap

by

Mike Scinto

Talk Show Host and Award-Winning Newspaper Columnist

as it appeared in Times Community Newspapers and the K-O Times

I don’t know about you, but when I step onboard that Boeing 747 to fly to Florida for a much-deserved week in the sun with my family, I want the best pilot they can afford to be in the cockpit. For that matter, I want the best entire crew money can buy!

If I’m ready to have IV medications started before going into surgery, I need to know the person with the scalpel has the motivation to be there doing the surgery.  I at least want to believe whoever that surgeon is, they are the best in the country; the best money can buy!

I’m sure most of you are not unlike me in those beliefs. That’s why it’s puzzling to me that Barack Obama, the Occupy movement and liberals in general are so resentful of successful folks in America who are paid commensurate with their abilities.

A professional baseball team wants the best manager it can find to handle its multi-million dollar roster. The same is true for the head coach on a professional basketball or football team. They don’t come cheap.

While all the aforementioned professionals are guided to a great extent by a passion and dedication to the activity involved, the location where those activities are carried out, I assure you, is guided in large part by the great American capitalist dollar!

This movement in America to penalize those with ambition, skill and wealth so those with none of those can have more is beyond me. That road to fortune in this great land is paved with the stories of individuals who did lack those three attributes in the beginning. But with hard work, dedication and searching within themselves they scratched and clawed their way into a comfortable lifestyle.

Let’s face it, that philosophy isn’t going to get a politician far these days. The lazy, government-dependent masses who want something for nothing are growing in number.  There was a time, and not so long ago, when pride wouldn’t allow a healthy, creative and proud American to take a dime they didn’t earn. They’d rather starve than to feel they didn’t provide for themselves or their loved ones. And that motivation alone made them morph an excuse into a job; and into a sense of pride, regardless of the bottom line on the paycheck.

And those individuals, rather than criticizing, hating and viewing their employers through the eyes of that green-eyed envious monster, learned from those who achieved and thanked them for the opportunity.

Does that mean there are no rich and powerful folks who abuse that strength? Of course there are. But left alone, the free market tends to take care of those sharks far better than any government committee, or bug-infested hippie mob camped in a park could.

           Get government out of it, turn true free-marketeering loose again on America and feel the magic………again!