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.

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.

You'd think he'd open up new currency making mills to create more jobs and money.

uatuba: You lost me at solar tower. Seriously, the best thing to do would be to go nuclear

Agree to disagree.
Nuclear, IMO, takes too long to implement, and is too expensive to build and run. The waste is a worry, but not even the biggest one.

Solar-collector-type installations work well and are inexpensive to build and maintain. A startup, eSolar, already has a deal with SoCal Edison to provide almost 250MW of solar from this type of setup.

Thin-film solar panels are also already being mass-produced, and they have the potential to be so inexpensive that homeowners could buy a system good enough to power their house for $6,000 or so (manufacturers say they could make them for about $1 per watt of capacity). I think a lot of people would pay that much to never have another electric bill -- even more would if there were subsidies available. This would essentially make it so that residential neighborhoods would be functioning as fields of solar panels.