WARNING... DON'T EAT THE FREE CORN!

Several years ago, there was a chemistry professor in a large college that had some exchange students in the class. One day while the class was in the lab, the professor noticed one young man (exchange student) who kept rubbing his back and stretching as if his back hurt.

The professor asked the young man what was the matter. The student told him he had a bullet lodged in his back. He had been shot while fighting communists in his native country who were trying to overthrow his country's government and install a new communist government.

In the midst of his story, he looked at the professor and asked a strange question. He asked, "Do you know how to catch wild pigs?" The professor thought it was a joke and asked for the punch line. The Young man said this was no joke. "You catch wild pigs by finding a suitable place in the woods and putting corn on the ground. The pigs find it and begin to come everyday to eat the free corn. When they are used to coming every day, you put a fence down on one side of the place where they are used to coming. When they get used to the fence, they begin to eat the corn again and you put up another side of the fence. They get used to that and start to eat again. You continue until you have all four sides of the fence up with a gate in the last side. The pigs, who are used to the free corn, start to come through the gate to eat. You slam the gate on them and catch the whole herd. Suddenly the wild pigs have lost their freedom. They run around and around inside the fence, but they are caught. Soon they go back to eating the free corn. They are so used to it that they have forgotten how to forage in the woods for themselves, so they accept their captivity."

The young man then told the professor that is exactly what he sees happening to America. The government keeps pushing us toward socialism and keeps spreading the free corn out in the form of programs such as supplemental incomes, tax credits for unearned income, ethanol subsidies, dairy subsidies, payments not to plant crops (CRP), welfare, medicine, drugs, etc. while we continually lose our freedoms - just a little at a time.

One should always remember...
THERE IS NO SUCH THING AS A FREE LUNCH!

I got the above in an email forwarded to me from a guy I recently worked with. He's a bright guy with a good head on his shoulders and very aware about the fragile state of our nation and the world in general. Reading the story reminded me of the parallels to the one about the frog in the pot of water brought slowly up to boiling until it was too late for it to jump out and was subsequently served as dinner to some snooty Frenchman. However, I found this one to be more deeply ground in reality and a far better analogy for emphasizing the dangers of socialism. Though I must admit, if I were to have been the originator of the story, for dead-balls-on reality, I would have made the professor a teacher of sociology who ended up giving the student a 'C' for badmouthing communist principles.

H/T to Tom Murphy. Thanks for the great email, bro ;)