My grandma often scolded me when I was a boy. “If you think the world owes you a living, you got another think coming!”
To the contrary, many today adhere to a doctrine of entitlement.
Throughout his life, Winston Churchill fought against a similar philosophy – the philosophy of socialism. In 1945, in a speech before the House of Commons, he said: “The inherent vice of capitalism is the unequal sharing of blessings. The inherent virtue of socialism is the equal sharing of miseries.”
In a 1908 speech, Churchill said: “The socialists … are very fond of telling us they are reviving in modern days the best principals of the Christian era. They consider they are the political embodiment of Christianity, though, to judge by the language that some of them use, and the spirit of envy, hatred, and malice with which they go about their work, you would hardly imagine they had studied the teachings of the founder of Christianity with the attention they profess to have given to the subject.”
He continued: “But there is one great difference between the socialist of the Christian era and those of which Mr Victor Grayson [a political adversary] is the apostle. The socialism of the Christian era was based on the idea that ‘all mine is yours.’ The socialism of Mr Grayson is based on the idea that ‘all yours is mine.’ ”
Timothy Robinson
Portland
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