As anyone who reads my blog knows, I love competition. Bridge is all about using your mind and creativity to best advantage – and then hoping that you can best the opponents due to it.
In America, we’ve always been a nation of competitors. We try to learn more than the previous generation, invent more, expand more. Most people like to win. Yet, without the ability to fail, “winning” has no meaning.
Uber-free market afficianado Larry Kudlow is well familar with this philosophy. Let the master expound.
It seems like failure is off the board nowadays and that it’s government’s job to rescue everybody.
Whatever happened to the philosophy of Friedrich Hayek, the great free-market economist and Nobel Prize winner, who said the great thing about capitalism is the freedom to succeed beyond your wildest dreams, but that there is also the freedom to fail? I believe Hayek once argued that if he had to choose between success and failure, failure is more important in terms of preserving the free-market system.
Of course, the great thing about America is that you can fail many times, pick yourself up, keep on trying, and then succeed beyond your wildest dreams. But this whole process is being subverted by the political attitude that no one must ever be allowed to fail. I don’t like it. It’s socialism, isn’t it? Perhaps it’s big-government socialism. Or maybe it’s corporate socialism. Or maybe (with Fan and Fred) it’s Republican socialism.
Some of you may like the bailouts. Remember, though – too many bailouts, and you will lose the wins. No one wants to put forth the energy, risk, time and the like to win if those who do a poor job end up in the same spot as the winners. And without the risk and effort – that which made our nation great will no longer be produced.