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In March 2009, one of the e-mail forwards of the moment was the piece quoted below. It appeared variously titled Excellent Lesson in Economics, Great Experiment, Experiment in Socialism, Texas Professor, A Simple Analogy, A Great Lesson on Socialism, Economics 101, Something for Nothing?, A Perfect Analogy, Simple Economics and Capitalism vs Socialism: There is indeed a real school named Texas Tech in Lubbock, Texas, but that school is merely one of many settings used for this fictional illustrative tale meant to explain the teller's belief that socialism does not work. (Another example of an illustrative tale used to explain what might otherwise be a difficult concept to grasp is the How Taxes Work item that was widely circulated in 2002.) We've encountered other pieces that expressed the same concept as this one in a similar setting, such as the following: Regardless of its literal truthfulness, the example proffered here has some significant flaws as an object lesson in the supposed perils of socialism: 1) The concept it criticizes -- distribution shared equally by everyone, regardless of their efforts -- is far more an expression of communism than of socialism (the latter being a system that advocates social ownership of production and distribution, but does not eliminate either free-market capitalism or rewards for individual effort and innovation). 2) It attempts to compare a system for the equitable distribution of resources across an entire population with a system intended to measure individual achievement. This is as nonsensical as positing that under a socialized health care system, the heart rates, blood pressures, weights, and other vital statistics of patients would all be averaged together rather than being individually charted and treated.
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