by Patricia Gilliam

Created on: October 05, 2008

I was going through the radio channels the other day and caught the middle of a conversation on The Dave Ramsey Show, who is a financial counselor.

A caller had a quote from a fiction book that if anyone knows the title I'd be interested in finding it out-I didn't catch it. It really caught my attention however. This is a paraphrase since I was driving at the time and couldn't write it down:

"You don't destroy success by attacking it directly-because then people see it coming and will resist it. You destroy success by elevating medocrity to the point success is meaningless."

This election year, financial success is being attacted in America. People's financial fears keep being fed between the bailout and the election, and I keep hearing words like "fairness" being used in reference to the income levels of American citizens-something I never thought I'd hear, and personally that scares me more than our current economic situation.

While we're at it, why don't we just go all out on this "fairness" idea:

Since some children run faster than others, let's just take away trophies at track meets and just give everyone ribbons of participation. That way the kids that won 2nd and 3rd place won't have to worry about things not being fair-Heaven forbid they actually get inspired and want to train harder for the following year.

What about academic excellence? Some children make great grades and others don't-that's not fair! Let's just do away with those pesky standards and give everyone a high school diploma at 18 regardless to whether they even showed up and worked or not-and the same way with college.

You can see where I'm going with this-sounds really extreme and ridiculous, doesn't it? Some successful people have talent. Others have a better-than-average work ethic. Usually it's a combination of both-fueled by an inner desire to win-that results in success long-term. That doesn't mean there are not any obstacles and failures along the way, but successful people fail more than the average person as well-they just don't give up.

The question you have to ask yourself is should a person's success be rewarded to its full potential? In America, this didn't use to be a hard question.

Asking the successful people in America-who in addition to paying the price for success are already paying more than their fair share of our tax burden-to shell out even more of their hard-earned money is just as bad as asking the kid with the 1st place trophy to bust it and give some of the pieces

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