Catching Wild Pigs

An interesting 2minute read:

By Hosia Mviringi

Sunday 02 August 2020

Karl Marx once said,

"Remove one freedom per generation, and soon you will have no freedoms and no one will have noticed."

One day while the class was in the lab, a professor noticed one young man, 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 that 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 regime.

Then, the student looked at the professor and asked a strange question,

"Do you know how to catch wild pigs?"

The professor thought it was a joke and asked for the punchline. The young man said that it 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 every day to eat the free food.

When they are used to coming every day, you put a fence down one side of the place where they are used to coming. At first, they are scared, but 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, which are used to the free corn, start to come through the gate to eat that free corn again. You then 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 in many countries. The governments keep pushing us to keep spreading the free corn out in the form of programmes such as supplemental income, tax credit for unearned income, tax exemptions, tobacco subsidies, dairy subsidies, payments not to plant crops, welfare entitlements, medicine, drugs, etc, while we continually lose our freedoms, just a little at a time."

One should always remember two truths:

1. There is no such thing as a free lunch, and

2. You can never hire someone to provide a service for you cheaper than you can do it yourself.

If you see that all of this wonderful government 'help' is a problem confronting the future of democracy, there is hope.

If you think the free ride is essential to your way of life, then God help you when the gate slams shut!

”Most of the problems Zimbabwe faces today are there because the people who work for a living are now vastly outnumbered by those who vote for a living!”

This is particularly true on either side of the political spectrum.

Politics have inadvertently held generations to ransom through tokenism and blind patronage.

Freedoms have been quietly taken away while rights have been tacitly replaced by perceived generosity of political captors.

This is true but each person is free to adapt this narrative to their own situation.I have full confidence that this narrative will be true in one way or another to every individual in any nation globally.

It's a modern political phenomenon that has been widely exported and exploited at different levels in different countries by different political actors.

It's food for thought.

Karl Marx