Let us ride the damn horse. Don't make the track all full of mud

It's about ten p.m. right now as I begin writing this post, and I just got home from work. Sort of. I left the office at about five-ish, stopped by the dry cleaners to pick up some shirts, dropped them off at the house and then walked down to the restaurant that I go to on most nights for my dinner. Except this particular night, I was meeting a vendor to talk about business.
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Here is the breakdown. He provides a service that the organization I work for needs. My company currently uses competitors of his for that service. He wanted to talk about why we should give them a chance to compete for the dollars we spend on this aspect of the business.

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He has an "in" though, because this isn't my first time as a jockey, and the horse I rode the last time, employed the same services. ( last time I was actually just an assistant jockey) This guy was a part of that when I was with that previous horse, and I know how he handles his part in keeping the horse at a competitive level .

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As the jockey of this new horse, my responsibility is to keep the horse agile and competitive, and as I know this particular groomsman to be awesome, he will get his chance. There are no handouts here though. He will make some money because he knows that ultimately the horse has to be competitive with the other horses in the race, and if he can't help me do that, then he cannot pass go. He cannot collect 200 dollars, and he cannot continue playing the game.

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He understands this because he is an entrepreneur. He is a capitalist. He has risked his own money for the chance to earn more money than what he has risked. He is a competitive son of a bitch and he will help me keep my ride.

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I will only get to keep my job as the jockey of this new horse, as long as it is competitive and shows constant improvement. I get paid to ride the thing, and guide the horse, and make the decisions that will keep the horse on its way and out of trouble. It is really everything I ever wanted. I began as an assistant stable cleaner. I was given the chance to shovel horseshit out of the stalls. Later the opportunity to brush the beast was bestowed upon me. Sometime after that I was allowed to bring the food she eats to her, and soon after that I was allowed to pick the food that she was allowed to have. Then I was given the opportunity to ride her during training runs and had obtained the job as assistant jockey. Even though I believe I had shown promise as an assistant jockey I ran into some personal problems and the owner of the previous horse riding operation and I, agreed to split our ways.

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In my current role I get to be the jockey. If I let the horse eat junk food and have sex with goats while smoking crack, I will not be able to keep the ride. The owner of the horse pays me to help guide her to be faster and more durable, and in this aspect I am selling my skills as a jockey to do this. If he believes he can get better results from someone else, then I am out of a job. That is also capitalism.

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I get this and understand it and believe in it.

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So in the end ,what I was doing tonight at dinner was talking capitalism with an acquaintance that also spoke the same language. We understand that our income and our ability to live the kind of lives we want to live, and earn the income we believe we deserve, comes from our ability to compete and do what we do better then others. Neither of us believe anyone owes us shit, which in theory, brings us income, albeit from different ways. We are on the same page about this. We are fellow capitalists.

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So when I got home from this business meeting and picked up my mail, part of what I picked up was my subscription to "Newsweek" Here is a photograph of the cover of that magazine for this week:

I have not read the article yet but it is still deflating. There is some truth to it though and that is what makes it all so depressing. O'bama is still my President, but he is the leader of our new existence. He is the leader of our socialistic society and I feel like I am dying a slow death.
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It's Like he is in control of my oxygen intake. Maybe a true capitalistic approach to our problems would be to just cut off the oxygen right now, maybe that would force us to grow gills. What O'bama is doing with these bailouts and spending bills, is slowly dialing down our oxygen intake, so that soon we will be so accustomed to breathing thirty percent air that we will think that is normal. We will never learn to grow gills. We will begin to beg for the 30 percent air and think that is all normal.