The Life Savers (a true story by DrHurd.com fan Tim Scharff, reprinted here with permission)
In the early 1960s, when I was a little kid about five years old, my mother used to give me a nickel each week as my allowance. Then I would keep the nickel in my pocket until we went to the grocery store on Fridays to do our weekly shopping. One day I spent my nickel on a roll of Life Savers, and as we were leaving the store I said to my mother, ‘I wish candy was free so I could get all I want.’ My mother stopped and knelt down to me and said, ‘Well, Tim, there are countries that have tried that. It’s called socialism. But it doesn’t work — because it’s not fair to the people who make the Life Savers.’ Years later in high school and college when I was studying history and government and philosophy and economics — and reading Ayn Rand’s brilliant novel Atlas Shrugged — I remembered what my mother said. Truer words were never spoken: ‘It’s not fair to the people who make the Life Savers.’