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Show THE AMERICAN WAYl t - 4&' 1 BACK jji- : TO WORK hi) ?' J . By Georg PickmjLSLJ An American returning to his homeland after an absence of twenty or twenty-five years would wonder what in the world had happened to the industrious people whom he had left behind. He would be saddened at the spectacle of millions of Americans Ameri-cans demanding and getting more pay and giving in return work, less in quantity and inferior in quality. The present situation brings back to mind a motto which I saw some years ago on the office wall of o business executive. It read: "I am a great believer in luck; I find that the harder I work, the more I seem to have of it." A few days after reading this brief essay on luck and work, I was the week-end guest of a friend at his shooting lodge. There above the immense fireplace fire-place extending across the end of the living room was another motto. It seemed to go hand in hand with the one seen a few days before. It read: "He who chops his own wood gets warmed twice." Those two motlos. it seems to me, most tersely and eloquently describe the America that was; an America that we must revive to make it once again a land where men work and take pride in doing their jobs well. It used to be the American concept that the man who worked work-ed a little harder and a little better deserved a larger reward than his less industrious and less skillful fellow-worker. Until recently re-cently no one in this country had ever thought of denying to that better -worker his right to a larger larg-er compensation. It was the competitive com-petitive spirit between Americans, Ameri-cans, whether they were workers or bosses, which was largely responsible re-sponsible for making America the most prosperous country the world has ever known, with the highest standard of living for all classes. In recent years, sad to relate, certain individuals and groups have been trying to upset this American scheme of things which justly rewards individual effort, initiative, ability and thrift. They would have us abandon our right to pursue individual in-dividual opportunity as it presents pre-sents itself, or as we seek it out; they would deny to the individual individ-ual the right to share in the profits pro-fits of his own personal accomp lishments. They demand that we set up here in America a different system under which there would be no incentive for the individual to work and to create. For lack of a better name, we call this great American system "Free Enterprise." Under it, for over a century and a half, as a nation and as individuals, we made great progress. If we cast out this system our forward progress pro-gress will cease, decay will set in, and we will lose our place at the head of the parade of nations. na-tions. Defeat of Hitler and Hiro-hito Hiro-hito will have availed us naught, and the billions of dollars we are now spending abroad to head off Communism will be wasted, if we lose at home those things for which our armed forces fought so valiantly and successfully success-fully in World War II. and which our dollars now fight for overseas. over-seas. Let us, therefore, turn deaf ears to the defamers of our American System of Free Competitive Com-petitive Enterprise. There is nothing fundamentally wrong with this system. True there are some individuals who abuse it, but for 150 years we were gradually grad-ually eliminating those abuses. Let us resume with that refining refin-ing process to make the best economic system ever devised in all the history of mankind, work even better. Let's have done with some-thing-for-nolhing schemes; let's quit looking for a daily visit from Santa Claus, instead of his time-honored annual pilgrimage. Let's recognize again the old truth that "He who chops his own wood gets warmed twice." Let's go back to work. Hard work brought us luck in the past and hard work will bring us even better luck in the future. |