Well, among the myriad problems that socialism presents us, I recall this particular example, it’s the story of “Crazy Roger & The Conveyor Belt,” as told to me years ago by my High School philosophy teacher. Unfortunately, it’s not the same Crazy Roger who fed me morphine and whisky a few months back… Anyways, my teacher, Mark, grew up in Indiana, and one summer during college, he got a job working at a John Deere manufactory, or some other tractor/lawnmower assembly plant. His job was to install the headlamps on the larger ones, 8 hours a day, five days a week. Using Ford’s model of the “Assembly Line,” the tractors would roll down the line in various stages of assembly, and as they passed each station, they get closer and closer to completion.

Well, after a few weeks of acclimating himself to the plant, and getting friendly with the other workers, he was interrupted during his routine by a guy everyone referred to as “Crazy Roger.” Roger walks right up to Mark, and just starts a-chit-chatting. He talks Mark’s ear off for about 20 minutes, telling him he’s not doing his job the right way, and blah-blah-blah. Mark is understandably confused, because he’s doing his job exactly the way he was trained to do it, and this he lets Roger know.

Roger says, “No, no, you don’t understand, you’re doing in the long, boring way – you’ll go crazy – You see what I did thar? Last 20 minutes, you ain’t done a lick of work, and now you got all dem tractors there jes a-waitin’ for theys headlights to be put in. Now get back to work!” Apparently Roger’s mantra was to just let the work pile up, and then rush through a bunch of it at once. Crazy Roger then went through the rest of the peculiarities of plant life, he introduced Mark to the “alcoholics,” who downed a pint in the parking lot before their shift, and another during their lunch break, and the “pot-heads,” who substituted a few joints for the pint. He showed him all the places you could go where the white-collars couldn’t see you if you wanted to sneak a smoke, and so on.

One day, Roger asks Mark if he’d “like to take a break?” Mark tells him he’s sorry, he’s already taken his break and they only get so many per day. Roger just laughs, “Not that type of break… now lemme see what you got around here…” Roger proceeds to rummage through the various tools and other implementations lying around the shop. He comes back with a crescent wrench that Mark describes as “4 feet long, for working on the heavy machinery.” A sinister grin comes over Rogers face, as he slides the Thor-sized crescent wrench into the track moving the conveyor belt.

Now this conveyor belt goes down some distance before it makes a hard turn at the end of the shop, and it takes several minutes for it to make its journey, but once there, something went terribly awry. The loudest, strongest, fingers-on-the-chalkboard, grinding-metal noise you could ever hear. Sirens start blaring, the white-collars are scrambling out of their offices on the catwalk above trying to figure out what the fuck the problem is. All told, the plant is shut down for a good 15 or 20 minutes before they find the crescent wrench lodged in the conveyor track.

The problem I’m trying to relate here, is that Roger and everyone else in that plant were on the same pay-scale. The size of one’s paycheck was completely divorced from his respective ability or efficiency. Now, that might be all fine and dandy for folks like Roger, but somewhere at a plant not unlike that tractor manufactory, there is a dedicated worker, who clocks in on time, doesn’t smoke cheeba on the clock, and works his hardest.

For this, people like Roger are rewarded.

Yeah, nice.