Posted on 10/23/2012 9:06:24 PM PDT by Tolerance Sucks Rocks
Annika Eriksson, a long-time Swedish chef revered for her school lunches, has been squelched.
Has she made errors? Are her meals contaminated? Has the quality of her ingredients slipped? No, none of the above.
The trouble stems purely from the fact that her meals are too good. Yes, you read that right.
She’s exceeding expectations. She bakes fresh bread every day. She offers 15 different vegetables at lunchtime. She knows it pleases the students to have choices.
This is her crime because, you see, other schools don’t have the same benefits in the Falun district in Sweden. (This is called collectivist logic, something to avoid like the plague.)
Ericksson maintains her meals don’t go beyond budget allocations. She’s just doing a good thing. She obviously likes doing it; and, of course, the kids love her meals.
Now, there will be no more of her fresh baked bread. That will be replaced by store-bought bread.
And the array of 15 vegetables? Gone, too. She is allowed to offer only half as many.
Ericksson’s students and their parents are in an uproar. How can the authorities take away the wonderful lunches? Apparently, it’s more important to preserve one-size-fits-all collectivism than to serve healthy and innovative meals.
Why doesn’t the district send other school chefs to Eriksson, so they can learn how she makes her brand of magic?
When someone exceeds the standard in a positive direction, why not pull everyone else upward? Why push the brilliant person down?
The answer is obvious. The most important thing is the collectivist system. The individual who enters the system is expected to tailor his or her actions to the norm. That’s the game.
(Excerpt) Read more at personalliberty.com ...
This story sounds familiar, whare have I heard it before?
Sweden
Enacted in 1982, the Naming law in Sweden was originally created to prevent non-noble families from giving their children noble names, but a few changes to the law have been made since then.
The part of the law referencing first names reads: "First names shall not be approved if they can cause offense or can be supposed to cause discomfort for the one using it, or names which for some obvious reason are not suitable as a first name."
If you later change your name, you must keep at least one of the names that you were originally given, and you can only change your name once.
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Is it any wonder that the state would want to 'equalize' school lunches?
Socialists don’t allow the rising tide to lift-up all boats; they pump the water out of the bay to lower all boats equally into the mud.
Utopian masterminds must drive everyone down to the lowest performers of our society. It ensures their able to control us thoroughly!
Socialism is about pounding everyone down to the level of the lowest common denominator.
Thanks for the ping!
>>>It’s quite an amazing thing, since Vonnegut was a serious socialist. Then again, so was Orwell.<<<
I was going to comment on the liberalism of Vonnegut, but stopped myself and kept on topic. Vonnegut wrote the story in 1961, back in the days when there were still people who thought of themselves as liberals but also thought of themselves as anti-communist and pro-military - I’m thinking of Scoop Jackson and Jack Kennedy, but there were many others. “Harrison Bergeron” shows promise of his eyes opening to the horrors of the utopian state. However, it looks like he was swept up into the leftist antiwar fervor that came soon afterwards, with its focus on America hatred. He wrote an entire book centered around the bombing of Dresden, which was carted out by leftists when I was a boy as the classic example of how we were just as bad as the Nazis.
Still, it’s good that my students have a seed planted in their minds about the evils of so-called good intentions, equality of results, and government overreach. This story’s protagonist is 14 years old, too, and teenagers love reading about themselves.
You’re doing excellent work on all that. And I read Slaughterhouse Five in high school out of the school library, along with pretty much the entire Vonnegut catalog, in the mid-70s. Pretty amazing that they had Breakfast of Champions, when you think about it.
On the general topic of socialists, see the Hayek quote on my FR profile page. It’s the 3rd one down, two paragraphs.
Wrong. The failures are NEVER brought up.
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